[I]n populous Egypt they fatten up many bookish pedants who quarrel unceasingly in the Muses’ birdcage.” —Timon of Phlius, 230 B.C. For almost as long as there have been literary works, there have been literary canons, largely established by bookish pedants who do, indeed, “quarrel unceasingly.” The quarreling began early in the third century B.C....
Luminary paleoconservative, Chronicles' own Sam Francis, foresaw how the vast managerial state would increase its stranglehold over its citizen-subjects. But there are signs that Leviathan is losing its grip.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the standard of respectability in politics has been clear. Respectable politicians are those who believe in international trade agreements, sing the praises of mass immigration, and insist that military force should be used to advance some abstract notion like democracy—whether under the auspices of the United Nations...
Twenty years have come and gone since Congress passed, and President Reagan signed into law, a bill creating a federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and, in those years, the holiday has become little more than yet another session in the perennial ritual of mass production and consumption that American public festivals generally celebrate. ...
The opening sentence of Herodotus’ Histories, which recount the wars fought between Greece and Persia in the early fifth century B.C., unrolls like a long musical phrase rising to its Homeric crescendo and then dying away into momentary quiet: Herodotus of Halicarnassus here publishes the results of his research, in order that the actions performed...
“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...
Twenty-eight years ago, in the summer of 1980, I moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, to take a job teaching English and journalism at a university there. The job ended just as soon as it began: On the first day of classes, the university, a private institution with connections to the country’s thriving neofascist movement and, thence,...
Americans, it has been observed, have little or no strategic sense. Strategy, as any schoolboy used to know, comes from a Greek word meaning “generalship” in the broad sense of the art of “projecting and directing” (OED) a campaign as opposed to the tactical abilities needed to marshal men on the battlefield. The American can-do...
Attorney General Merrick Garland recently set his sights on what the federal government considers one of the gravest threats to the political order: parents angry with the promotion of transgender ideology and critical race theory in public schools. “In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence...
If radical Afrocentrists have their way, soon all schoolchildren will learn—as some are now learning—a version of ancient Mediterranean history that gives credit for the Greek achievement to the ancient Egyptians. The Afrocentrists contend that what most people have learned about the origins of Western civilization is untrue. According to them, the ancient history we...
One of the many sociological uses of Hollywood is its dramatic availability when things go wrong in America. Michael Satchell, for instance, has raised the question in Parade of whether the movies by too often glamorizing drugs and alcohol encourage their use among young people. He cites Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin,...
I disagree with Stephen B. Presser’s statement (The 225th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: A Chronicles Roundtable, June 2001) that the Declaration of Independence is not part of the U.S. Constitution. True, as the professor says, the Declaration was not adopted by conventions in the 13 states in the manner prescribed in the seventh...
Biden's presidency is marked by multiple domestic failures. Those combined with his age and declining cognitive abilities make a second term of his presidency highly unlikely.
Some people love to go to Washington. The sight of so much power and wealth is exhilarating, especially for young conservative writers who discover that their names are recognized on the Hill. For many, however, the reaction is just the reverse. Within a few hours they are mulling over certain scriptural passages in Eliot—”Oh my...
Our mainstream media largely ignored it, the world media did not. Ascending the stairs of Air Force One on Friday, to fly to Georgia, President Joe Biden slipped and stumbled. Getting up, he slipped again and then fell. The scene was jolting and disquieting. Adversaries abroad will use it as a metaphor for the decline...
Ordinary people, we are told, ordinarily speak in cliches, bromides, and dotty banalities, and it is the task of the literary artist, of the playwright in particular, to give them expressive and convincing words. This is the practice of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, of Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard. The success of heightened language upon the...
Jackson Hole is burning up. Gerry Spence had to evacuate his ranch ahead of the wildfires, and Dick Cheney could be next. Here above timberline in the Snowy Range of the Medicine Bow Mountains, 400 miles to the southeast, the breeze is cool, the grass is fresh and green, and the ponds of standing water...
Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...
The term “political religion” designates the infusion of political beliefs with religious significance. Political religions involve grand plans to transform society into a new sacral order unrelated to how humans have lived beforehand. Political religions also typically divide people into the righteous and the evil based on whether they conform to its transformational vision. They...
A successful national leader (“good” or “bad”) is able to redefine the terms of what is politically possible in accordance with his values, and to produce durable desired outcomes. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan come to mind at home, and Churchill, De Gaulle, and Deng Xiaoping abroad. Very few are able to effect a profound, long-lasting...
A year ago, the University of Maryland held a special screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), followed by a two-hour discussion of the film led by representatives of the departments of history, English, philosophy, and communications. John Ford would have been publicly contemptuous of this attention from the egghead professors. In private, he probably...
Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A...
“Studying” philanthropy is a new academic enterprise, and one riven by various interests. Though a growing camp of scholars is following grant money, their studies, even when critical, generally confirm the conventional wisdom of foundation leaders. As a permanent supplicant, the academy approaches organized philanthropy with either a tugged forelock or an upraised list. Ellen...
