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...
2673 search results for: Southern%252525252525252BHeritage
Post
Why Has the Land Turned on Me?
I have showered more love on this old 1940’s farmhouse than on any person living. Certainly, I’ve spent more money on it than I care to count. But more than the house itself—an undistinguished structure made interesting only by my renovation—it’s the land I fell in love with. The way my foot sinks into the...
Post
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. ...
Post
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...
Post
To Secede or Succeed?
Over a decade ago, Don Livingston organized a Liberty Fund Colloquium in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the sessions examined whether any movement toward political decentralization was possible without at least the threat of secession to back it up. On that subject, most of the attendees agreed: Whether one regards secession as good in itself,...
Post
Onward and Upward
Like the Roman cursus honorum, the ascending path of neoconservative success is carefully prescribed. Instead of the progress from aedile to consul, however, the journey leads through hackwork up to the glories of publishing with Basic Books, appearing on TV talk shows, and gracing the mastheads of neocon magazines. David Frum managed to move through...
Post
Fake Indians
Promoting oneself as an American Indian, even when it's not true, can be a career enhancer ... until the lie is exposed.
Post
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...
Post
The Folly of Propositional Democracy
California continues its essential role as the proving ground for bad ideas. The latest is the demolition of “popular” initiatives to decide important issues. Of the 11 initiatives on the ballot last November in the Golden State, 8 were funded primarily by multimillionaires, according to MapLight, which tracks election funding. And Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
Thoughts on Brown People
A nine-year-old boy in Phoenix earned a three-day suspension from the Abraham Lincoln Traditional School for committing a “hate crime,” reports the Arizona Republic. The boy reportedly used the phrase “brown people” while arguing with another student. He was then questioned by a detention-room officer—the mother of the offended “brown person”—who demanded to know “why...
Post
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 ...
Post
Letter From South Africa
I spent March 1985 in South Africa as a guest of several South African universities. I lectured to academic audiences, traveled in the rural areas of Transvaal and the Cape Province, spent a day in Soweto, visited the Crossroads slum in Cape Town and the Black township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. I talked to Black ser vants and Black leaders,...
Post
The Making of a Banana Republic
Now that the Rubicon has been crossed and we have entered a world in which politicians attempt to not merely defeat their opposition at the ballot box but also prosecute and incarcerate them, there is no going back.
Post
A Coming Era of Civil Disobedience?
The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has ordered a monument of the Ten Commandments removed from the Capitol. Calling the Commandments “religious in nature and an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths,” the court said the monument must go. Gov. Mary Fallin has refused. And Oklahoma lawmakers instead have filed legislation...
Post
Is ‘Our Democracy’ Failing Our Country?
Millions of Americans are coming to see our incumbent regime, "our democracy," as failing in its foremost duty—to protect and defend our country from enemies foreign and domestic.
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
Palm and Pine
David Gilmour’s witty and elegant, original and useful book chronicles “Kipling’s political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline.” Sympathetic yet aware of Kipling’s faults, Gilmour shows that his ideas were more subtle than those of a crude...
Post
The German Swindle
To walk along a narrow ridge or cliff path, German-speakers will tell you, you have to be schwindelfrei. The French word vertige exists in English (vertigo), but we would be more likely to say “dizziness.” The German word is for vertige or dizziness der Schwindel, but Schwindel also can mean what it does in English—swindle....
Post
The Media Hype Over Civil War
Sputnik News carried a live interview on Jan. 25 with Srdja Trifkovic on the social and political climate in the United States in the aftermath of President Joseph Biden’s inauguration. We bring you Dr. Trifkovic’s translation of some key segments of that interview. Q: [At 7 min. 55 sec.] How seriously should we take the warnings that America...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
One, Two, Many Colombias
Great Britain’s decision to transfer control of Hong Kong to Communist China by 1997 has spurred a flight from the colony. Despite reassurances from Beijing, money is flowing out of Hong Kong at an accelerating rate. Among those who are moving their assets are the Chinese crime syndicates—the Triads. While they are expanding their criminal...
Post
Done Away With
The boy choir of Duke University has been done away with, apparently at the behest of one of the campus ministers, a woman who had never even attended any of the services at which the choir performed but who complained that the group was one of the “subtle and not so subtle vestiges of male...
Post
Chuck Older
Recently, a younger acquaintance of mine, an actor on stage and screen, mentioned with disgust the circus-like atmosphere that pervaded the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife. I noted that early on in the trial, Judge Lance Ito simply lost control of the proceedings, and the “Dream Team” of defense attorneys...
Post
Is Biden Prepared to Lose Afghanistan?
