In Duncan Oklahoma, two black “teens,” driven by a white teen driver, murdered a complete stranger–an Australian student and baseball player. The only motive given so far is that they were bored. Since the victim was white and at least one of the three a devotee of the racist thug doggerel known as rap, there...
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Nelson Mandela Idolized?
Nelson Mandela idolized? Am I the only one who didn’t do a spastic street dance over his arrival in America? Tell him to take “power” in the wrong African language? California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown said being with Mandela was like “being in the presence of God.” A worshiper along the parade route in New...
Mea Culpa
Dear Norman, This is the second (and probably the last) time I have written to you. The first time was way back in tumultuous 1968 when, as a kind of review of your book Making It, for the Hollins Critic, I wrote you an open letter entitled “My Silk Purse and Yours; Making It, Starring...
Remembering the Old Russia
This Fall marks the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Although few commentators today are likely to glorify that event or its aftermath, most will assume that the revolution was a regrettable necessity, which swept away a repressive and stagnant ancient regime. Such a view is false. Culturally and spiritually, that lost pre-revolutionary Russia was...
Horror in Europe
On New Year’s Eve 121 German women were subjected to sexual attacks, robbery and violence by “concentric rings” of a thousand Middle Eastern and African migrants in and around the central railway station in Cologne. Women and girls were surrounded, poked and jeered at as “whores” and even worse insults; their blouses were ripped and...
Rockford Schools Controversy
The Rockford schools controversy, approaching its tenth anniversary, is taking on the mythic stature of the Little Rock, Cleveland, and Kansas City cases. While still in its infancy (as desegregation cases go) and relatively inexpensive (only $166 million through the end of the 1997-98 school year, compared to $2 billion in Kansas City), the Rockford...
In a Trump Hunt, Beware the Perjury Trap
Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, “I would love to do it . . . as soon as possible. . . . under oath, absolutely.” On hearing this, the special counsel’s office must have looked like the Eagles’ locker room...
Responding to Obscenities
I am not Charlie, nor will I ever be. Wearing a Je suis Charlie badge is one sure way of getting attention, but I will leave that to others. And another thing: Obscenity has no redeeming social value, and Charlie Hebdo was and is one long obscenity. But let’s start with that famous Parisian march...
On Liberty and the Grand Idea
For a long time I thought I knew how to evade the discourse of the Grand Idea. It began when I was in the Yugoslav People’s Army. The war was barely over, but victory brought no greater liberty to those who had suffered the Nazi occupation, and the brainwashing in the barracks grew more and...
Bridge of Hope
In 1958, when the first barbed-wire barricades were rolled out by the British colonial government across Ledra Street in the capital of Cyprus, it seemed inevitable that the seeds of division would yield a bitter harvest of intercommunal conflicts, regional tensions, and, finally, the partition of the whole island. Where minarets and churches once jostled...
Worldly Wise & Heavenly Foolish
The most widely known of these three novelists is Romain Gary, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 66, perhaps as a result of his disastrous marriage to the American actress and radical, Jean Seaberg, who had taken her own life a year earlier. A Lithuanian emigrant to France, where he played a...
Reforming the Military
On August 25, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that he would look into ways to strengthen U.S. combat power without increasing the size of the military. While the “end-strength” of 1.4 million should stay the same, he intends to rebalance the active and reserve components, sending underutilized active-duty personnel to the reserves and moving...
A Watch in the Marches
“Oh, the wild hills of Wales, the land of old renown, and of wonder . . . ” —George Borrow, Wild Wales I step silent across the flagged floor below weathered slates and beams, sleep-held family breathing behind, the only other sounds the scratching of terriers’ claws as they push past...
Print the Legend
It was about 3 p.m. on October 26, 1881, as Tombstone’s town marshal, Virgil Earp (also a deputy U.S. marshal), his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and the Earps’ eccentric friend Dr. John H. Holliday confronted Isaac and William Clanton and Thomas and Robert Findley McLaury near the O.K. Corral. After 30 seconds of firing, Morgan...
The Postmodern Sneer
Funny Games Produced by Celluloid Dreams Directed and written by Michael Haneke Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures After seeing Austrian director Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, I experienced an unaccustomed urge. I wanted to buy a .45. I’m sure this was not the reaction Haneke was hoping for, but he can hardly complain. After all,...
Netanyahu Overplays His Hand
Following his doomsday speech at the United Nations General Assembly on October 1—in which he warned the world that Iran’s new president should not be trusted and that Israel would attack Iran on its own unless it ends its nuclear program—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent two days in New York on an anti-Rouhani media...
