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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Attack the Symbols
On the day that three members of the punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years’ prison for having interrupted a service in the Christ the Savior cathedral in Moscow in February to sing in front of the altar a blasphemous “prayer”—which included the refrain “Sh-t, sh-t, the Lord’s sh-t”—a group in the Ukrainian...
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The Ruined Tenement
“Every child should be taught to respect the sanctity of his neighbor’s house, garden, fields, and all that is his.” When James Fenimore Cooper insisted upon the inviolability of property, his conviction was as much the fruit of personal experience as it was the expression of his old-fashioned reverence for law and order. Upon returning...
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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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The Third Muslim Invasion
They came in the early eighth century across the Straits of Gibraltar, unleashing terror and carnage across Iberia “like a desolating storm.” They were stopped deep inside today’s France, at Tours, by Charles Martel in 732. They kept attacking Europe throughout the Middle Ages, but their next sustained assault was at her vulnerable southeastern flank,...
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Middle American Aviatrix
Taking Flight: The Nadine Ramsey Story; by Raquel Ramsey and Tricia Aurand; University Press of Kansas, 2020; 312 pp., $29.95 Taking Flight tells the remarkable tale of a courageous woman, Nadine Ramsey, who survived a difficult childhood to become Kansas’ first female commercial pilot, a World War II WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilot), an instructor of male fighter...
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Who and What Is Tearing the US Apart?
In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, former President George W. Bush’s theme was national unity—and how it has been lost over these past 20 years. “In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks,” said Bush, “I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days...
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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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Poster Illegals . . . and the Rest of Them
I have seen this woman and her child more times than I can remember. She is the poster mother for illegal immigration. In article after article on illegal aliens in the mainstream press, sympathetic journalists describe her suffering and hardship in a land where people have too little compassion. Another such poster illegal is the...
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The Princesses and the Pea
The sun is no longer the hot buttered pancake worshipped by the ancient Slavs: It has been reformed into an altogether more Christian, Lenten, and distant figure. The sea is still beautiful, though it too no longer moves with the same pagan frankness, its orgiastic, by turns manic and depressive, barometrically motivated summer feasts and...
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An Historian of Imagination
Forrest McDonald, the great historian of the American founding and early Republic, passed away on January 19 at the age of 89. Born in Orange, Texas, McDonald earned his doctorate from the University of Texas-Austin in 1955, and taught at Brown University, Wayne State University (Michigan), and the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He retired to...
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New Light on the Lakes
We had been dreaming about Andalusia. But plans sometimes must be altered, and so one August evening we found ourselves instead entering into Ulverston, 1,300 miles from Andalusia, and even more distant climatically, culturally, and historically. The Lake District—“England’s Switzerland,” Manchester’s playground, stamping grounds of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter—is a magnet to millions of tourists,...
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The Mark of the Beast
One aspect of America that most impressed Alexis de Tocqueville was how individuals could often accomplish what the most “energetic centralized administration” could not. This ability was well demonstrated, according to Tocqueville, in how efficiently America dealt with crime and criminals: A state police does not exist, and passports are unknown. The criminal police of...
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Storming the Castle Doctrine
Americans have been captivated by the February incident in Sanford, Florida, that resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and the eventual arrest and charging of George Zimmerman. If the case could be resolved today, Trayvon Martin’s family would still be without a son, George Zimmerman—even if exonerated—will never live a normal life, Sanford Police...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Always keen to read travel books about Mexico, I picked up an elderly copy (printed by A. Appleton & Company in 1921) of Viva Mexico! by Charles Macomb Flandrau that I came across in a local bookshop. The book, originally published in 1908, is still available in reprint. I’d never heard of Flandrau, but a...
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The Fruits of Intervention
If we had it to do over, would we send an army into Afghanistan to build a nation? Would we invade Iraq? While these two wars have cost 5,200 dead, a trillion dollars and a divided America facing an endless war, what have we won? Gen. Stanley McChrystal needs 40,000 to 80,000 more troops, or...
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Hungary: Steady as She Goes…
Upon his return from a week-long stay in Budapest, Srdja Trifkovic provides an assessment of Hungary’s current political scene in his weekly roundup of world affairs for Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV network. He also looks at the central European country’s role in EU politics, which occasionally may appear disproportionate to its modest size and resources....
