Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault—and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual...
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The Call of Blood
We Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of rootless individuals, cut off from the history that chained Old Europe to a cycle of wars and revolutions and bound to one another not by ties of blood and soil but only by the bloodless abstraction of self-evident truths. Rooted in no one place, our corporate...
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In Praise of Geopolitics
The noun geopolitics and the adjective geopolitical are increasingly present in media discourse on world affairs. In principle, this is a good thing. Relating political power to the immutable imperatives of space and resources is essential to an analysis of world affairs that is free from the ideological baggage of American exceptionalism, whether Wilsonian or...
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Pork Politics
“There is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.” —Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar Mark Twain, responsible for the foregoing, was being funny. His remark, however, is steadily becoming a little more true and a little less funny. The U.S. Congress, through indirection and guile rather than by overt vote, has managed to give itself a...
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On Might
“I chant the new empire . . . “ —Walt Whitman Walt Whitman sang what he saw—in 1860, he gave a name to Madison’s and Jefferson’s vision of the new commonwealth. “[Our success],” Jefferson had said in 1801, “furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only...
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Slaying Dragons, Coddling Snakes
The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West by David Kilcullen; Oxford University Press; 336 pp., $27.95 When the West defeated the Soviet Union, CIA Director R. James Woolsey, Jr., observed that we had “slain a large dragon” only to face a “bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and a proliferation...
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Contemptible Familiarities
“Would you guys like somethin’ to drink?” I could not help smiling at the lady and two men sitting across the table from me in this California restaurant injected into the middle of North Carolina. We had just been deploring the use of this unisex slang expression to mean “ladies and gentlemen” and debating the...
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Time for an Immigration Moratorium
The Center for Immigration Studies reports this morning that the number of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the United States is now 41.3 million, the highest it has ever been. Even as the American economy continues to sputter and many Americans face unemployment or underemployment, an additional 1.4 million immigrants entered the country between...
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Closing the Barn Door
Ethnic groups were reportedly highly successful in registering new voters in the months before the 1992 national election. In California, the Secretary of State’s office was deluged with requests for registration forms and, in at least two cases, countless thousands of those forms were sent to businesses like Domino’s Pizza and the 99 Cent Store,...
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Bianca and the Commissar
I was reading at the Periodicals Room of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library the other day. The magazine I happened to pick up was called Soviet Literature, subtitled “A Monthly Journal of the Writers’ Union of the U.S.S.R. published in English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, and Slovak.” The issue, for March 1985, “marked the...
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New York State of Mind
Some 20 years ago, my friend P.J. O’Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with his new bride. She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner called me a male chauvinist, racist antisemite and left the house in a fury. P.J. apologized and followed his bride out. To this day I haven’t figured...
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Comey & The Saturday Night Massacre
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, said Marx. On publication day of my memoir of Richard Nixon’s White House, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Instantly, the media cried “Nixonian,” comparing it to the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre. Yet, the differences are stark. The resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and...
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We’re Not as Dumb as They Think
It’s gone just about too far this time. In the past year, North and South Dakota were included in a group of states described as “America’s Out back” by Newsweek. As if that weren’t bad enough, both states were also left out of a Rand McNally photographic atlas. (The editors smiled urbanely, one imagines, and...
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True Reform
The Electoral College is an archaic institution designed by men who felt that they could not trust the people at large to choose the president—or so we are told every four years by the most ignorant members of the Fourth Estate. While it may have been true (the argument continues) that the people were relatively...
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Fire the Nanny
Even under a “conservative” President, government entitlements continue to grow. President George W. Bush’s expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs will add billions to the already overinflated budget. And, despite warnings from Alan Greenspan that Social Security is on the verge of default, neither political party is willing to address the issue. Americans have...
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Remembering Jim Traficant
Donald Trump made headlines when he warned of illegal-immigrant drug runners and rapists pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border. But he wasn’t the first to do so. Ohio Rep. James Traficant, Jr., was well-known for voicing similar comments on any given morning from the floor of the House. Before there was Trump, there was Jim Traficant—the...
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On Saving Private Ryan
Wayne Allensworth, in his poignant and beautifully written review of Saving Private Ryan (“The Face of Battle,” January), focuses on what is right with the film. However, I find much that is wrong, and, for me, the wrong outweighs the right. Nonetheless, Steven Spielberg makes an important contribution to the making of war movies by...
