“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966). That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering families. No custody battles. No brawls over alimony and child support. No kids shuttled back and forth...
After ethnic Albanian guerrillas initially rejected the peace settlement fashioned by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a friend of hers told Newsweek that “She’s angry at everyone—the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO.” Another Clinton administration official raged: “Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothing-balls to do something entirely in their...
President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran. Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump’s reelection. It would widen the “forever war,” which Trump said he would...
Americans prefer no consistent government, rapid-cycling anarchy, to everything the two parties offer: neither has made the sale.
Last week, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and slaughtered nine of the innocent people he found there. Roof’s act of slaughter has rightly been greeted with universal revulsion. But the media and politicians from both parties seized the opportunity to inaugurate a self-righteous crusade against a flag he displayed in...
We’re only a few months beyond the turn of the calendar and already I have a candidate for the word of the year: Censorship. Examples are proliferating at such a fast rate that it seems like a game of whac-a-mole just to keep up with all of them. A few of the most recent include:...
In an election campaign dominated by domestic issues, foreign themes have appeared as isolated snippets. Questions regarding what to do about Syria or Iran, or how to manage relations with China and Russia, produce stock responses unrelated to the broad picture. These are among the most important questions facing political decisionmakers, foreign-policy practitioners, and their...
The New York Times, in a 2,128-word obituary (nearly three times the length of this article), fondly recalled Jack Kevorkian as “A Doctor Who Helped End Lives.” Kevorkian, 83, the Michigan pathologist turned assisted-suicide activist, died in a hospital, a more dignified locale than the 1960’s-era Volkswagen microbus where he uncorked the Thanatron, his suicide...
Despite Pat Buchanan’s record as a Trump-supporter sans pareil, his most recent column, on why Trump’s challenges to the Biden victory are both futile and possibly harmful, is profoundly unsettling. It is also based on questionable assumptions. “It seems a certainty that not enough electoral votes could be flipped from Biden to Trump to overturn’s Joe Biden’s...
It has become obvious that the majority of elected officials and candidates for public office are not qualified for their positions, and often stand in the way of attempts to institute the programs and diversity that are the hallmarks of modem society. Nonetheless, American voters, either because they are ignorant of what must be accomplished...
America is disintegrating alarmingly fast in a manner not seen since the final years before the War Between the States.
Does it really make much difference whether Barack Hussein Obama (or anybody else) was actually born in the United States or not? Is the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq justified under international law and the U.S. Constitution? Is the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq an appropriate response ...
As founder of the intellectual tradition of the West, Saint Augustine has one peer: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman of noble antecedents who spent his life in the service first of literature, then of the Gothic kingdom of Theodoric, and always, throughout a life that compassed literary success, high office, and political disgrace, of...
The debate over gays in the military has highlighted the progressive impulse to look anywhere but to America for cultural truth. On talk shows and in editorials, Americans are urged to emulate “other industrialized nations” (read “increasingly decadent Western Europe”) that permit openly homosexual soldiers and sailors. Often praised is Holland, whose ponytailed, hairnet-coiffed legions...
In 1997, the headmaster of the English secondary school in which I was teaching ordered a bibliocaust. The inspectors were coming, and he wanted our library to look up-to-date. All the old stuff had to go; only bright, modern volumes relevant to the contemporary curriculum were to be on the shelves. Each department was told...
Most of us objected to The New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project” because it trashes the great achievements of Americans (creating free institutions and conquering a continental wilderness), substituting a story of supposed victimization as the core of our history. Alas, Professor Hall, in his speculations in the March issue (“Slavery and the American Founding”)...
From the June 2012 issue of Chronicles. Most retrospectives take the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms. “Society was shaken to its foundations!” a 2011 BBC documentary on the subject shouted. “All the rules came off, all the brakes came off . . . the floodgates were unlocked. . ....
There are two sides to the same-sex “marriage” debate, as SCOTUS sees it: Decide now for federally mandated pretend marriage, or rule in favor of “wait and see,” which amounts to a declaration that “gay marriage is inevitable.” We don’t need to wait with baited breath for the ruling. Like old milk, the culture has...
“America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!” That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by “taking a knee” during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before San Francisco ’49s games in...
In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen). These studies—named the “Dunning School” for historian William A. Dunning, whose students applied his interpretation to individual Southern...
The true nature of the New Deal was revealed in one of those brilliant ironies that flash lightning-like in a midnight storm. It happened September 13, 1933, the Nativity of a new secular holiday: NRA Day. An interminable parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue celebrated the National Recovery Administration, which was to set prices, fix...
The year 1975, for those of us old enough to remember, was a calm and quiet time in the United States. The Vietnam War and Watergate were both over, the riots and protests had ceased, and everybody liked our presiding nonpartisan president, who shared the name of America’s most iconic car company. The music was...
It’s been a bad year for terrorism in the United States. Not bad, fortunately, in the number of actual attacks (at least at the time of this writing), but in the continuing debasement of the word terrorism, so that it ceases to be a useful characterization of behavior and becomes merely a propaganda slogan for...
The abortion question seems to have reached an unfortunate standoff. Just as the federal judiciary has seen fit to allow more scope for pro-life legislation, it would appear that public opinion, registered in the election returns (as interpreted), has turned against the pro-life position. If it is true that Americans are more pro-abortion now than...
Across the country last weekend, there were antiwar demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him. I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, Calif. My neighbor...
A mojito is a Cuban mint julep, mixed with rum rather than bourbon. It was Ernest Hemingway’s second-favorite drink. The shot of gin first thing in the morning from the bottle beneath the bed took top honors. Somewhere just on the dark side of dawn in an Eivissa nightclub, I was trying to convince the...
“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...
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
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...
Leagues like the NHL have made their moral stances clear—their millionaire star players may not engage in sports gambling, but hockey fans are subjected to over two hours of gambling propaganda during each broadcast.
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...
“It doesn’t matter to me if Mexicans make fools of each other; what I will not tolerate is that Mexicans do it.” —Pancho Villa The world remembers the 2000 U.S. presidential election, with its hanging chads, overvotes, undervotes, and esoteric attempts to “discern the intent” of the voter. Irregularities people thought did not and could...
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...
Intolerable Cruelty Produced by Alphaville Films and Imagine Entertainment Written and Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Distributed by Universal Pictures Lost in Translation Produced by American Zoetrope and Elemental Films Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola Distributed by Focus Features Intolerable Cruelty should by prosecuted for intolerable smugness, the besetting sin of...
Until all aspects of DEI are abolished from universities, public gestures like eliminating this or that aspect of the ideology are mostly empty publicity stunts designed to relieve pressure from embattled administrators.
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
While many Asians have welcomed the election of George W. Bush, leading Europeans are nervous. In particular, they fear that President Bush will reduce their continent’s free defense ride, especially as the Balkans begins to explode vet again. But it is time to expect Europeans to behave like adults in securing their own interests. The...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
On the evening of Dec. 6, I watched the debate between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, who are running against each other for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia with the runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5. As a non-leftist I am anxious to see the Georgia Senate seats now up for...
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...
As recently as the 1930’s, elderly black people in rural Maryland were still keeping headstrong children in line with the admonition that something called “pattiroll” would “get” them if they didn’t behave themselves. “Pattirolls,” or patrols, were gangs of Union Army soldiers who rode throughout the moonlit countryside enforcing curfews in occupied Maryland during the...