At last, the Tacoma Public Schools’ board has recognized the obvious educational potential of the Prince of Darkness. For years, this hopelessly hidebound and reactionary institution has restricted itself to providing what it calls “a welcoming, nurturing environment [to] . . . provide the knowledge and skills for students to become respectful, responsible life-long learners...
[What follows is a meditation on T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.” All indented quotations, with apologies to their author, are taken from Eliot.] What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from . . . The first step,...
England abolished capital punishment in the mid-1960’s when few capital crimes were committed there, and corporal punishment was abolished long before that. Sometimes when I am in Manhattan, reading of the constant homicides there, I recall the four “Mayfair Playboys” of my not-so-distant youth who were sentenced to the “cat” in two doses of eight...
Such was my pro-Israel ardor back in 1967, I actually put my name down as a volunteer soldier in the Six-Day War. I was living in Paris, and I was asked by the recruiter if I were Jewish. When I answered in the negative, he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my...
Silence is unhealthy and un-American. Everybody has a right to talk and play their media as much as they want to, anywhere any time. Every child has the right to a quality education. A college education is the key to a well-paying job. Same-sex couples have the same right to government benefits as everybody else....
Thomas Fleming’s criticism of Ludwig von Mises and his student, Friedrich von Hayek (“Abuse Your Illusions,” Perspective, January), overlooks or misinterprets major contributions of both. In Socialism (1922), Mises was the first economist to show the unworkability of socialist systems. He based his analysis on the impossibility of establishing a price structure for the various...
“The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner. . . . His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and...
The environmentalist movement, as usual, is one theoretical jump ahead of the practical results produced by its previous level of ideological development-results it now deplores and blames on the enemy. After arson destroyed three buildings and damaged four ski lifts on Vail Mountain in Colorado last October, Earth Liberation Front took the credit for destroying...
It should be obvious to anyone who has taken the slightest trouble to examine the immigration question that America is faced not with an immigration “problem,” or even a “crisis,” but with a massive ...
Great musical artists approach the coda, without the recognition they deserve. As the year closes, we’d do well to remember (or discover) their work.
“Soft Power” is real power. The State Banquet at Buckingham Palace earlier this month showed royals and the President at their best, with an unstated but perfectly clear implication: no other country can do this. It were well to keep on good terms with the people who can put on a show like this. Everyone was at the top of their form: Trump behaved impeccably, and...
The thing about Lyndon Johnson—and you may be sure I kept a close adolescent eye on him while he was one of my two U.S. senators—was that he knew what he was doing. There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done. The faint breezes from the ’50s...
Back in the days when Southern merchants had to take the Ku Klux Klan seriously, the knights of the Invisible Empire liked to play a neat little trick on a store owner who had strayed too far from the path of racial rectitude the secret society demanded of him. Several Klansmen in plain clothes would...
Immediately after Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France in May 2017, progressive Americans fairly swooned with envy. If only they could have a president like M. Macron: young, handsome, progressive, cosmopolitan, polished, globally minded and dedicated to the European Union’s dream of uniting all of Europe into a single state! And Mrs. May across...
Sen. Bernie Sanders may be on the cusp of both capturing the Democratic nomination and transforming his party as dramatically as President Donald Trump captured and remade the Republican Party. After his sweep of the Nevada caucuses, following popular vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has the enthusiasm and the momentum, as the...
I once read that Abdala the Muslim, when asked what was most worthy of awe and wonder in this theater of the world, answered, “There is nothing to see more wonderful than man!” Hermes Trismegistus concurs with this opinion: “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man!” However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions,...
While “off Broadway” is often the destination for the worst sort of stage-direction anarcho-anachronism, with Othello in spaceships and all-lesbian versions of Macbeth, it may surprise the non-New Yorker to learn that it is often the place to discover classic drama played absolutely straight (in all senses) and flawlessly acted. Such was the case recently...
Two important recent events – Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India last week and the massive energy and trade agreement which Russia and China signed in Beijing on Wednesday – have the potential to alter Asia’s strategic landscape. Modi is an assertive politician unafraid to take risks, a market-oriented reformer, but also a Hindu nationalist....
In 1912, at dusk walking home, Henry Adams spotted something he thought to be a hippopotamus in the nation’s capital. As he drew nearer he saw it was President Taft. He gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble to pieces than ever . . . but what struck me most was the...
Even in the beginnings of winter, Georgia’s capitol Tbilisi emits a warmth. One should expect this from a city known for its many hot springs, but the warmth experienced goes much beyond the sulfur baths popular with tourists and locals alike. Tbilisi, with its 1.4 million residents, is inviting in a way that few cities...
In 2002 the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia, formalizing what had been tolerated by the government for several decades prior. Today, however, the Dutch practice of euthanasia is arguably less settled legally than ever before. In September, a doctor was found not guilty of breaking the law after administering...
The raw political interest of Democrats is at work in gaming the census numbers to increase the headcount in America’s leftist cities to maintain the political power.
Americans are perennially tempted to believe that Soviet armament is a reaction to American armament, and therefore reversible by American disarmament. For years we allowed that hope to guide our military policy: beginning in the late 1960’s, the United States exercised unilateral restraint in nuclear construction for more than a decade. American-produced IGBM warheads were...
One hundred years have now passed since both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. For a long time, both major parties were ready to grant the suffrage, should American women clearly ask it of them. The question was never whether women were worthy of...
The Vice President was in Russia in September, trying to persuade Boris Yeltsin to amend legislation giving the Russian Orthodox Church a privileged position. Al Gore was just the man to explain religious toleration to the Russians. In the 1996 campaign, he revealed himself as an affirmative action fundraiser, willing to solicit donations from anyone,...
