In the bright, warm autumn of 1947 that followed a chilly summer, several hundred bewildered 17-year-olds found the Ohio State University campus in Columbus swarming with an alien and formidable species: veterans. The war, though well over, was still more a reality than a memory. The Great Depression was over too, having disappeared insensibly in...
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The Crisis of Controlled Thinking
A General’s Life by Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair; Simon and Schuster; New York. General of the Army Omar N. Bradley’s military career spanned a half-century of dramatic change for the United States. When he entered West Point in 1911, the United States had few military interests beyond its borders; when he retired in 1953,...
Dutch Euthanasia Case Serves as Harbinger
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...
Republicans Bet the Farm
President Trump, every Republican senator, and the GOP majority in Speaker Paul Ryan’s House just put the future of their party on the line. By enacting the largest tax cut since the Reagan administration, the heart of which is cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, Republicans have boldly bet the farm. They...
Anarcho-Tyranny 2020
As I began to contemplate the theater of the absurd that we Americans have been living through in recent days, I found the most useful place to begin was an essay by Sam Francis published in Chronicles 26 years ago, “Anarcho-Tyranny USA.” In this long, thoughtful piece, Francis contrasts the eagerness to criminalize what had...
Attacking Kamala Harris as the DEI Candidate for President is Fair Game
Suggestions that Republicans cease noting the obvious about Kamala Harris being the DEI candidate for president are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the American electorate.
A Billion Sordid Images
Disconnected is not an amusing book. The subtitle’s “digitally distracted” doesn’t hint at its grim findings. This short text—a long one might be too dispiriting—is nevertheless lengthy enough to expose the digital revolution as an outright calamity, though the author generally eschews the apocalyptic tone. Of course, there is the familiar boast that children now...
Movie Czar
The latest school massacre has all the do-gooders crying for more gun control, yet few have touched upon the blood-splattering, shoot-’em-up electronic games that the unhinged nerd who murdered 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, played. His favorite was Call of Duty, a first-person-shooter game where participants use assault rifles, machine guns, and other weapons to...
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?
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...
Who Decides What Kids Should Be Taught?
Virginia is a newly blue state, with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, that Joe Biden won by 10 points. Hence, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe was an early and solid favorite to regain the office he vacated in 2017. But if McAuliffe loses Tuesday, the defeat will be measured on the Richter scale. For...
The Neo-Ottoman Empire
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...
Reaping the Red’s Harvest
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...
Intellectual Operator
It is a distinct possibility that we leave to posterity writers and works from which the future curious will conclude that this century was the stupidest, most verbose and obscene, altogether the worst in the historical record. What else can you say of a century that elected Michel Foucault as one of its mâitres à...
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...
Last Call?
It was quiet at Drea’s Tavern on St. Patrick’s Day. It might seem unusual for an Irish bar to have so few souls stop in the third week of March, but there were reasons. “It’s tough to have it during the middle of the week,” bartender Larry Drea said. “So few people can get time...
The Rule-or-Ruin Republicans
“Things reveal themselves passing away,” wrote W. B. Yeats. Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, his campaign has done us a service—exposing the underbelly of a decaying establishment whose repudiation by America’s silent majority is long overdue. According to the New York Times, super PACs of Trump’s GOP rivals, including PACs of candidates who...
Flags as Symbols
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...
The Wonder of Academe
“The high-minded man must care more for truth than for what people think.” —Aristotle While being interviewed on William Buckley’s Firing Line, Harry Ashmore remarked that he had allowed the subject of his Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins to tell the story of his life and work through the numerous quotations that...
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.
Conspiring With Terror in the West
The liberal paradigm is dying before our eyes. At twelve midday on March 22, Theresa May announced at Prime Minister’s Questions that she had sent her condolences to the family of Martin McGuinness, who had been the capo di capi of the IRA. She had been preceded at the BBC by a high priest of...
