Civil unions, which offer same-sex couples the privileges that presently accrue to those who have been united in normal marriages, have been discussed by several legislators since the MassachusettsSupreme Judiciary Court ordered the state legislature to establish “homosexual marriage.” The Massachusetts high court, under the dynamic (demonic?) leadership of Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, decreed that...
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Kamala Harris Is a Race Hustler
A Harris presidency would send white men to the back of the line and ignite racial animus.
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Comment
If familiarity were the same thing as understanding, it would be supererogatory to raise the question of what the media mean. Nothing is more generally familiar in our time, nothing deals more consistently with the familiar, and nothing familiarizes masses of men more rapidly with certain classes of events. Surely it should be enough for...
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From White House to Blockhouse
Bill Clinton is the American icon, whose face is rapidly eclipsing both the profile of the heroic young Kennedy and the simpering grin of Jimmy Carter—the presidential images that until recently symbolized victory and despair for Democrats and something else for Republicans. It was understandable if, in the early 60’s, Republicans could not appreciate the...
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S&L to L.A.
If you’re white in the United States, you, says Professor Andrew Hacker, have at least that much going for you. “No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority,” Hacker, a political scientist, writes of white Americans. “No matter what happens, they...
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A (Re)Movable Feast
“A morality which has within it no room for truth is no morality at all” —Flaubert ” . . . But the thing is, you know, let’s face it, there’s a whole enormous world out there that I don’t ever think about, and I certainly don’t take responsibility for how I’ve lived in that world....
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With Nixon in ’68: The Year America Came Apart
On the night of Jan. 31, 1968, as tens of thousands of Viet Cong guerrillas attacked the major cities of South Vietnam, in violation of a Lunar New Year truce, Richard Nixon was flying secretly to Boston. At 29, and Nixon’s longest-serving aide, I was with him. Advance man Nick Ruwe met us at Logan...
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McDumb and Dumber
With more and better fast-food choices available than ever before, why do Americans continue to reward the mediocrity that is McDonald’s?
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Studies in Tyranny
“Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered.” —Thomas Paine Nearly half a century after their destruction, Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler remain the objects of greater attention and hatred than do Stalin and his Soviet Union, although the extent of their crimes were similar and Stalin’s regime was in some ways the more complex and...
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Results Are In
The election results are in, and those who are reading this piece have an advantage I do not: They know whether George W. Bush or John Kerry has won. (This issue went to press the day after the election.) Regardless of the outcome, however, we already know a good deal about what the next President...
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A Heated Topic
The Confederate Flag has become a heated topic this election year. As George W. Bush and John McCain battled in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the New York Young Republican Club invited Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, to discuss the Republican Party’s prospects for November. In the question-and-answer session that followed,...
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Home Truths Again
“Liberalism” is the predominant form of snobbery in our time. A child molester is more likely to be a Democrat. A closeted homosexual is more likely to be a Republican. Nothing fails like success. But the opposite is not true—unless you have affirmative action. The USPS will discontinue Saturday mail in August. I can...
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Blame Poland
OK, all you readers: You are weak, easily manipulated, led by the nose to the gutter, susceptible to the devils of your diabolical urges, and you are crazy. In fact you are the unspeakables, the deplorables who voted for Trump, and a bald, ugly man by the name of Roger Cohen says so. Needless to...
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The American Muse
[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....
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Rockefeller Center
On a rainy July afternoon I stood on the Promenade at Rockefeller Plaza and beheld Prometheus unbound. There he was, his golden self sprawled against the wall of the erstwhile skating rink (in summer it is transformed into an outdoor cafe), holding the flame in his right hand, his gift to mankind. Above him is...
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An Establishment in Panic
Pressed by moderator Chris Wallace as to whether he would accept defeat should Hillary Clinton win the election, Donald Trump replied, “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.” “That’s horrifying,” said Clinton, setting off a chain reaction on the post-debate panels with talking heads falling all over one another in...
