History, in the end, remembers a society more by its culture than by its politics. If a modern American knows little about the dramatists and poets and sculptors of ancient Greece or Rome, he knows even less about their political leaders. The point is well put in an anecdote told in the Soviet Union: a...
Dramatic conversions happen. F.F. Bruce, the noted New Testament scholar, is not alone in insisting that no one can understand Paul of Tarsus without considering his experience on the road to Damascus. And whether you believe, as Christians do, that he there met the resurrected Christ or not, all admit that he was not the...
Normality is a fragile concept, and that observation is nowhere more true than in sexual matters. In making that point, I am not questioning the existence of absolute moral standards—quite the contrary. Rather, I am suggesting that, once a society loses its religious moorings, it drifts into startling novelties with a haste even more vertiginous...
In 1865, six years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, Francis Galton wrote: If talented men were mated with talented women, of the same mental and physical characters as themselves . . . we might produce a highly bred human race . . . If we divided the rising generation...
In 1968, George Wallace said that there wasn’t a “dime worth’s of difference” between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Implicit there was the suggestion that Americans were not satisfied with echoes and preferred choices. As it happens, Wallace was the last third-party presidential candidate to win Electoral College votes. Besides 14 percent of the popular...
Western societies have given up on reasoned deliberation and discourse, capitulating instead to mobocracy and the crass flexing of raw power.
American Views: The North The Lord made use of my Pen to write many Books for the advancement of His Kingdome; Yea, and had strangely encouraged and fortified my Serviceableness, by such Marks of Respect from other Parts of the World, as no Person in America has ever yett received before me. —Cotton Mather, first...
I live in flag country. Here in east-central Illinois, amid the corn and soybean fields, the whistle-stop towns on their grid of well-maintained blacktops, the Stars and Stripes are as common as blue jeans. The banner flutters from angled rods on the pillars of wraparound porches, flies from big poles in front of white two-story...
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” wrote Honoré de Balzac in a cynical sentiment that Mario Puzo chose as the epigraph of The Godfather. The line at once establishes the metaphor that dominates the book as well as the films and carries us into the essentially Machiavellian worldview that pervades them and to...
Just before the Minnesota caucuses, one of the nation’s ten or so largest Reform Jewish synagogues, Minneapolis’s Temple Israel, cosponsored a political speech by Kitty Dukakis at the synagogue’s regular Friday evening sabbath service. Temple Israel is typical of many synagogues around the country where liberal Democrats are regularly endorsed from the pulpit. The fondness...
History may be a series of more or less contingent events, whose only connection to the preceding or following ones is that men react to what others do. Such events are basically disjointed because each one depends on the more or less unpredictable behavior of those men who are able to attract enough followers to...
Kenneth McDonald’s article (“The French Revolution in Canada,” April) illustrates why Quebec may secede from Canada. The legal mechanisms have been explained, but the political dynamics need to be understood. First, McDonald complains that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (in Sections 16-22 of the Constitution Act of 1982) has entrenched French and English...
Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, by Ellen Vaughn (B&H Books; 320 pp., $24.99). This is the official biography of the wife of famed missionary martyr Jim Elliot, who was killed along with four other missionaries while attempting to bring the Gospel to a group of savage natives in the South American jungle during the mid-1950s. Elliot was...
It has long been self-evident that Henry James was thoroughly apolitical in any practical sense of the term. He did not involve himself in public affairs as such and hardly took more than passing notice of the Civil War, even though his two younger brothers, Wilkinson and Robertson James, served with distinguished records in the...
My summer vacation along Lake Superior’s western shore into Canada took place just before the anniversary of a milestone, although it was marked by no celebrations or remembrances, and nobody I saw on mv quick stay in Thunder Bay showed any sign of acknowledging it. The anniversary was not the subject of conversation in the...
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again. –Mark Twain Just in case you have not heard, we are in the midst of a Culture War. Death by Journalism? is a battle report from the front lines. The Last Confederate Flag and Bedford: A...