Is President Joe Biden prepared to preside over the worst U.S. strategic defeat since the fall of Saigon in 1975? For that may be what’s at stake if Biden follows through on the 2020 peace deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1—just two months from now. ...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
Lady and the Vamp
“No womman of no clerk is praised.” —Chaucer An old-fashioned historian can be forgiven for feeling a touch of empathy for the bewildered Egyptians upon whom Yahweh emptied the vessels of wrath some 3,500 years ago. The Hebrews’ God plagued the Egyptians for a matter of days, but the stern Minerva who reigns over academe...
Post
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,...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
False Narratives Driving America’s Immigration Policies
Before any serious work can be done to correct America’s border policy failures, we must dispel the false narratives about immigration that too many Americans still accept as fact.
Post
Liberals’ Dilemma: Immigration or Israel?
American internationalism was shaped by the national origins of Americans themselves, so it’s not surprising it shifts with shifts in those origins.
Post
Faith and Freud in the Bayou
A comic religious novel, North Gladiola treats the same region of southeast Louisiana and some of the same characters that James Wilcox introduced to his readers in his first novel, Modern Baptists (Doubleday, 1983). The protagonist of the first novel, bumbling Mr. Pickens, plays a minor role in the second, as do meddling Donna Lee...
Post
The Tyranny of Non-Thought
The sullen self-righteousness of the progressive left (i.e., “We’re right, and the rest of you can go to the hot place!”) glows on college campuses everywhere but also in big cities—such as my beloved New Orleans, come to think of it: a locality embroiled in useless controversy over the removal of four Confederate-themed statues. City...
Post
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...
Post
Scare Quotes
A tactic the left uses to inspire loathing for conservatives is repeating something a conservative or even nominal Republican says, and then slapping scare quotes around it. That supposedly shows that whatever the conservative said is self-evidently false, and worse, “hateful.” It might run something like this: “Tea Party Senator says ‘Earth revolves around Sun.’”...
Post
Lessons From France
On the French nightly news for Monday, June 12, the anchor’s face was so grim that, at first, I thought the French forces in Bosnia had suffered serious losses. But, no, he was reporting on the French municipal elections, the first round of voting for mayors of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. The...
Post
Entrepreneurs and Bureaucrats
Despite his Viennese birth, Peter Drucker enjoys a reputation as a leading American social analyst, particularly on industrial and economic issues. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker interprets U.S. management theory and practice within the framework of the free market economy and the open society, as he seeks to define entrepreneurship as “a craft” essential for...
Post
Carolina, I Hardly Know You
In the primary of June 10, the Republican voters of South Carolina gave a comfortable victory to Lindsay Graham, one of the most notorious and repulsive of the current “invade the world, invite the world” brand of U.S. Senators. Friends from elsewhere have questioned me repeatedly: how could this happen in such a traditionally conservative...
Post
Has the West the Will to Survive?
“If you’re . . . pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart, that’s a tough dilemma. . . . I’d rather be strong.” So said President Donald Trump, on issuing his order halting the separation of children from parents...
Post
The Era of Our Discontent
In scientific culture, every subject is accepted as a legitimate one for quantifiable study, including subjects no wise man would venture to approach in such a manner. Hence academic researchers, boldly rushing in where mystics and poets fear to tread, feel encouraged to establish themselves as experts in matters to which the concept of expertise...
Post
On Diversity
To make an urgent point—the corruption of the representation of history in film by the anachronistic distortions of contemporary politics—Roger McGrath, in his fine and well-argued analysis (“Celluloid Nation,” March), at the outset and at the end uses language that suggests that he holds non-Christians are un-American, the practice of religions other than Christianity marking...
Post
Foreigners No More
They are coming: on trains, on buses, on foot, all the way from Central America, where they meet up with smugglers who take them across our nonexistent border. This has been happening for decades, but there’s one big difference in the recent wave of illegal immigration: These are children, many under ten years of age—50,000...
Post
It’s 2028, and All Is Well
Thursday, June 1—My final American Interest was published today in Chronicles. In the aftermath of the Second Revolution, the column has outlived its purpose. Pontificating on the evils of one-worldism, empire, global hegemony, propositional nationhood, jihadist infiltration, foreign interventionism, and “nation-building” was a necessary and often frustrating task, back in the awful days of George...
Post
Election Year Smoke and Mirrors Magic from the Left
A notable decline in the antics of far-left oddballs suggests they’ve received an order from on high to cool it.
Post
How to Write a Novel
Cormac McCarthy is so fine a writer-for my money the best novelist in America today-that he and his work must be accepted pretty much on their own terms. Criticism therefore, in the case of Mr. McCarthy, is reducible largely to questions of taste. He has published now six novels, all of them distinguished for reality...