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Remembering Warren G. Harding
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
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On Property Rights
I applaud your interest in property rights in the April 2001 issue, “Your Land Is Their Land.” I was especially interested in the article “For Keeps! A Christian Defense of Property” by Scott P. Richert (Views), since I have come to know and work with two of the four families who are used as examples...
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The Twilight of the Sacred
At the center of the contemporary pagan/Christian controversy are the nature, the localization, and the psychological-mythological motivation of the sacred. The last one dominates the debate because as the transcendent God becomes less focused the sacred turns into a basically human domain. The question, no longer addressed to heaven, is not over how God communicates...
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Rockford Schools Controversy
The Rockford schools controversy, approaching its tenth anniversary, is taking on the mythic stature of the Little Rock, Cleveland, and Kansas City cases. While still in its infancy (as desegregation cases go) and relatively inexpensive (only $166 million through the end of the 1997-98 school year, compared to $2 billion in Kansas City), the Rockford...
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David Hume and American Liberty
David Hume’s History of England was one of the most successful literary productions of the 18th century. It became a classic in his lifetime and was published continuously down to 1894, passing through at least 167 posthumous editions. The young Winston Churchill learned English history from an abridged edition known as “The Student’s Hume.” Yet...
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No More Nonsense About Elites
A fish starts rotting from the head, it is said. That a society starts rotting from its head needs to be much better understood. Blaming the decline of Western society on a “revolt of the masses” absolves elites, who must bear the brunt of the blame. Catering to popular tastes is not the result of...
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Jack and Jill, or Why I Am Not a Conservative
He who has seen the present has seen everything, said Marcus Aurelius, and this is why the floor of my study is made concave by the aggregate weight of all the newspapers and magazines I have acquired since moving to Cambridge: I simply cannot bring myself to throw away a single page of newsprint. In...
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The Lady From Niger
“There once was a lady from Niger Who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They returned from the ride With the lady inside And the smile on the face of the tiger.” —Ogden Nash Christopher Patten warns at the start that his engagingly written book is not a memoir. Though the core of it...
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Will the Honduras Column Intimidate America?
There is something about “column” that alerts the mind. It is not the same as “crowd,” and is active, purposive. My Chambers dictionary gives for column “a body of troops forming a long, narrow procession,” reminding us that the word is quasi-military. Napoleon’s infantry always attacked in columns. The Honduras column now commanding the news...
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Dua Lipa, like Pope Benedict, Strives to Give Eros Dignity
The artist’s new album is panned by critics who miss the point of her commentary on real and lasting love.
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The Hell With Spinach!
In the early years of the Republic Americans focused their efforts on democratic government, geographic expansion and settlement, and a program of national improvements intended to promote them. In the decades immediately following the War Between the States they concentrated on industrializing and amassing national wealth. Then, in the 1880’s and 90’s, they began to...
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Recovering the Dignity of Truth
We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...
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The War Over America’s Past
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” That was the slogan of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith worked ceaselessly revising the past to conform to the latest party line of Big Brother. And so we come to the battle over history books...
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The Five Good Reasons
Atheists have no god to worship. This is by no means a tautology. Belief in god is ingrained in our nature, and Anselm’s proof is the nearest thing to an effective rebuttal of atheism. Put in simple terms, Anselm’s argument is that we know that god exists because we have the category god in our...
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Dance With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight
There was a notable convergence some decades ago, one that was noticed musically as two separate and distinct phenomena, but not as a convergence—or even as a conspiracy, or a rivalry. I never heard or saw any acknowledgment that two of the foremost instrumentalists in the world were fiddling around pretty much at the same...
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Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
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Marines on Okinawa
Okinawa’s Governor Masahide Ota has learned what it means to be governor of a Japanese prefecture; precious little. When Mr. Ota stood up for Okinawans who no longer wish to lease their land to the American military, he was asserting an ancient Okinawan belief in private property: “It’s yours, do with it as you see...
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Vol. 3 No. 3 March 2001
The pro-Gore bias of the American media during the five weeks of post-election legal and political wrangling was as unsurprising as it was obvious. Most foreign media were even less restrained. On December 14, BBC commentator Brian Barron told British television viewers that George W. Bush’s “mandate is all but invisible.” Radio 4 network commentator...