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The Wind Listeth
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Speaking from experience, rather than poetic frenzy, I say both. The spring winds blowing white at home in Wyoming blow red down here in New Mexico, a howling gale that seems to be returning to the Dustbowl the errant Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas...
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Pragmatic Problems
Jacques Barzun: A Stroll With William James; Harper & Row; New York. William James is the nearest thing to a thoroughly American philosopher this nation has produced. George Santayana complained that James felt compelled to play the part of a home-spun American a role enjoyed by our intellectuals from Ben Franklin to Ezra Pound. Santayana...
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The Cajuns of Louisiana
In the 1980’s, “Cajun” suddenly became “cool.” From rotund Chef Paul Prudhomme and high-rolling Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards to the music of Beausoleil and “blackened” redfish, anyone and anything associated with the remnants of French culture along the Gulf Coast was “in.” The nation eagerly embraced the battle-cry of the Cajun: “Let the good times...
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Anywhere But Here
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . . ” —Romans 1:22 Man, by nature, is limited by time, space, and biology. I can only be where I am, live for my appointed time, and accomplish what I am physically capable of accomplishing—which, according to the natural order, means, chiefly, having a wife...
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Are China’s Threats to Taiwan a Bluff?
Monday, four dozen Chinese military aircraft flew into Taiwan’s air defense zone, climaxing a weekend of provocations that saw nearly 150 sorties of China-based fighters and bombers. The U.S. State Department countered by issuing a stern statement warning Beijing about the adverse effect on regional “stability” of such “provocative military activity.” Yet even as the...
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Bulldozing into Trouble
Dubious parallels, like old prejudices, die hard. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt unleashed his legislative whirlwind in the winter and spring of 1933, and more particularly in France since 1986, it has become a standard cliché to judge a new government’s performance on the basis of its achievements during its first 100 days in office. If...
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The Militia of Love
Carolyn Chute’s return address includes the postscript, “No Fax/No Phone/No Paved Road.” The self-taught novelist of Maine’s backwoods can add “No More Good Reviews,” for with her latest book, Snow Man, she has committed an unpardonable act of literary patriotism: She depicts a militiaman as a human being. We came to Chute’s Parsonsfield from Concord,...
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In Search of the Bourgeoisie
“How beastly the bourgeois is,” sneered D.H. Lawrence, “especially the male of the species.” What courage and imagination a writer must have to revile a social class that has been under attack for over a generation! Aristocrats (and would-be aristocrats) look down their noses at the bourgeoisie’s convention-bound moralism and dismal commitment to hard work...
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A Legendary Failure of Liberalism
When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America’s public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C. In the shadow of the Capitol, Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see the “for sale” signs...
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Fateful Choices
There are few issues more emotional than abortion. The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...
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What I Saw (and Prayed) in New Orleans
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always...
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Is Rob Henderson ‘Troubled’ or Blessed?
Rob Henderson’s memoir “Troubled” demonstrates why it’s not enough for a writer to dwell on the problems that afflict a person and his community. Henderson should now turn his focus to what makes him, and his circle, blessed.
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Country
Maximus: Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. That is not it. That is not it! Proximo: Marcus Aurelius is dead, Maximus. We mortals are but shadows and dust. Shadows and dust, Maximus! —from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Every time I watch the above scene from Gladiator, that powerful movie about the decadence of...
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Monocultural Resilience
At the end of the ongoing global melodrama’s first quarter, it seems reasonable to predict that this will be a two-act play with the final curtain coming down in July. It will end as a tragedy, not because the outcome was preordained in a world impervious to human choices, but because men have free will....
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Witnessing at The Hague
All history is to some extent contemporary, but none more so than that analyzed, interpreted, and sometimes constructed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. ...
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Vol.1 No. 10 October 1999
Twenty years after being exiled from the Soviet Union, Alexander Zinovyev—one of the most prominent living European authors—has decided to leave his adopted homeland, France, and to return to Russia. His reasons are summarized in the title of a long interview in Le Figaro Magazine: “The West has become totalitarian” (July 24). While he was...
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Fake Indians
Promoting oneself as an American Indian, even when it's not true, can be a career enhancer ... until the lie is exposed.
