The facts of George Garrett’s literary career are laid out in the bibliography here: his 24 books include novels, plays, and collections of poems and short stories. In addition he has served as editor of 17 other books—interviews with contemporary writers, literary criticism, books on film scripts. He has also written a biography of the...
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Blood Will Tell
In Tom Wolfe’s America the Northern WASP elite is shallow and cowardly, the most sacrosanct minority groups seethe with ingratitude toward the majority and snarl at one another, culture is dominated by the conspicuous vulgarity of new and ill-gotten wealth, and manners and morals are in a catastrophic nosedive in which the relation of man...
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Imperial Dusk
Whether it ends with a whimper or a bang, the American Empire is ending. WikiLeaks shows that the empire can no longer control the dissemination of information. Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen show it can no longer militarily defeat insurgencies. Brazil, China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and even Bolivia show it can no longer dictate the foreign...
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Rainbow Fascism at Home and Abroad
Some years ago, when I was a consular officer in the once-notorious border city of Tijuana, I spent a few days in Mexico City on my way back from a temporary assignment in Matamoros, another border town just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. At a social function, I was cornered by a typically...
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Of Genes, Vowels, and Violence
Why do the British speak English and not a variety of Welsh? Philip Jenkins, having fallen under the sway of a Harvard medieval historian, Michael McCormick, believes it is because the invading Germans of the fifth and sixth centuries killed all the Celtic-speaking male Britons in what is now England. (See “Once There Was a...
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Society Before Government: Calhoun’s Wisdom
John C. Calhoun was the last great American statesman. A statesman must be something of a prophet—one who has an historical perspective and says what he believes to be true and in the best long-range interest of the people, whether it is popular or not. A politician, which is all we have now, says and...
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Why the Politics of Grievance Is a Winning Strategy for the Democrats
The Democratic Party decided to abandon the working class and become the party of grievance groups generations ago. This is what it is today; there's no going back.
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Lone Star Populism
Out of thin air—or of mythic consciousness—a Texas governor once plucked unhesitatingly the mot juste. The governor, Allan Shivers, who served back in the 1950’s, was indignant over some piece or other of legislative tomfoolery. As he saw it, the whole enterprise was downright “un-Texan.” “Un-Texan.” Right there we had the nub of the matter....
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Change is in the Air
Gov. Rick Perry was a star at the Texas “tea parties,” denouncing Washington and mentioning the s-word—secession—in front of enthusiastic crowds. Perry had already made headlines by calling for Texas to reject Washington’s “stimulus” funds and by backing a resolution in the Texas House of Representatives affirming the state’s sovereignty, before he fired up the...
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No Mere Christian
The cover of your November issue suggests the truth that we, conservatives and especially conservative Christians, are engaged in spiritual warfare. And yet, smack in the middle of that issue, you print an article, “Remembering C. S. Lewis.” The reader is led to believe that this man has been a powerful instrument of truth and has...
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The Facts Behind the Greek Melodrama
Greece is now technically in default, having failed to pay its $1.8 bn monthly installment to the IMF which was due June 30. Contrary to the mainstream media treatment of the story, there will be no ripple effect and no major financial crisis. The Greeks are in dire straits, but their economy (the size of...
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National Enormities
Seed From Madagascar, first published in 1937 and now printed for the third time, is an agrarian memoir. Its author was one of the last rice planters of coastal Carolina, from a family who had been in the business for two centuries. Duncan Heyward details the methodology of rice planting as only one well acquainted...
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Secessionist Fantasies
Throughout the first half of the present year, “secession” became the new watchword for a growing number of people on the American right. Economist Walter Williams has written at least two newspaper columns openly advocating secession. Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute describes secession as “the cutting-edge issue that defines today’s anti-statism,” and...
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The Economic Realities of U.S. Immigration
Mass immigration is changing the fundamental character of America—our culture, institutions, standards, and objectives. Until recently, our society was the envy of the world, so why are these changes even necessary? In addition to the ruling class’s commitment to globalism and multiculturalism, the chief reason that is given in support of open borders is the...
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Dawn Goes Down to Day
Walter Sullivan entered Vanderbilt University in 1941 as an 18-year-old freshman. Two years later, he left during World War II to join the Marine Corps. He returned in 1946 to finish his degree in English and left again in 1947 to pursue an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with Robie Macauley...
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‘War Between the States’
Judge John Roberts can rest assured that his Supreme Court confirmation will go very smoothly, judging from the weak 11th-hour attacks the left is mounting against him in the media. A “shocking” discovery about his record appeared in an August 26 report in the Washington Post that took issue with a phrase Roberts used while...
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Learning From the Fate of the American Indian
The plight of American Indians provides a cautionary tale on what happens when you can’t or won’t stop those who have come to replace you. Middle Americans and conservatives should take notice.