âFamily Valuesâ: Illegal Aliens and Their Sex Crimes
Whatever President Bush says about the âfamily valuesâ of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale. On April 29, 2005, an illegal alien from Guatemala, Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, was power washing a deck at the Nagle home in New City, New York. In her...
Mondo Quasimodo
Last June, the 19,000 delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott the Walt Disney Company for its “promotion of homosexuality” and the other “anti-family” values. The convention pointed to Gay and Lesbian Days sponsored by Disney theme parks; to such twisted fare as Priest, Powder, and Kids, all films produced by Disney’s Miramax;...
Washington Politics
Teddy Kennedy, the famed moral exemplar, read his former senatorial colleague John Ashcroft the riot act during confirmation hearings. Ashcroft was extreme; his constitutional understanding of gun control was “radical.” The senatorial face grew flush—presumably with anger, since it was a bit early in the day for more potent stuff. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware...
Wallow in the Mire
One of the less appreciated perils of literary fame is the risk a writer runs every hundred years as the anniversary of his birthday approaches. This year marks the 200th birthday not only of Darwin but of Lincoln, a completely irrelevant coincidence that inspired Smithsonian—the trivializing newsletter of “the nation’s attic”—to celebrate the two men...
Homeless People Do Not Have a ‘Right’ to Camp in Squalor and Invade Our Neighborhoods
SCOTUS is expected to overturn a Ninth Circuit ruling allowing homeless encampments no later than June, freeing municipalities to restore order and safety to their streets. But cities will have the political will to do it.
The Drugged War
When President-elect George Bush announced a week before his inauguration that his new “drug czar” would be former Education Secretary William Bennett, the air began to seep out of the tires of his new presidency before it even got on the road. Had Mr. Bennett ever participated in a drug arrest, had he ever worked...
The Other Pasternak
Sir Ernst Gombrich, for one, is glad to hear the news. The eminent art historian stands in the modestly furnished drawing room of his Hampstead house, leafing through his copy of Leonid Pasternak’s memoirs, recently published in England. The book’s publication had attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, and the first retrospective of the...
Will Bibi’s War Become America’s War?
President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran, after the shoot-down of a U.S. Predator drone, to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a U.S. war with Iran. But the same cannot be said of Bibi Netanyahu. Saturday, Israel launched a night attack on a village south of Damascus to abort what Israel...
Syria: Avoiding Another Quagmire
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned of the potential consequences of U.S. military involvement in the Syrian conflict. It could hinder humanitarian relief operations, he said, embroil the United States in a significant, lengthy, and uncertain military commitment, and strain relationships around the world. “And finally,” he...
Divorce-Court Demolition
In The Respondent, Hollywood actor Greg Ellis reveals the tyrannical horrors of the family court system, designed especially to emasculate men.
In Defense of Sam Francis
Open season has been declared on the late and longtime Chronicles columnist Samuel Francis. Evidence for this can be found in, among other places, a diatribe recently published by political journalist Michael Lind in Tablet, “The Importance of James Burnham.” Lind started his essay by analyzing Burnham but then segued into unkind remarks about Burnham’s...
McGreevey’s Resignation
Jim McGreevey, who will be resigning as New Jersey’s governor on November 15, cares deeply for the people of the Garden State. (No, not the way you’re thinking!) Despite the admission on August 12 that he engaged in an extramarital relationship with a homosexual Israeli with possible ties to the Mossad—whom, early in his administration,...
The Ranchers and the Mandatory Minimum
Two Oregon ranchers, Steven Dwight Hammond and Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., have been at the center of ethical and cultural clashes for several years. Even while a standoff purportedly held in their honor between armed militia and the federal government was occurring in January, the ranchers reported to the Bureau of Prisons to serve five-year...
Charlie Is Their Darling
On October 25, 2000, central Sydney’s traffic stood still for hours, for the first time since the Olympiad. Inside the late-Victorian Town Hall, approximately 2,000 pilgrims witnessed the Aboriginal faith’s latest canonization: the state funeral of Charles Perkins, who had died on October 18 after 29 years of daily medical dependence on the “whitefella” culture...
