I studied the weather for four days before making a break for the south, slipping between the winter storms along icepacked roads wreathed with snowsnakes across sun-glazed plains in the direction of the Salt Lake Valley, where much of the snow had evaporated, under a stiff northwesterly wind and horses and cattle at American Fork...
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Where Have You Gone?
Joe DiMaggio, where have you gone? One could add Babe Ruth, Bobby Hull, and Dick Butkus. On good days American sports stars were treated more as gods than as mortal heroes, but on bad days they were booed mercilessly by fans. Booing is a grand old American tradition, but like nearly everything that’s traditional, it’s...
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Letters From Tocqueville
From the September 1986 issue of Chronicles. “I am rich in letters. . . . “ —Horace Walpole Alexis de Tocqueville was an immensely prolific writer. His friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that “for one volume he published he wrote ten; and the notes he cast aside as intended only for himself would have served...
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Canceling Uncle Tom
The only thing those on the left hate more than a conservative white male is a conservative black male. It simply infuriates leftists when a black man rejects their socialist dogma and espouses such conservative ideals as individual initiative, freedom from government, self-reliance, responsibility for decision making, and competing in the marketplace. How dare he! A...
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Opposing the Disneyfiers
Paul Fussell’s enemies are “habitual euphemizers, professional dissimulators,” and the “Disneyfiers of life.” He is in favor of cojones, which is why he ends up in one of his essays liking the Indy 500 in spite of himself, comparing it favorably to the violence of the Falklands War, which is going on while he watches...
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Deformations of Justice
If a U.S. administration formally attempted to establish an authoritarian police state, its efforts would almost certainly encounter bitter and even violent resistance; recent experience, however, has shown that remarkably authoritarian and unconstitutional methods can be established without provoking serious protest, provided they are introduced piecemeal and justified by the rhetoric of good intentions. In...
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Recapturing the Constitution
In a landmark five-to-four decision last spring, in United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court announced—for the first time in almost 50 years—that Congress had exceeded its interstate commerce powers. At issue was a federal statute—the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990—which forbade the carrying of firearms within one thousand feet of a school....
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Sheer Christianity
For a long time after “modern” first came into the language, it was an innocuous little word, the simple opposite of “ancient,” and insofar as it had connotations, they were not very good ones. Shakespeare always used it to mean “commonplace,” with strong suggestions of the slipshod and the second-rate. The Enlightenment and the French...
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No Miracles This Time
Last year, when I was in Helsinki, I made a great discovery:, probably the best informed people on Soviet affairs are the Finns, whose Russian-watching goes back almost two centuries, long before the Bolshevik coup of 1917. I was in Finland talking with veteran analysts, official and unofficial, about the overpowering Soviet military presence that...
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Lawrencemania and Anglophobia
“Into hell” read the headline in the tabloid Daily Mirror on February 24, 1999. The Mirror‘s reporter had “walked the streets where racism is a way of life—and death.” He had found “racism seeping from every pore,” and his photographer took shots of neo-Nazi graffiti, such as “Kill all coons at birth.” The “hellish” place...
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Home Church
Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime. —Daniel 6:10 With the election of Democrat Barack Obama as...