Figuring Out Your 1960s Stance in One Question
The 1960s, according to Carl Oglesby, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, “will never level out.” “It’s a corkscrew, it’s a tailspin, it’s a joyride on a roller coaster, it’s a never-ending mystery,” he continues. “Who won? Who lost? What were the terms of victory and defeat? We’ll always be discussing that.” I...
Still Sorry After All These Years
With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...
Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame
Just three days after Georgetown University had Kathleen Sebelius on campus to address an awards ceremony during commencement week, another prominent Catholic university found a better way of dealing with Sebelius: the University of Notre Dame filed suit against Sebelius in federal court, asking the court to enjoin and then vacate the Obama Administration’s mandate requiring...
What Trump Has Wrought
Should Donald Trump fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot (1,237), there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race. But Washington, the city of self-delusion,...
Polemics & Exchanges: March 2024
Readers tussle with Paul Gottfried over slavery and the War Between the States, praise for November's "End of the Dollar" issue, and more thoughts on the coming American resistance.
Airs, Waters, Places
I might say at the onset that I am usually not a big fan of anthologies, though I have edited one; most end up unwieldy grab bags of vaguely related material. This is emphatically not the case with Gregory McNamee’s Named in Stone and Sky, a collection of Southwestern material that marvelously coheres into a...
We’ve Only Just Begun
The Left is not generous in victory. The ink on the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was barely dry before a vicious assault on organized religion in this country was launched, a multipronged offensive with the clear intention of marginalizing Christians and banishing them from the public square. The first shot was fired...
Bubba Peugeot and the Pickerel
“Good news!” a friend told me this morning in Rockford. “McDonald’s is closing 16 restaurants in Serbia.” Apparently Serbs, who eat the best “hamburgers” in the world and serve them with excellent bread, have stood up to the fast-food wing of the New World Order more stoutly than they resisted Madeleine Albright (though which is...
Perceptibles
Howard Thurman: For the Inward Journey; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. During his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Jesse Jackson was widely praised for using the language of black evangelism. Wiser observers recognized that Jackson had actually degraded his inherited religious vocabulary by cutting it loose from its spiritual roots and putting it...
The Belligerent Advantage of Congress
The way foreign-policy mavens in Washington, D.C., talk about Afghanistan, you would think that country had successfully launched a ballistic-missile attack against us on 9/11. We have occupied Afghanistan for over 17 years now, but still we cannot leave because the Taliban could then return to power and once again grant haven to terrorists who...
Mapping Verona
A map of Verona is open, the small strange city; With its river running round and through, it is river-embraced, And over this city for a whole long winter season, Through streets on a map, my thoughts have hovered and paced. I still wake up some nights, thinking about the streets of Verona and of...
The Burden of Racial Guilt: A New Declaration of Independence
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” —The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America As I write I am sitting in Pitt County, North...
China: Xi in Charge
In the aftermath of last week’s finale of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) 19th congress, many commentators have opined that President Xi Jinping is now the country’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping. This is incorrect. Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong at home, and arguably the most influential Chinese player...
The New Conservation Movement
To mainstream environmental activists, Ron Arnold merits special disdain. A former Sierra Club conservation committee member, Arnold now runs, with associate Alan Gottlieb, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in Bellevue, Washington. Together they wrote a 1993 expose of the environmental movement, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America, which remains...
What 9/11 Wrought: The Bush Legacy
In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition. Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted: “Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?” “Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan...
Delusion Is Killing the American Republic
More Americans are mentally ill than ever before. It’s no wonder we are seeing signs of it in our politics.
Fake News Has Always Been a Thing
In re-airing the classic Absence of Malice, Turner Classic Movies reminds us of the sort cinéma vérité about unscrupulous journalism we rarely see from a Hollywood devoted to political leftism.
Trump’s an ‘Insurrectionist’—But Hillary Was Exercising Free Speech
When Republicans ask questions about the integrity of our elections it's insurrection. When Democrats do it, it's just politics.
Kissinger’s Legacy
One of Henry Kissinger’s greatest virtues was his political realism and his resistance to America’s messianic urge, relentlessly promoted by both neoconservatives and neoliberals, to dominate the world as global hegemon.
Of Dirty Bombs and False Flags
Russia’s claim about Ukraine’s intent to detonate a false-flag dirty bomb is one more narrative in a long line of political narratives that bombard the average citizen.
Good Writers, Complicated Lives
Quality of writing is no longer the standard for literature, as the busybodies of the left go about canceling all our best authors for their various sins of political incorrectness.
Are Conservatives Fair Game?
Should members of the political right criticize one another for their faults, or band together out of solidarity against the left? Is it fair to consider a conservative public figure’s personal life when judging his moral pronouncements? I attempt to answer these questions in response to a critic.