Braveheart Produced by Mel Gibson Directed by Mel Gibson Screenplay by Randall Wallace Released by Paramount Pictures In recent films, “angry white males” are generally portrayed as psychopaths, and it is, therefore, almost astonishing that even a good conservative like Mel Gibson should have chosen to make a movie on the life of William Wallace....
“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...
August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That Changed the World Forever, by Bruno Cabanes; translated by Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 230 pp., $27.50). This superb and marvelously readable work of social and political history, drawn from a wide variety of personal and official documents and records, recounts the...
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious...
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
Is President Donald Trump about to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war? For that is what he and his advisers seem to be signaling. Last week, Trump said of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s campaign to recapture the last stronghold of the rebellion, Idlib province: “If it’s a slaughter, the world is going to get...
Copperhead Produced by Swordspoint Productions Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell Screenplay by Bill Kauffman Distributed by Brainstorm Media What makes a good war story? Cannons, bombs, bloody bodies, and bounding heroes? Stephen Crane’s short story “An Episode of War” demonstrates it can be achieved by other means. It fully registers the madness, horror, and folly...
These days, you don't have to leave your house to do much of anything—and fewer people do. That’s probably why so many Millennials are pining for a simpler time.
High Country News, the environmentalist newspaper founded by Tom Bell, a former rancher, in Lander, Wyoming, in 1970 turned 25 this year, and since the weekend of September 8 was forecast to be a fine one I decided to attend the anniversary celebration. HCN has been based for about a decade or so in Paonia,...
Iraqi Christians are paying the price of the Bush administration’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iranian Revolution and the rising influence of militant Islam have already forced the secular Iraqi dictatorship to make concessions to proponents of Iraq’s Islamicization, but the threat of a U.S. attack, together with a widespread feeling in the Arab...
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
Our elite political class has manipulated illegal immigration to entrench themselves in power and disenfranchise Americans.
Emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud.
Clyde Wilson’s View in the April issue (“Society Precedes Government: Two Counterrevolutions”) was excellent. A New England “Yankee” (my great-grandfather was captured and put in Libby Prison during the war) and a Bunyanesque Calvinist at that (I might as well completely alienate myself from your editorial staff while I’m at it), I attended school in...
The Great American Jerk is a chameleon who changes colors according to circumstances, from obsequious to bullying, from pious to lewd. He may, on some occasions, display buck-waving generosity and on others check-splitting stinginess, but underneath there is always the baby boy or girl who wants what he or she wants, whether it is money,...
“It’s a new day, and a new way!” exulted Adelaide Sanford on television in early 1985. A black supremacist and member of the New York City Board of Education, Sanford was the candidate for schools chancellor of the Reverend Al Sharpton and “activist attorneys” Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason (both of whom have since...
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
I grew up in the Volunteer State of Tennessee, so called because of its citizens’ enthusiastic response to the First Mexican War. Maybe growing up there colors my view that wars ought to be fought by folks who want to fight them-and it certainly in creases my estimate of the number of young men who...
Traditional Christians should unite against the satanic vision of liberal-democratic nirvana, which continually threatens the West.
As some of you may have heard, the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, June 19 to win the NBA Championship, making the Cavs the first Cleveland team to win a major sports championship since Jim Brown and Frank Ryan and Gary Collins and the rest of the Cleveland Browns defeated the...
A rare crack in the fortified wall of the Bush administration’s diplomatic obstinacy seemed to appear as U.S. diplomats sat down in March with their Iranian and Syrian counterparts to discuss stability in Iraq. Foreign-policy realists of both parties hailed the move as a potential breakthrough: Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) offered a characteristically self-righteous lecture,...
Years ago, a Christian evangelist friend of mine complained about doing the Lord’s work in the South. Everyone is a Christian there, he lamented, whether or not they really are one. His point was well taken. It is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is a problem not just for Christian evangelists...
The first four Republican contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—produced record turnouts. While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out...
When the mode of music changes, Plato remarked, the walls of the city shake. When the mode of music changed back in the 1950’s, the denizens of Plato’s Pad—sorry, but there are so few opportunities to get in an allusion to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis these days—and their peers saw more fingers than...
Since the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chief propagandist for the emerging American colonies the United States has been subject to invasion by British journalists. They come for a variety of reasons. Tired of tax collecting in England, Tom Paine came to start anew, and if doing so involved the common sense...
According to an article in Forbes (November 16, 2016), “Mexico aside, [Latin America] barely featured at all in the presidential campaign. This overall situation will largely remain the same under the Trump administration.” The first sentence is a truism (when has Latin America, as such, ever “featured” in a U.S. presidential election?), and the second...
On the night train from Kiev to Simferopol I share a compartment with Volodymyr Prytula, a Crimean journalist. Called “Vova” by his friends, this slender man with a Zhivagoesque mustache is my sole contact in the Crimea. He speaks little English, I no Ukrainian or Russian, but we communicate with the help of Ukrainian red...