I have several times passed through Figline Valdarno without realizing it was the birth place of Marsilio Ficino, the head of the Platonic Academy of Florence. Ficino was a strange bird: part Platonist, humanist, and part Christian, he has sometimes been suspected of paganism or worse. Perhaps he was a pagan, somewhere in his mind,...
The impact of judicial review has been profound and often detrimental to the rule of law in America. Judicial review is the power of the courts to void federal, state, and local laws and ordinances that they have determined to be incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Certainly, national and state legislatures have passed laws that...
“Is Russia an enemy of the United States?” NBC’s Kasie Hunt demanded of Ted Cruz. Replied the runner-up for the GOP nomination, “Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug.” To Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., entertained an offer from the Russians for dirt on Clinton...
Nearing the third anniversary of their crime, the remaining members of the Jena Six at long last admitted what anyone with any sense knew: They are guilty as charged. The leader of the pack, Mychal Bell, had already confessed to second-degree battery on December 4, 2007, one year to the day after the attack, and...
Leon Redbone left the scene in 2015—I don’t mean that he expired, but simply that he retired. There was mention at the time of health concerns, but he was through with television appearances and concerts and touring, and with recording as well. There has been almost nothing about him on the national scene since then,...
A unique exhibition was held from March 1 to April 15 in the Vatican’s Braccio di Carlo Magno (Charlemagne wing) next to St. Peter’s Basilica. Entitled Verbum Domini, it was dedicated to telling the story of the Bible amid a mounting wave of anti-Christian secularization. “This is the most valuable exhibition the Vatican has ever...
Bobby Fischer, the reclusive, troubled, and often unpleasant chess genius from Brooklyn who single-handedly crushed the myth of Soviet invincibility, died of kidney failure in Iceland on January 17 at the age of 64. Robert James Fischer was born out of wedlock to a prominent Hungarian atomic physicist, Pal Nemenyi, who was involved with the...
An idea from Horace Greeley and the post-Civil War burst of national imagination has come to the fore again.
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” —Psalm 8:4-5 Ellis Sandoz’s new book is of such importance to us in our intellectually disoriented day as...
“Rochester had sprung up like a mush- room, but no presage of decay could be drawn from its hasty growth.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne The day after his 101st birthday, novelist Henry W. Clune escorted my wife and me to a fine local restaurant, where we dined in the Henry Clune Room. “It’s a sin to live...
“A crocodile has been worshipped,” wrote John Taylor of Caroline, “and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by the crocodile.” Such was his final judgment on the central government of the United States and the advocates of its power. This prophecy, if such it may be...
According to a recent front-page story in the New York Times, the latest innovation of a particularly ambitious segment of the upwardly mobile American middle class is the replacement of the old-fashioned summer camp with getting-into-college camp. In proportion as the Times is ignorant of One Big Thing, its editors are highly knowledgeable about many...
“‘Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.” —William Shakespeare “Just the facts, ma’am.” Joe Friday’s prescription for getting at the truth has been followed by Seymour Hersh, whose investigation of the secret life of John F. Kennedy, America’s “prince of the people,” is peppered with facts as recalled by...
It is no longer news that 2020 saw a collapse of political discourse and public behavior in the United States. Trends that developed over many years intensified last year. One major political party had as its candidate for president a magnetic figure who can also be nasty and lacking in verbal self-control. The other party...
The final presidential election of the millennium is still more than a year away, but by last summer rumblings of discontent with the plastic dashboard figurines who are the leading candidates of the two major plastic dashboard political parties were already audible. The rumblings first attracted national notice when Pat Buchanan, in the course of...
During an Iowa town hall last week, “Beto” O’Rourke, who had pledged to raise the level of national discourse, depicted President Donald Trump’s rhetoric as right out of Nazi Germany. Trump “describes immigrants as ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals'” and as “‘animals’ and ‘an infestation,'” said Beto. “Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being...
“O Fame, O Fame! Many a man ere this Of no account hast thou set up on high.” —Boethius “It is a kind of baby talk, a puerile and wind-blown gibberish. . . . In content it is a vacuum.” —H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding’s speeches Americans are a practical people. They don’t want...
At the end of the recent remake of Planet of the Apes—turn the page now if you still plan to see it—the hero escapes from said planet and its monstrous chimp-tyrant, General Thade. Returning to Earth at night, his spacecraft crashes in, of all places, the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Mall, and he solemnly...
The cinders of the World Trade Center had barely fallen to the earth before George W. Bush had it all figured out. “America was targeted for attack,” the President explained to the nation barely 12 hours after the first plane hit the Manhattan skyscrapers, “because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the...
At the Jan. 6 rally in Washington D.C., those of us entering the VIP section were required to throw our tote bags in the trash. We divvied up various items, threw the rest away, and entered the grounds. When we left the rally, someone had emptied all of those cans onto the street and the...
David Brock, scourge of Anita Hill and Bill Clinton, the young man who gave new meaning and currency to the phrase “Arkansas state trooper,” has made a second career of repenting of his years in the conservative movement. He has now retold the story of his disaffection from the movement in Blinded by the Right:...
Jane Ohlmeyer examines how English imperialism shaped Ireland; tangled alliances and cultural identities complicate the story of the Irish nationalist movement.
The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite, “neither businessmen nor manufacturers, blue-collar workers or farmers,”...
Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough. The Grand...
Webster’s defines culture as a variation of the verb cultivate. It is time, therefore, for us to look at what, as a nation, we are cultivating. In our government schools, which we persist in calling “public,” students are taught that virtually any loose community can be called a society, and that the world is driven...
