[This article first appeared in the December 1992 issue of Chronicles.] In the second segment of the several-part BBC documentary on his life, Malcolm Muggeridge smoothed his white feathery hair away from his cherubic face, smiled cryptically, and said in his deep, rolling, gentle English voice, “There’s nothing in this world more instinctively abhorrent to...
And . . . she’s outta there. On June 12, Marge Schott, the embattled majority owner of the Cincinnati Reds, was given the heave-ho by baseball’s powers-that-be, forced to relinquish day-to-day control of her ball club through the 1998 season. In an ongoing effort to polish Major League Baseball’s tarnished veneer, the august guardians of...
A History of Violence Produced and distributed by Neil’ Line Cinema Directed bv David Cronenberg Screenplay by Josh Olson from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke Film titles do not come more portentous than A History of Violence. Entering a Manhattan theater to view David Cronenberg’s latest cinematic lesson, I was half...
“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here . . . and . . . around the world, that there is a ‘clash of civilizations.'” So said Hillary Clinton in Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate. Yet, that phrase was not popularized by Donald...
A video of a white teacher from Loudon County, Virginia protesting the required Critical Race Theory (CRT) training for teachers is a highlight of Andrea Widburg’s article, “Maybe the pendulum is starting to swing on cancel culture.” Take one minute to watch this female fireball, and you’ll hear what so many of us are thinking but...
Lobbying for Freedom in the 1980’s: A Grass-Roots Guide to Protecting Your Rights; Edited by Kenneth P. Norwick; Wideview/Perigee; New York. Susan J. Tolchin and Martin Tolchin: Dismantling America: The Rush to Deregulate; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. What is freedom? To the ancient Greeks, freedom existed in the margins: it was that vacuum of authority between...
“How can tyrants safely govern home I Unless abroad they purchase great alliance?”—William Shakespeare There is something compelling in reading about spies and something compelling as well about spying, or we would not have so many spies to read about, fictional or not. Our century has been a century of spies:...
Goodbye, Peter Pan The Big Chill; Directed by Lawrence Kasdan It is unique in that it has something for virtually everyone to hate. Consider the characters, all eight. They are the types of people that our parents warned us about in the late 60’s and early 70’s: not the drug pushers who lurked behind bushes,...
Three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, and clarity emerges. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, is in trouble. Polls show her slightly ahead of Socialist Bernie Sanders in Iowa, but narrowly behind in New Hampshire. And the weekend brought new revelations about yet more classified and secret documents sent over her private email server...
Nothing is riskier in life—at any rate, for those interested in discovering that elusive thing, the “truth”—than to assume that what one has personally experienced years ago can be a useful guide in judging present problems. It is particularly true when the time gap between the two exceeds 50 years. This said, I feel almost...
Let's say the mosque (you know what mosque) gets built, as it certainly might, public opinion notwithstanding. What's the next theological concession America's Christian churches get to make in the name of brotherhood, sisterhood, pluralism, world peace and amity, the reconstruction of America's image, etc., etc.? First it's one thing, ...
“In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. . . . And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.” The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy. ...
Celt, Roman, Angle, Saxon, Dane, Norman, Pict—and Bengali, Afro-Caribbean, Turk, Arab, Chinese. Glyndebourne, swan-upping, roast beef and Maypoles—and arranged marriages, bowing to Mecca, halal meat, chop suey. Harris tweed—and saris. Anglicanism and Catholicism—and Diwali, Rastafarian New Year, Ramadan. Milton, Shakespeare —and Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison. All of the former, traditionally British things have been, are...
The Deer Hunter received the Academy Award for best picture at the Oscars ceremony in 1979. The film was much criticized by some for its Russian roulette sequences, especially the alleged “racism” on display in the film’s depiction of the Viet Cong. But The Deer Hunter is truly a mythic, poetic work of art. The...
Martin Luther King, Jr. did not bring the races closer together; and the legacy he left behind has been one of erasing more and more of our national heritage whenever it does not fit a progressively more radical leftist agenda.