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The Patriot
Italian journalists are forbidden these days from using the Italian word for foreign migrants who have stolen their way by subterfuge into Italy. By controlling which words people can use you can control their thought. It is a thoroughly fascist idea and therefore much adored by the liberal left. You use the law to criminalize...
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Human Comedy
American playwrights handle comedy better than tragedy, at least if this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville is any gauge. Richard Strand’s farce of corporate ladderclimbing, The Death of Zukavsky, and Jane Martin’s broad comedy about lady wrestlers, Cementville, were the two high points of the festival, and even...
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The Cowboys and Wyatt Earp
Arrayed against the Earps in Tombstone was a loose and constantly shifting set of alliances known as “The Cowboys.” Eastern journalists, looking for sensational material, followed the Cowboys’ enemies and rivals in describing them as an organized gang, but no one could quite figure out who the gang’s leader was—Ike Clanton, Bill Brocius, or...
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In the News Again
The Confederate battle flag is in the news again—specifically the one that has flown from the state capitol dome in Columbia, South Carolina, by legislative resolution, every day since 1962. A combination of leaders of civil rights organizations, out-of-state-owned mass media, and big business powers has been trying to get the flag down for years....
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Animal Farm
Martin Fletcher worked seven years as a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the London Times. Before returning to Britain, he packed up a car and hit the road for a five-month journey that started in Virginia and ended in Seattle. After years of writing about politics in Washington, Fletcher “resolved to take time off to explore...
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Silicon Hillbilly
“Breathitt County in east Kentucky is the only county in the United States not to have had selective service enforced during the Second World War. That was because there were so many volunteers.” —Gordon McKinney Since I have long been convinced that the Appalachian South embodies a grounded yet radical alternative to the American mainstream,...
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Shelby Foote, R.I.P.
Shelby Foote, one of the giants of Southern literature, passed away on June 27 at his home in Memphis at the age of 88. An unapologetic Mississippian, Foote never finished college but had much more valuable experiences—he grew up with another world-class Southern writer, Walker Percy, and, as a young man, played tennis on William...
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The Work of Romulus Linney
Beth and John want to break the news in as civilized a manner as possible. After all, they mean to have a pleasant weekend away in their cabin. So, over beers, cheerfully, they tell John’s parents that Beth is leaving him for his best friend—who is smiling in the armchair in the corner, the fifth...
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Ride On, Proud Boys!
Canada has not done much to assure the world it is anything other than a dog in search of a lap. Americans declared independence from England in 1776, but Canadians still haven’t mustered the gumption to cut ties with the mother island 522 years after John Cabot planted the flag on Newfoundland for Henry VII....
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Post-Lebanon II: Constructing Narratives
A friend who has just returned from Lebanon told me that one of the jokes he heard before leaving Beirut was that the Bush administration decided to hire Hezbollah as one of the faith-based organizations that would help in the rebuilding of post-Katrina Louisiana. After all, the Lebanese Shiite group has been assiduously reconstructing the...
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Second Thoughts
These days everyone is having second thoughts—about Vietnam and the 60’s, about American history, about what it means to be a liberal and what it means to be a conservative. Rather than be left out of the rewrite, I too have been having second thoughts about what I did and did not do some 20...
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Eurabian Nights: A Horror Travelogue
Thousands of young Muslims, armed with clubs and sticks and shouting, “Allahu akbar!” riot and force the police to retreat. Windows are smashed; stores are looted; cars are torched. Europeans unlucky or careless enough to be trapped by the mob are viciously attacked, and some are killed. The scene could be Mogadishu in the aftermath...
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The Civil War & Hollywood
The Civil War and Hollywood have been a pair ever since Ken Burns—because of potential profits, of course. But most of these recent pictures, with their emphasis on marketing rather than script or acting, have had more in common with Nintendo than any real war. For the pittance of $500,000, independent filmmaker Robby Henson has...
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Updike’s Grandfather
“Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.” —President James Buchanan, 1860 A poll of American historians, not long ago, chose James Buchanan as “the worst”...
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The War on Terror Ended
Unlike some of my readers, I’m old enough to remember the time, during the American occupation of Baghdad, when this part of the city was known as the Green Zone. It was renamed the Yellow Peace Zone ten years ago, after Iraq joined the China-led Association of South-West Asian Nations (ASWAN). In fact, I’m digital-delivering...
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Anti-Catholics & Elitist Bigots
Will Hillary Clinton clean out the nest of anti-Catholic bigots in her inner circle? Or is anti-Catholicism acceptable in her crowd? In a 2011 email on which Clinton campaign chief John Podesta was copied, John Halpin, a fellow at the Center for American Progress that Podesta founded, trashed Rupert Murdoch for raising his kids in...
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Soothe the Savage Soul
The Autobiography of Mark Twain, recently released, contains a reminiscence, dictated by the author, of a mass public meeting on the night of January 22, 1906, held as a fundraiser on behalf of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute on the occasion of its silver anniversary. According to old Mark’s figures, 3,000 people filled the hall,...