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A Transformational President
Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, portrays Andrew Jackson as one of America’s transformational presidents, including him in the company of Lincoln and the two Roosevelts. He highlights the crucial events that took place during the 17th president’s two terms in office (1829-37), maintaining that three of those incidents effectively define him. The first (and foremost)...
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And Pastures New
Suppose you had to choose the single motion picture that dealt most seriously and challengingly with religious matters. What might it be? Offhand, I can think of a dozen or so possible answers from various countries, and probably most cinema-literate people would agree on at least a common short list. It’s a reasonable bet, though,...
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The Strange Case of the Missing Constitution
Some acute scholar of future times, should there ever be such, will perhaps ponder over the very strange career of the United States Constitution—how it came, without changing a word, to be understood almost universally to mean things it did not mean and to be used for purposes other than, and sometimes the opposite of,...
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On Hometown Steel
I had to chuckle when I read Scott P. Richert’s “This Is Your Hometown” (The Rockford Files, March). Did it never occur to him that manufacturers in his own hometown might be hurt by a higher steel tariff? The trouble is that some conservatives have ceased being conservatives and have become ideologues on the issue...
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Beautiful Afternoons
“None of you has ever seen a gentleman.” —Charles Eliot Norton “You have been writing,” the author’s alter ego tells him at the conclusion of this book, “about the decline not of the West but of the Anglo-American upper class.” As A Thread of Years makes plain, however, the two entities...
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Rights of Clergy
I saw my old friend Browne recently. The subject eventually turned to the politics of religion and the religion of politics. I asked him what he thought about the current Anglican debate over homosexuality, and I wondered aloud if it had anything to do with the obvious unmanliness of the clergy—the final phase of what...
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Church Shopper
Like the French, we Americans live in, to borrow from Claude Polin, a “me-first” society. Each and every man is the measure of all things, his own arbiter of that which is beautiful, true, and of good report. Reared on the Disney principle (You can be whatever you want to be, or, Be true to...
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Serbia Betrayed by Her Leaders
Talking to CKCU 93.1FM in Ottawa, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic considers the extraordinary readiness of the government in Belgrade to compromise Serbia’s national and state interests in order to demonstrate its subservience to the “international community.” A recent batch of Wikileaks cables from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade drastically illustrates the extent of institutionalized political...
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The Letter That Rocked Orange County
Greetings: You are being sent this letter because you were recently registered to vote. If you are a citizen of the United States, we ask that you participate in the democratic process of voting. You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal...
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Is the Interventionists’ Era Over for Good?
President Donald Trump could have been more deft and diplomatic in how he engineered that immediate pullout from northeastern Syria. Yet that withdrawal was as inevitable as were its consequences. A thousand U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies were not going to dominate indefinitely the entire northeast quadrant of a country the size of Syria...
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The Diner’s Refrain
With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th. For almost 40 years, the family-owned restaurant...
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“I’m Liberated; Free at Last!”
Pat Buchanan has taken more punches than Chuck Wepner, hut unlike the Bayonne Bleeder, Buchanan has a good right hook (or is it now a left?) of his own. The year began with Buchanan defending his feisty anti-interventionist manifesto A Republic, Not an Empire: Not since the days of Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright, the one...
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John F. Kennedy: Character and Camelot
John F. Kennedy first gained national attention at the age of 23. His book Why England Slept, published in 1940, became a best-seller and earned the new Harvard graduate plaudits as a man of learning and thoughtfulness. Kennedy was heard from again in the summer of 1944 when the New York Times carried a front-page...
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Nationalism Looking Pretty Good
If conservatives carried revolvers, they’d probably reach for them at the sound of the word “nationalism.” Perhaps it’s just as well they don’t carry revolvers, since nationalism usually makes its appearance armed with considerably bigger guns. In the Europe of Metternich and Castlereagh, nationalism was the vehicle for the revolutionary destruction of dynastic and aristocratic...
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The Republican Party’s Welfare Queens
Republicans routinely portray themselves as fiscal guardians. In truth, they, like the Democrats, are irresponsible wastrels. Outlays are up by one third under President George W. Bush, making him the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson. As the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski observes, “Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still...
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The Puritan Legacy Birthed the American Creed
Right-wing critics of Christianity often quote from The Hour of Decision, the last work of a once widely read German historian of philosophy, Oswald Spengler. This short, graphically composed book was published in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Although it has never been proven, there is a suspicion that the Nazi government disposed...
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Blacks on Abortion
The U.S. black population has been disproportionately devastated by the practice of abortion, yet many black leaders have been cajoled into dutifully mouthing the abortion politics of their white leftist overlords.