The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have jarred American self-confidence, caused coast-to-coast panic, and even (we shall see) ignited World War III, but so far they have failed to put a dent in multicultural etiquette. President Bush and other government spokesmen have been at pains to stress that...
Seeing Red Red Dawn; Directed by John Milius; Written by John Milius and Kevin Reynolds; MGM-UA Entertainment. by C. P. Dragash There is a common daydream among men who grew up in the years between the Berlin blockade and the Cuban missile crisis: the Russians have invaded the American heartland, and a...
If California were to secede from the United States and establish itself, as its first Anglo settlers once intended, as an independent republic, it would instantly emerge as one of the world’s richest nations. As it is, one in every ten Americans now resides in the so-called Golden State. Its economy affects not only those...
Along with death, crap is the great equalizer. And traditionally, satirists make a point of not being fastidious.
Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote. Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters. As a matter of fact I said absolutely nothing in my article...
One of the primary functions of literary criticism is to impose a certain order on the subject, the text. In a very basic sense, it can be thought of as a set of instructions for the reader of the text, not unlike those packed along with a dishwasher or a swing set. However, there is...
British television, like television almost everywhere, is dominated by left-wingers masquerading as liberals. As a consequence, British television often denigrates those traditions and institutions held in most affection by the indigenous inhabitants of this country. In the interstices, it finds time to celebrate and promote everything that is not British, or at any rate not...
Foreign aid, like other forms of aid, is a subsidy that distorts choice. The distortion takes many forms; for example, aid is sometimes put to uses unintended by the giver; it also lets the recipient pursue activities below their real cost. Since President Harry Truman launched the foreign-aid crusade, U.S. economic aid to developing nations...
“First grubs obscene, then wriggling worms, Then painted butterflies.”—Alexander Pope, Phryne Maybe I’m bewitched, but I’m not bothered and certainly I’m not bewildered by Sean Griffin’s too divinely unbelievable disquisition on one of everybody’s favorite topics, and I’m not going to waste space by saying what that is, because you just...
A naked boy runs down a crowded Italian street, chased by an angry old man. Grabbing the boy by the back of the neck, the old man shouts: “Just wait till I get you back home.” The crowd quickly takes sides against the old man, and when the carabinieri arrive, they take him off to...
John Richardson, the brilliant biographer of Picasso, resembles (by his own account) those charming and attractive young men of limited means and boundless ambition—right out of the novels of Stendhal and Balzac—who use any means to make their way in the world. The son of an English soldier, educated at Stowe school and the Slade...
The Last Confederate Produced by Strongbow Pictures Directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams Written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams Firetrail Produced by Forbesfilm Written and directed by Christopher Forbes Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the largest audience and...
The Rockford Public Schools, as longtime readers of Chronicles know, have seen more than their fair share of troubles. With the end, in June 2002, of the 13-year-long desegregation suit and its accompanying rule by the federal courts, and the hiring of Dennis Thompson as superintendent in 2004, however, the school board has begun to...
“Such was that happy garden-state, While man there walked without a mate. . . . “ —Andrew Marvell Kingsley Amis has been practicing the writer’s trade long enough to have produced a full shelf of books. Last year’s Stanley and the Women was not only his 17th novel but a signal that three decades have...
The Fox Theatre—a grand movie palace of Detroit’s 1920’s, which is now used primarily as a venue for acts that won’t fill an arena—contained a chronologically mixed crowd in mid-March. Paul Young was in concert. Young, a slightly chubby, baby-faced British singer (he appears, to borrow a line from Elvis Costello, “teddy-bear tender and tragically...
I sure wouldn’t want to cross Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. In his semihysterical, mean-spirited diatribe (Cultural Revolutions, January 1992), he manages to charge Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with perjury, perversion, and racial opportunism. And that’s just for openers. Although I probably lost count, there are some twenty-five negative references to Thomas’s character, ideology, or...