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The Mythology of Mainstream Media
Blacks are moving back to the South by the thousands. This is not supposed to happen, not if you trust the mythology of the mainstream media. How can this be? Affluent black families leaving Chicago to go back home to Mississippi, back to the land of church burnings and redneck sheriffs? But according to a...
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Enemies of the State
The Great Republican Revolution took a brief trip to the benches last summer when committees in both House and Senate paused in their deliberations to burrow into the federal atrocities at Waco and Ruby Ridge. The resulting hearings were by no means as much fun as the O.J. Simpson trial, and the House investigation of...
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This Dog Won’t Hunt
Judge Roy Moore of Etowah County, Alabama, was sued by the ACLU and something called the Alabama Freethought Association (Unitarian-Universalists, I believe they are) back in 1995 for displaying the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall and for beginning each session with a prayer by a Christian clergyman. Over the past year, the affair has...
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Egon Tausch, R.I.P.
Chronicles has lost a longtime writer and friend, Egon Richard Tausch, who passed away on July 27. In Egon was found both brilliance and humility, a rare combination reflecting his Christian faith. He was also a man of fierce loyalty, unmoved by the patricidal demands of the politically correct and faithful to his inheritance as...
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Jefferson, New and Improved
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” —Thomas Jefferson With the exception of the driven and depressed Lincoln, no major figure in American history is, in the final analysis, more enigmatic than Jefferson. Without any exception, none is more complex. There is more to the enigma and complexity than a...
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Man of Letters
Thomas H. Landess, R.I.P. At 80 Tom was still producing every day more than a day’s worth of versatile work. His sudden passing in January struck like an unexpected calamity that portends the end of an era. We lost not only the truest of friends, but a true gentleman, a true man of letters, and...
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Egon Richard Tausch, R.I.P.
Chronicles has lost a longtime writer and friend, Egon Richard Tausch, who passed away on July 27. In Egon was found both brilliance and humility, a rare combination reflecting his Christian faith. He was also a man of fierce loyalty, unmoved by the patricidal demands of the politically correct and faithful to his inheritance as...
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Bury Me With My People
There he was, Abraham Lincoln in a Confederate Army cap, staring out of the page of an old Courier-Journal. I had been looking for something else when I happened upon this collateral descendant of the 16th president, photographed in front of the obelisk that is the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, as he honored...
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Who Can We Shoot?
Who better to kick off a discussion of American populism than Henry James? In The Portrait of a Lady Sockless Hank had Henrietta Stackpole define a “cosmopolite”: “That means he’s a little of everything and not much of any. I must say I think patriotism is like charity—it begins at home.” Likewise, a healthy populism...
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The Novel and the Imperial Self
Preoccupation with the state of the novel was until about 10 years ago one of the major bores of American criticism. From the early 1950’s well into the 60’s, it was scarcely possible to get through a month without reading as a rule in the Sunday book review supplements or the editorial page of Life—that...
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The Mongrel Din
This year marks the centennial of the publication of Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore, a comedy of manners about a wedding cake. Or, rather, it is about an honorable young Charlestonian’s determination to keep faith with a decidedly dishonorable young woman whom he has, in a moment of fatal infatuation, promised to marry—thus, the necessity of...
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Historians in Blunderland
The academy is in an even worse plight than you may imagine. Every so often, surveys reveal just how far America’s professors are out of touch with the political and cultural mainstream. Not only do they overwhelmingly register with the Democratic Party, but most adhere to the straitest sect within that tradition, those who regard...
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Going First Class From Karakorum to Moscow
In August-September 1985, I traveled as a faculty lecturer with a group of Rice University alumni on a journey from Mongolia to Moscow by way of Siberia. The trip began in the village of Khujirt near Genghis-Khan’s capital of Karakorum. From there we went northwest to the God-forsaken Ulan-Ude and the capital of Eastern Siberia,...
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America’s Other War
Americans are understandably concerned about the grave security situation in Iraq. The United States has suffered more than 2,500 fatalities in that conflict and has yet to defeat the insurgency. Indeed, the level of violence in Iraq is increasing, and much of that violence now consists of sectarian bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites. The American...
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Good News
Good News Blues What I started to say, my original impulse, was wrong. Not all wrong, but, anyway, riddled with error and inconsistency. I started to say this: that in many ways, speaking (as we one and all must) from my own limited angle, my assigned point of view, the times we seem to be...
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Slavery’s Ironic Twist of Fate
The historical ignorance of The New York Times’ 1619 Project is difficult to accept. Is the newspaper truly that ignorant or is it disinformation in a propaganda campaign to destroy our country? What I know for certain is most colleges no longer require the U.S. History and Western Civilization courses once considered essential, and that leftist professors...