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Unraveling the Remnant
“Whatever the road to power, that is the road which will be trod.” —Edmund Burke For years, or at least for that stretch of time between the heady days of Theodore Roosevelt and the hapless days of Jimmy Carter, something called the Eastern establishment benevolently ruled over America. For years, or at least between the...
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Not to Worry
Me seemes the world is runne quite out of sqaureFrom the first point of his appointed sourse,And being once amisse, growes daily wourse and wourse.—Spenser, The Faerie Queene It looks like the economy is going bad, but don’t worry. Congress will make sure the bankers and speculators don’t suffer. Could military failure in Iraq have...
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Wymyn Don’t Wyn
The girly-men at the New York Times and a perpetually aggrieved feminist you’ve never heard of finally got what they wanted. In August, Augusta National Country Club, home of the storied Masters Tournament, finally admitted two women: Condoleezza Rice, a neocon secretary of state under President George W. Bush, and the fetching Darla Moore, a...
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Pandora’s Box
Globalization is remaking the world in ways that will profoundly affect how people do business, govern themselves, and even make war. We may debate what the driving force behind globalization is—capitalism or technology, for example—but there is no doubt that capital goods, services, people, and ideas cross borders with increasing speed, frequency, and ease. Actions...
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A New Agrarian Primer
Most people think agrarianism is synonymous with farming. As a result, agrarian thinkers spend much of their time defending what they really mean—namely, that agrarianism is not so much about agriculture as it is an integrated life in which farming plays a central or at least respectable role. Eric Freyfogle wisely avoids this pitfall and...
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Regional Anthem
A century ago, the American Midwest was in the ascendant, widely acknowledged as the nation’s vital Heartland, a place characterized by a morally strong and independent populace, a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth in land (the classic 160 acre family farm), and true democratic values. The print media of the day celebrated its distinctive farm...
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Jihad’s Enablers
Almost 80 years ago, Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his time, La Trahison des Clercs. The “scribes” in question are those who traffic in words and ideas. For generations before the 20th century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite made sure that “humanity did evil, but honored good.”...
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Polemics & Exchanges: December 2024
Chronicles readers comment upon and critique recent pieces by Geoff Shepard and Jeremy Carl.
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The Profiteering Migrant-Industrial Complex
Migrants complain about rotten food. The worst rot is inside the Adams administration's handling of this emergency.
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No Peace for Iraq
From Operation Desert Storm, unleashed against Iraq by President George Bush, up to the present moment, the attack on Iraq has been relentless. As I write, a report of a U.S. sortie over Iraqi skies and a clash with Iraqi anti-aircraft guns is hitting the wires—yet another skirmish in the continuous low-level warfare that has...
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Iraq as “Intelligence Failure”: We Told You So
“W,” a.k.a. “our Commander in Chief,” is apparently even more blindly stubborn and willfully ignorant than I had thought. As of this writing (December 2006), he is still distancing himself from the Iraq Study Group’s efforts to provide him cover for a withdrawal from the Middle East morass he has drawn us into. Bush Senior,...
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Forgetting Colin Kaepernick
Colin Kaepernick, the former star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, made the decision during the 2016 NFL preseason to kneel during the playing of the National Anthem. Other athletes quickly followed suit, some by kneeling, others by raising a fist to protest “racial injustice” in America. Outrage predictably followed, with opinion polls suggesting that...
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The Genuine Article
Linda Hasselstrom is a friend of mine, although we don’t write often or know each other well. I visited her South Dakota ranch, between the Black HOls and the Badlands, only once, six years ago, at which time I had the unwitting bad manners to ask her how much land she owned. It was an...
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We’re All Sikhs Now
The shooting of Sikhs at a temple in Milwaukee is generating the usual blather about senseless violence, the paranoid racialist right, and the patriotism of Sikh immigrants. I finally heard, this morning, the inevitable, “Today, we are all Sikhs.” Excuse me, but no, I am not now and shall never be a Sikh. Sikhs,...
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Secularism and the Mosque Flap
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, ...
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One City, Three Faiths
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest book is an ambitious yet incomplete survey of Jerusalem’s history. It begins with the Exodus from Egypt and concludes with the reunification of the Holy City under Israeli rule in 1967. Unlike the author’s magisterial biographies of Stalin, which demonstrated an excellent knowledge of the relevant material and brought to light...