Not long ago, I found myself sitting one sunny Friday afternoon in the Unity Museum in Seattle, notebook in hand, as a group of fresh-faced college undergraduates participated in a debate over whether or not their city is dying. The general conclusion of the affair and the grim message of the students was that it...
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 its jacket as...
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,...
Ending Plague, by Francis Ruscetti, Judy Mikovits, and Kent Heckenlively, draws a connection between big pharma’s vaccine industry and a host of modern diseases.
Ever since the cinéaste Nino Frank first used the term in France in 1946 (he never said he invented it), there has been considerable controversy about the meaning of “film noir” and various attempts to define it, some more or less authoritative. The essential arguments have been usefully collected in Silver and Ursini’s Film Noir...
The second half of the life of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is not nearly as interesting as the first, when Russell did his major work in philosophy and mathematics and, through close contacts with the Bloomsbury Group, knew all the major writers of his time. In this second volume, Ray Monk picks his way through the...
The pro-life principles of President Bush have often been questioned (not least in these pages), but, in late August, the President confounded his critics and firmly established his credentials as the most pro-life occupant of the Oval Office since Bill Clinton. In 1999, the Food and Drug Administration approved “Plan B,” the “morning-after pill,” for...
When Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced their decision to welcome and validate openly homosexual boys six years ago, Cub Scout mom Theresa Waning saw the writing on the wall. Shortly after BSA’s announcement, the church chartering her son’s troop, like many other churches across the country, revoked their BSA charter, leaving Waning’s son and...
It’s easy in this business to read too much journalism at the expense of books. Every morning I go through the New York Times (faster and more selectively with each week that passes), the (London) Daily Telegraph, and Le Figaro (it has some strong conservative writers, like Luc Ferry, and interesting essays and well-done interviews...
William Murchison’s “Color Me Kweisi” (Views, May 2000) brings to mind an aspect of the so-called “civil rights” movement which has played an active part in undermining this country. While the left has failed to achieve total collectivization through the democratic process, it has introduced a caste system that can circumvent both referenda and ethics...
John Lukacs has observed that our century’s two most significant revolutionaries were Lenin and Wilson. Of the two, according to Lukacs, the internationalist Lenin had less destructive influence in the long run than the democratic moralist but fervent nationalist Wilson; today it may be said that the Wilsonians have outlasted the Commies. Democracy and national...
The post-conciliar Church's efforts to bring Christ into the modern world have brought the modern world into the Church. The Church is not moving the world; the world is moving the Church.
(A review of The Last Confederate; produced by Strongbow Pictures; directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams; written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams; and Firetrail; produced by Forbesfilm; written and directed by Christopher Forbes.) Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the...
Republican leaders are “a bunch of wimps,” said Jerry Falwell Jr. Conservatives and Christians need to stop electing “nice guys.” “The US needs street fighters like Donald Trump at every level of government because the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps.” So tweeted the son and namesake of the founder of the Moral Majority,...
Any reader familiar with Martin Amis’ novels—especially his most recent, Money: A Suicide Note (1984)—will not be surprised by the relentlessly contemptuous tone of The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, a collection of his essays and articles on America and Americans. While Amis confesses at the outset that he “feel[s] fractionally American” (his...
Reviews of Blonde, adapted from the Joyce Carol Oates biographical novel of the same title, and the 1951 film, The Enforcer.
“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” The inauguration of the first black president of the United States on January...
You Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws by David E. Bernstein Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute; 197 pp., $20.00 A Miller Brewing Company executive is fired for retelling a racy segment of a Seinfeld episode at the watercooler. An unwed teacher successfully sues the parochial school that fired her for becoming pregnant...
Six Questions for A.G. Sulzberger March 20, 2018 Dear Mr. Sulzberger: Congratulations on assuming the reins of this nation’s—and arguably, the world’s—most influential publication. It’s the family business, of course, so your appointment to succeed your father doesn’t exactly qualify as a surprise. Even so, the responsibility for guiding the fortunes of a great institution...