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A Complete Man: Remembering Terry Kohler
During the late 1950’s, Terry J. Kohler was a jet pilot with the U.S. Air Force, flying T-33 fighters and B-47 bombers with the Strategic Air Command. Like most others of that tribe whom I have met, the experience gave him an almost startling directness of manner. On meeting him, you quickly became aware of...
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Mexico Under New Management: Wish Them Well, and Build That Fence
Because of illegal immigration, there is no other country that affects America’s way of life as profoundly as does Mexico. Its politics should he followed, therefore, with the same attention to detail that characterized Kremlinology at the height of the Cold War. Instead, there was an air of unreality to the hundreds of American editorials...
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What’s Behind Our World on Fire?
When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given. Negligence by campers. Falling power lines. Arson. A dried-out land. Climate change. Failure to manage forests, prune trees, and clear debris, leaving fuel for blazes ignited. Abnormally high winds spreading the flames. Too many fires for first responders to...
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Confessions of an Autodidact
From the September 2005 issue of Chronicles. Is self-education a good idea? The greatest of my teachers, Walter Starkie, in his delightful autobiography Scholars and Gypsies, recalls a comment made in 1914 by his godfather, J.P Mahaffy, the legendary provost of Trinity College, Dublin, about W.B. Yeats: “Poor fellow! He is an autodidaktos—he never worked...
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Fighting the Dragon With Solzhenitsyn
Do great men make history? Or does history make great men? One thing’s for sure: History sometimes smothers great men, as Thomas Gray suggests in his famous elegy written in a country churchyard, and as the rows of endless graves from Arlington to the Somme demonstrate with brutal candor. “Some mute inglorious Milton here may...
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The Message of Tokyo’s Kowtow
Hubris will do it ever time. The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest ...
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Fall of a Titan
Pat Buchanan’s new book is another tour de force. Suicide of a Superpower builds on the prophetic warnings first articulated in such earlier books as The Great Betrayal; A Republic, Not an Empire; and, most importantly, Death of the West. The current work exhibits the most famous paleoconservative’s trademark word-crafting verve, encyclopedic knowledge of history...
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Immigration: The Greatest Government Failure of Our Times
Migration is a reality that concerns no more than 200 million people on earth now living outside their country of origin—that is, only three percent of the world’s population. Why should we even talk about it? The reason is simple: Global statistics are worthless; the whole phenomenon is concentrated in Europe and the United States. ...
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The Cassandra of Caroline County
“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...
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Leftist Rage, Conservative Hate
Years ago, when we were very young and contributing promiscuously to the reviews departments of various intellectual publications, a misguided editor sent me a review copy of a leftist rant by an author whose name I have long since banished from memory, while clearly recalling the title. It was The Dying of the Light—taken, of...
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UVA: Facts Versus the Left’s Narrative
For a news professional, it is hard to say which is more discouraging: that Rolling Stone published an imaginary tale of gang rape from a crazy college girl without double-checking her story, or that no one at Rolling Stone was fired after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued a report that revealed top-to-bottom...
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Unjust War
“War is the trade of kings.” —John Dryden The single greatest force for consolidation of the national state is war. A truism, but one that American conservatives have been loath to admit. Ideologically committed to anticommunism, the conservative movement fell into lockstep with liberal troops in the Cold War, in the...
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A Dirge For Bosnia
“Whom I served—by him I was buried!” —14th-Century Bosnian Inscription “For now I began to get the news from Croatia,” wrote Mrs. Ruth Mitchell, an American in Dubrovnik, in May of 1941. “I could not believe a quarter of them. Unfortunately, I was soon to know that they were a weak understatement of the truth....
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Blaming Columbus
The news that politically correct groups in the United States are greeting the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America by denouncing the great explorer as an imperialist exploiter has been greeted with incredulity and derision in Europe. After all, had he not discovered America, there would be no tax-fed intelligentsia of progressive Americans to...
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The Moral Minority
The word “minority” represents one of those inversions of value (that typify socialist regimes. Derived, obviously, from the Latin minor (smaller or less in respect of size, importance, age, etc.), “minority” has been used in English to express both the immature years before adulthood and the losing side of a judicial opinion. Most significantly, it...
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Obama Repudiated
Last night’s midterm elections marked a decisive repudiation of Barack Obama. Not only did the Republicans seize control of the Senate, increase their majority in the House, and win an overwhelming number of the governorships being contested, but most Democratic candidates wanted nothing to do with Obama, with the Kentucky candidate for the U.S. Senate...