General Pierre-Marie Gallois, who died on August 23 in Paris at the age of 99, will be remembered primarily as the architect of France’s nuclear deterrence doctrine in the 1950s. He was the last in a long line of European geopolitical thinkers—from Clausewitz and Jomini to Liddell Hart and Guderian—who have combined superbly honed analytical...
Since the end of the Cold War American foreign policy has been incoherent. The Clinton administration has sent U.S. troops under U.N. authority to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti; tried to broker peace talks in Northern Ireland and the Middle East; bombed Iraq; ordered American warships to the Taiwan Straits; and antagonized China and Russia—while simultaneously...
Whenever the president of the Rockford Institute and I chat about movies, the conversation always runs into the brick wall of the Japanese cinema. I especially like the films of one of its acknowledged masters, Yasujiro Ozu, whose later movies are his best-known in the West, especially Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959). “Ach,...
Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil’s coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree. The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier...
For the last four years, change has been in the air in Spain, following the election of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. And thanks to his reelection in March of this year, we can look forward to more of the same. There have been abrupt changes to...
The Fox Theatre—a grand movie palace of Detroit’s 1920’s, which is now used primarily as a venue for acts that won’t fill an arena—contained a chronologically mixed crowd in mid-March. Paul Young was in concert. Young, a slightly chubby, baby-faced British singer (he appears, to borrow a line from Elvis Costello, “teddy-bear tender and tragically...
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
I have often complained that the self-styled progressive of our time never tells us where he wants to go. Progress implies a destination, and rest—sweet and blessed rest—once you have arrived. But that would imply a natural human order to return to, or to attain. And then what? Then what? The progressive sweats. He...
Senator Eugene McCarthy is America’s senior statesman without a party. An Irish-German Minnesota Catholic who left the seminary for academe, McCarthy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 and the Senate in 1958. He was the link between the Old Progressives of the Upper Midwest and the postwar liberals; as time goes by,...
During oral argument on the cases challenging the definition of marriage upheld by the voters in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked, “I don’t know how to count the decimals when he talk about millennia. The definition [of marriage] has been with us for millennia. And it’s very difficult for the court...
The conventional wisdom is simple: when there is an uninspiring incumbent and a lackluster challenger, the people will opt for the incumbent. The formula is unsatisfactory in this case, however. Obama was not just any incumbent. He is the embodiment of an anti-America–culturally, spiritually and morally—that is hell-bent on destroying the surviving vestiges of...
Gun rights activist Dana Loesch recently complained that she had been denied the right to respond to her critics on Twitter, according to a story reported in the New York Post. Unlike her adversaries, who are free to swing away at her, Loesch is not allowed to use Twitter’s fact-checking platform to correct their misstatements. Loesch...
People don’t like it when you mess with their heritage. The Bolsheviks tried to destroy Russian nationalism, in particular massacring Russian Orthodox bishops, priests and nuns. But when Hitler invaded, not enough Russians fought for Marx, Lenin and dialectical materialism. So Stalin allowed Metropolitan Bishop Sergius to be elected patriarch, brought some of the surviving...
Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans want stricter controls on immigration. Yet it should be clear that our ruling class is not going to impose stricter controls or even enforce its own laws. What does this mean? The first thing to note is that immigrants, as such, are not the problem....
The public discourse in both hemispheres seems to be legitimizing the coming of World War III. These are interesting—if not terrifying—times.
The Work of Atget: The Ancient Re gime; The Museum of Modern Art; New York. Bill Harris: New York at Night; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Robert Freson: The Taste of France; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Ansel Adams: Examples; New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown; Boston. William Manchester: One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering...
My definition of liberal education as the education of liberals no longer sounds provocative. Liberalism, having failed and failed disastrously in all its political experiments from church disestablishment to women’s suffrage to food stamps, still reigns triumphant, with hardly a rival, in the empty corridors of the Western mind. How failed? The church is disestablished,...