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Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee: Don’t Trust, Just Verify
As I wrote on the Day After the Election, it is incumbent upon America’s Deplorables not to sit idly by, content with a mere victory in a presidential contest, as if suddenly all of our problems are solved. The rabid mainstream media, still licking its wounds, is working 24/7 to undermine any agenda item that...
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The Life of the Mind
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life; by Zena Hitz; Princeton University Press; 240 pp., $22.95 “What do I need to know for the test?” This common refrain, repeated endlessly by high school and undergraduate students, sums up one of the great heresies of our age: the view that learning is a...
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Ukraine Bosnified, Putin Hitlerized
On March 6 President Obama said in Washington that the Crimean authorities’ plans for a referendum “violate the Ukrainian Constitution and violate international law.” “Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine. We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratically elected...
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Duty, Honor, Atrocity
George W. Bush Receives a Character Award at West Point In George W. Bush’s home state of Texas, if you are an ordinary citizen found guilty of capital murder, the mandatory sentence is either life in prison or the death penalty. If, however, you are a former president of the United States responsible for initiating...
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War Without End, Amen
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...
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Daffodils for Wordsworth
The name Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is a wonderfully poetic one, conjuring an image of a lover of horses on a carefree adventure. Such, however, is far from the temperament of this 20th-century poet, whose poetry is more suggestive of some horse in a Dickens novel, harnessed to an industrial wheel and moving forever round in...
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Calling Dr. Johnson
The Dear Leader of the United States reminds me of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is a man who won’t take his own side in a fight. More precisely, his own country’s side. Barack Obama seems to hate calling anyone our enemy. It isn’t nice. It’s not Christian, as he understands Christianity. Well, Christ...
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Honor to Whom Honor
“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB). When a zealous Christian offered to help Mark Twain understand the difficult things in the Bible, Twain said something like this: “It is not...
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Moments in the Sun
One can no better describe the subject of this book than by quoting the publisher’s press release: Once there was a group of liberals and Leftists. They were Democrats, they were radicals, they were freedom riders. But they became disillusioned by the Left. They moved toward the Right, they opposed the anti-war movement, they made...
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Celtic Justice
“For any displeasure, that they apprehend to be done unto them by their neighbours, they take up a plain field against him, and (without respect to God, King, or commonweal) bang it out bravely, he and all his kin, against him and all his.” —King James VI of Scotland, Basilikon Doron...
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Where Is the Right’s Marc Elias?
The right has no moral stomach for a ruthless fight, but in politics, that is what it takes to win.
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Glorified on TV
Bounty hunters with a license to kill are glorified on television every week. The reality is uglier and more terrifying than most of us imagine. In Phoenix, a group of heavily armed bounty hunters, wearing ski-masks and body armor, sledgehammered their way through the front door of a private residence, tied up a mother, and...
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Why the Republicans Won’t Stop Obama’s Amnesty
Spending more than a minute or two to discuss Barack Obama’s latest assault on the Constitution that he has sworn to uphold is, quite frankly, a waste of time. Even before the announcement of his “executive action” plan for amnesty for five million illegal immigrants, the President’s defenders had claimed that he wanted to do...
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The House That John Built
In the 1980 film Atlantic City, Burt Lancaster, portraying a has-been racketeer, turns to a young companion while they’re walking along the Board walk and exclaims, “You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in the old days.” According to Louis Malle, the film’s director, the producers wanted to cut that line: “They said it didn’t...
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Memo to Trump: Defy Mueller
If Donald Trump does not wish to collaborate in the destruction of his presidency, he will refuse to be questioned by the FBI, or by a grand jury, or by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his malevolent minions. Should Mueller subpoena him, as he has threatened to do, Trump should ignore the subpoena, and frame...
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A Nation without Community Is a Nation without Value
Communal Americanism needs to make a return for the nation to survive. There is no other remedy.