In reporting an infant mortality increase in Texas in the wake of the Dobbs decision, the newspaper suggests it would have been better had these children never been born.
That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question. Asked five years ago about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” As judgment was thought to...
Is the Republican establishment losing it? Is the party leadership capable of uniting a governing coalition as Richard Nixon did before Watergate and Ronald Reagan resurrected in the 1980s? Observing the hysteria and nastiness of Karl Rove and the GOP establishment at the stunning triumph of Tea Party Princess Christine O’Donnell, the answer is no....
As one sign of Chekhov’s greatness, his very name is invoked (in adjective form) to assess the work of others. But even while Chekhovian has been called into service on numerous occasions—in recent years, for example, to epitomize such disparate playwrights as Lanford Wilson and Beth Henley, or a bit earlier to position Lillian Hellman...
A year ago, Robert Philip Hanssen apparently felt the need to explain to the Russians his motives for supplying them with thousands of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents over the preceding decade and a half. The veteran FBI agent wrote them a letter, confessing that he is neither insanely brave, nor merely insane, but “insanely loyal”...
Did you hear the one about Bruce Jenner? No? You missed it? Well, then, it’s probably too late. A grown man says he’s a woman, shaves off his Adam’s apple (for starters), and shows a former network anchor his little black dress. You’d think the late-night comedians would have enough material to get them through...
Contrary to Washington’s official rhetoric, the U.S. government is an ally, not an opponent, of Islamic extremism—a foe, not a defender, of Western civilization. Not since the Turkish siege of Vienna (1526) has Europe faced the threat of a Muslim occupation of significant portions of the continent; it does so now because of the foreign...
“When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” —Flannery O’Connor In response to the charge of obsession with a “single issue,” pro-life activists contend that the abortion debate is really paradigmatic. As Joseph Sobran suggested...
Diane Johnson: Dashiell Hammett: A Life; Random House; New York. Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that...
American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime is the definitive study on the transformative ramifications of the 1960s civil rights legislation.
The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War by Luke A. Nichter Yale University Press 544 pp., $37.50 Even before the Kennedys took center stage in American mythology, Americans have had their share of legendary families, the decline and fall of which have been staples of both history and...
E.L. Doctorow is our loudest contemporary champion of the social novel, whose defining characteristic he posits as “the large examination of society within a story” of “imperial earthshaking intention.” (The genre’s American apotheosis is Frank Norris’s The Octopus.) Billy Bathgate is Doctorow’s latest, and if his publicist’s yowling chorus of “masterpiece” is a bit much,...
Eleven months after the 2020 American presidential election, the official results remain so incongruous, they merit an empirical exegesis. The political establishment’s narrative is that Biden won an unexpectedly close race, and the outcome requires no further examination. Yet, Biden’s victory is so statistically suspicious, so riddled with ahistorical outcomes, that a detailed data examination...
Dr. Samuel Francis is an outstanding scholar, and he is usually right on target, but, speaking as an attorney, I’m afraid his article “Tribunals for Terror” (Views, March) is seriously flawed. Supporters have argued that tribunals are necessary, in part, to avoid potential intimidation of jurors. Dr. Francis, however, believes that Timothy McVeigh and the...
At the end of the 60’s, the Establishment began a deliberate campaign to destroy a number of American symbols it considered inimical to black welfare. That these symbols—such as the various flags of the Confederate States of America and the song “Dixie”—are revered by a large section of our country for reasons not connected with...
A truly startling, topsy-turvy race is being run for governor of Illinois. U.S. Representative Glenn Poshard, the Democrat, is embracing more conservative positions on culture and social policy; Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan, the Republican, is running away with much of the Democratic base, including gay-rights supporters. On trade, Poshard has supported a Buchananite...
Flags are a feudal phenomenon. Not until the French tricolor was the flag a focus of nationalism. Even during the 19th century, flags were used mostly in military, naval, and diplomatic contexts, and were seldom seen by civilians. Often there was not one national flag but a variety for different uses and occasions. Americans did...
“National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.” Woodrow Wilson’s words, recorded in the New York Times on February 12,1918, defined the 20th century and...
You could say liberalism is about squaring the circle, if it weren’t for the fact that even liberals don’t really expect to accomplish this feat: They aim at creating the impression they can effect the impossible, and lying afterward about their success in having done it. In between comes an impressive array or sequence of...
Stripped of its excesses, Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech contains all the ingredients of a campaign that can defeat Hillary Clinton this fall. Indeed, after the speech ended Clinton was suddenly defending the Clinton Foundation against the charge that it is a front for a racket for her family’s enrichment. The specific charges in Trump’s indictment...
The decades-long campaign of Ron Paul to have the Government Accountability Office do a full audit of the Federal Reserve now has 313 sponsors in the House. Sometimes perseverance does pay off. If not derailed by the establishment, the audit may happen. Yet, many columnists and commentators are aghast. An auditors' probe, they ...
The left’s hashtag activism about sexual violence is just pure politics meant to manipulate female voters into believing that Democratic policies protect women.
“The necessary man” is the term that explains everything in British politics. Boris is the target of all the focused loathing of the Establishment, a force so powerful and widespread that no man can say who drives it. But in a myriad outlets—BBC, The Times, the Platonically-named Guardian, the City of London, academe high and...
Americans will cease arguing over the federal Voting Rights Act and its intricacies—oh, I imagine around the time Texas starts exporting ground water to Minnesota, or the Lord returns to judge the quick and the dead. Mandatory voter ID laws passed by Republican legislatures in Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin have been under legal assault by...
I am going to use the word “liberal” in a very broad sense to refer to the modern movement in ethics and politics that begins in the Renaissance, develops in the Enlightenment, and culminates in the classical liberalism of the 19th century. Socialism–and the other isms that have plagued European man for the past...