A subplot of the 2016 presidential campaign was the Green Party’s ability, for the second time in the 21st century, to achieve balance of power in a close race won by a Republican. Physician Jill Stein, 66, earned 1.4 million votes, or one percent—a miniscule amount, but more than the difference between Republican Donald Trump...
[This article first appeared in the June 1990 issue of Chronicles.] The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite,...
Donald Trump won in November 2016 in part because he had promised to turn a new leaf in America’s global engagements. Three years ago he spoke against his opponent’s imperial delusions, voiced doubt about the utility of NATO, expressed certainty that he’d find a common language with Putin (declaring Crimea none of our business), promised...
Though Chesterton disliked socialism intensely, he did not regard it as the most serious danger facing Western civilization. Writing in 1925, he describes the socialist state as something “centralized, impersonal, and monotonous” but suggests that this is also an accurate description of the societies in the modern industrialized West that regard themselves as enemies of...
In the ancient world no one could talk or read too much about philosophy. Wealthy Athenian nobles, Plato and Xenophon, for instance—even Roman emperors, like Marcus Aurelius—lived for the hours they could devote to philosophical discourse. The pagan’s conversion to philosophy was as important to him as conversion to Christ was for a Christian. When...
In August of 1955, William Faulkner traveled to Japan. Based in the out-of-the-way mountain province of Nagano—which, until the 1998 Winter Olympics, enjoyed a benign anonymity in perfect proportion to its relative unimportance in world affairs—Faulkner lectured and temple-toured for two weeks, doing the bidding of the U.S. State Department, which had sponsored his trip. ...
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss is sometimes more deadly than the curse. ...
Paul Theroux laments that the world is aging badly, that the world he knew as a young man has nearly vanished, that the decline and decay of precious things is everywhere apparent. Theroux should know; he travels more than I do. Also my own ventures at home and abroad depressingly confirm his impressions. Except when...
The American Academy of Religion should change its name to the American Unacademy of Ethno-Religio-Secular Fashions, if its call for papers for its annual meeting in Washington this autumn is any indication of trends to come. None of the classics, at least of Judaism, is going to find a place on the program. The section...
According to a recent front-page story in the New York Times, the latest innovation of a particularly ambitious segment of the upwardly mobile American middle class is the replacement of the old-fashioned summer camp with getting-into-college camp. In proportion as the Times is ignorant of One Big Thing, its editors are highly knowledgeable about many...
“I am teaching you to use a tool more deadly than a pistol.” This is the message beginning journalism students hear from an instructor who spoke last year at a conference on “Our Enemies’ Use of the Media,” sponsored by Accuracy in Media. In a world of Goliaths, count Accuracy in Media as one of...
In C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle the world of Narnia begins to dissolve and disappear. The Pevensie children are confused and frightened, but Professor Kirke, now Lord Digory, reassures them that the Narnia and the England they had known were only shadows compared to the reality they were about to experience. Then he mumbles to...
From the October 2015 issue of Chronicles. “Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss...
Not much more than 24 hours ago, one of many of you who could get away with it asked me to speak to you on Class Day. It hit me that for a tutor who insists on students meeting deadlines, the situation has the best of comic myth: you got yours back, and at the...
“Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honour, all things fade. Save Treason and the dagger of her trade . . . “ —Oscar Wilde, “Libertatis Sacra Fames” The Pollard treason case is so unusual that I want to start my review of this book with a review of the reviews. I do this because the first-hand story by...
“Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.” —Halifax The correspondence of Edmund Burke, whose letters help to illuminate his published works, was not available in a complete edition until 1978. Today, however, it seems that every aspiring journalist begins saving his correspondence even...
Americans like to think this is a land of diversity unparalleled anywhere in the world, but in religious matters at least, such a view is far from the truth. America remains today substantially what it has always been, namely, a Christian country. While the United States is indeed home to a remarkable number of religious...
Homeland Elegies: A Novel, by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown & Co.; 368 pp., $28.00). Mark Twain wrote in his 1897 travel book, Following the Equator: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” That saying came in handy as I read this book, described on...
It will take more than an economic revival to make America great again. We’re going to need a moral revival, too.
Early in Owen Wister’s 1905 novel Lady Baltimore, the narrator, recently arrived in Charleston from Philadelphia, remarks upon the stillness of the city, its “silent verandas” and cloistered gardens behind their wrought iron gates—“this little city of oblivion . . . with its lavender and pressed shut memories . . . ” For Wister the...
Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough. The Grand...
“October Revolution” is probably an apt description of Canada’s 1993 parliamentary elections, as the month marked the enthronement of a left-oriented political establishment and the ejection of the ruling Conservatives. The Liberal Party’s sweep to an absolute majority meant the relegation of the Tory Progressive Conservative Party to virtual extinction (it now holds only two...
As President Clinton’s Dialogue on Race draws to a close, his panel will be offering a final report on how to remedy the evils of racism in America. Given the members of the hand-picked panel, it can be said with certainty that the racism to be remedied will be white racism and only white racism....
“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare In preparing my review of this riveting biography, I gathered samples of what has recently been written about Richard M. Nixon, and I must say they make a bewildering collection. Here are a few: “A monster of a million disguises.” Andrew Kopkind, the...
On June 5, we lost not only one of our finest writers but a true American storyteller and one of the last of the book people. For Ray Bradbury, who passed away at the age of 91, was, like the remnant that Montag joins at the end of Fahrenheit 451, a book person, a walking...