“Meet you at Peace Cross.” In northwest D.C. in the 1950s, that was an often-heard comment among high schoolers headed for Ocean City. The Peace Cross, in Bladensburg, Maryland, was a 40-feet concrete memorial to the 49 sons of Prince George’s County lost in the Great War. Paid for by county families and the American...
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.
German movies of the 1920's receive a remarkably poor press in conservative circles. Some critics regard them as little more than obvious reflections of Weimar decadence, as some of the lesser films doubtless are. Sometimes even the ubiquitous use of expressionist technique is presented as definitive proof that the mental ...
Garry Wills identifies himself as a Christian. He says he accepts the creeds, along with prayer, divine providence, the Gospels, the Eucharist, and the Mystical Body of Christ as the body of all believers. He thinks it a bad thing that “article by article, parts of the Creed are fading from some churches.” He also...
Decades provide a useful, if not infallible, structure for organizing and understanding our historical experience. However frayed and disputed their limits, terms like “the twenties,” or “the eighties” each conjure their particular images and memories. Whatever we call the decade we have just completed—the twenty-teens?—it is one with landmarks arguably as important as any in...
T.S. Eliot notwithstanding, April is almost certainly not the crudest month. For the tens of millions of urban dwellers along the Eastern Seaboard who had to sweat it out this summer in conditions of infernal heat, as for the millions of others who watched despairingly as their wheat stems and cornstalks wilted across the parched...
Q magazine once regularly asked rock musicians the question, “How do you react when you see a nun?” Bryan Adams replied that he had the highest respect for nuns and thus reacted accordingly. He added that he had recently learned that nuns no longer wore their traditional habits, and that he was distressed by this change. ...
Climate ideology derives its power from its resemblance to religion. But it's a poor substitute for a real faith.
Ten years ago, federal district judge Leonard B. Sand ordered the city of Yonkers, New York, to integrate its public schools. Sand accused the city of 40 years of discrimination by concentrating public housing projects in southwest Yonkers. To comply with Sand’s ruling, many neighborhood schools closed their doors as busing became de rigueur. Parents...
How much would you pay for a library card? In Rockford, if you are not a resident, you have to pay $140 per year for the privilege of using the Rockford Public Library system. With six branches scattered throughout the city and ...
Just after 1 a.m. on July 22, 2019, Tyler Wingate, a 24-year-old white male, was driving on Livernois in Detroit when Lawrence Davis, a 24-year-old black male, bumped into him. The two pulled into a gas station to resolve the minor fender bender. Both got out of their cars. Wingate took one step when Davis...
A hundred years from now historians, if they are still permitted to research and write, will argue about when the United States started down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. Many Southern historians believe it began with the erosion of the U.S. Constitution occasioned by President Lincoln’s disregard of that document and by the Reconstruction Era....
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55, more than 3-1, to provide new guidance for receiving Holy Communion. Behind the decision? Bishops’ alarm that the public religious practice of President Joe Biden is conveying a heretical message to the faithful and the nation. At Sunday Mass, Biden regularly receives Communion. Yet he...
The standard opinion has it that, ever since they set foot on the new continent, the English settlers felt they were one people, Englishmen united by their common language, common origins, common enemies, so that it was only natural that their independence, once achieved, should lead them to the framing of one new national body,...
“Jeff Sachs is like the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, moving from cup to cup. He can never return to any country that he advised, since they all hate him. It happened in Latin America, in Slovenia, in Poland, a few of the Baltic States, and it was the same in Russia. They maintain...
“Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused. “ —Rev. Sydney Smith The rarest entity in American writing is the novelist with ideas—that is to say, one who is capable of writing the ideological novel. Of course, the term is enough to put a chill on what is in fact the...
Downtown Montreal was full of revelers last March 10. Despite subzero temperatures, they hit the streets, some wearing little more than a smile. But each had a maple leaf somewhere, on a flag, a piece of clothing, a sign, or even in place of the proverbial fig leaf. Such was the scene described by Macleans...