Public Opinion at the End of an Age
One symptom of decline and confusion at the end of an age is the prevalent misuse of terms, of designations that have been losing their meanings and are thus no longer real. One such term is public opinion. Used still by political thinkers, newspapers, articles, institutes, research centers, college and university courses and their professors,...
Faces of Clio
[This view first appeared in the October 1986 issue of Chronicles.] The obscurest epoch is today. —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage....
Music, Technology, and Psychological Warfare
“No change can be made in styles of music without affecting the most important conventions of society. So Damon declares and I agree.” —Plato, Republic The late Sam Shapiro used to tell a story about two Englishmen in China who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their culture to one of the mandarins they had...
Athens and Jerusalem
The holiday season is responsible for some of modern America’s most deeply felt traditions: cheap airline tickets on Christmas day, seasonal hymns like “Jinglebell Rock” and “Blue Christmas,” ACLU suits against the school Christmas pageant, and the Andy Williams Christmas special, for which the divorced Mr. Williams (one of whose wives killed her lover, Olympic...
Kamala Harris Is a Race Hustler
A Harris presidency would send white men to the back of the line and ignite racial animus.
Our Inner Mason-Dixon
About a hundred years before the Civil War, two British surveyors, Jeremiah Mason and Charles Dixon, with a crew of ax-men, marked out 270 miles of wilderness. They set a stone at every mile, and another grander one embossed with the arms of the Penn and Calvert clans every five miles. The resulting map pacified...
Nil and Void: Beckett’s Last Gasp
During the ongoing, international celebration of Samuel Beckett’s 80th birthday, which commenced last spring, much is being said, written, and done to reiterate unequivocally his position as the preeminent playwright of our century. There is no debate, really, so much as an affirmation and an exploration of his unquestioned significance. The irony, of course, is...
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.
Every Man a Victim
“Mankind is tired of liberty.” —Benito Mussolini An acquaintance of mine, who is not particularly conservative, once heard a television newsman quack about how bad the 1950’s were. Disgusted, he burst out, “What was wrong with the 1950’s? People were norma/then!” People certainly seem a lot less “normal” nowadays. Charles J. Sykes has written a...
Biden’s Full Plate—Ukraine, Taiwan, Tehran
One day after warning Russian President Vladimir Putin he would face “severe” economic sanctions, “like ones he’s never seen,” should Russia invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden assured Americans that sending U.S. combat troops to Ukraine is “not on the table.” America is not going to fight Russia over Ukraine. “The idea that the United States...
Kosovo and Its Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy
The struggle for Kosovo between Christian Serbs and Muslim Albanians dates back to 1389, when the Serbs were defeated by, and their lands annexed to, the Ottoman Empire. Muslim rule lasted over four centuries and resulted in several waves of forced migrations of Serbs from Kosovo. The current Albanian majority there was achieved more recently—the...
On Federal Power
William J. Watkins’ comment on states being forced to adopt the .08 blood-alcohol standard for drunken driving (Cultural Revolutions, January) is a narrow objection to federal power. The feds are not threatening to jail the entire population of any state which does not adopt the standard; they are only threatening not to return some of...
Fillet of Soul
Entertainment industry awards shows are, almost by definition, public orgies of televised backslapping. Still, TV viewers stick with them, not so much to discover what the best movie, TV show, or record is—for each viewer already knows what’s best—but in order to see personalities in environments that put them out of character and in competition...
Kingdoms of the Future
The invitation to the first symposium came from my old alma mater, the Free University of Brussels, founded by liberals, freemasons, and socialists, all united in their opposition to the Catholic Church, embodied by the 15th-century University of Louvain. Nostalgia drove me to the once well-known quartiers, or rather what remains of them now that...
Is Trump Right About NATO?
I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald Trump told the New York Times last weekend. “I like the expression.” Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically, to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.” Beltway media may...