The last time we heard Jess Kirkman tell stories about his father’s wondrous, humble life was in I Am One of You Forever (1985), a work of power and humor and charm. That book reminded me, however, that the word “novel” has hardly any meaning nowadays, for the work seemed a suite of stories united...
By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world’s attention. What else does he want? Almost surely not war with America. For no matter what damage Kim could visit on U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam, his country would be destroyed...
Homosexuality is either genetically or environmentally determined. Environmental influences are either intrauterine or postnatal. Behold the universe of possibilities! Sexual orientation probably results from the interaction of environment and genetic predisposition, but science, so far, explains only a little. Voluntarily choosing homosexuality cannot be discounted, although the more deeply embedded in genetics or early experience...
What exactly did the framers mean by putting in the Constitution Article II, Section 4? This is the section that reads, “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Treason is clearly...
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Celebrity Apprentices Here’s a lede you didn’t imagine five years ago: The Pope and Donald Trump are engaged in a public feud over illegal immigration. Trump is “not Christian,” says the pontiff. This latest brouhaha comes with Pope Francis’s visit to...
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
President Bush’s decision to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq is a desperate attempt to salvage a mission that has gone terribly wrong. Instead of persisting in a strategy that will have U.S. forces trying to referee a multisided civil war, Washington should focus on a more achievable objective: working with Iraq’s neighbors to quarantine...
“Well, fellow, who are you?” demands the Earl of Warwick of a character who appears on stage for the first time at the end of George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan. “I,” huffs the man who has just burned Joan of Arc at the stake, “am not addressed as fellow, my lord. I am the...
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled this mob and lit the flame of this attack.” So alleged Liz Cheney, third-ranking Republican in the House, as she led nine GOP colleagues to vote for a second impeachment of Donald Trump. The House Republican caucus voted 19-1 against impeachment. House Democrats voted lockstep, 222-0,...
The arguments by Srdja Trifkovic against the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO (Cultural Revolutions, August) are reminiscent of my variation of an old Noel Coward ditty: “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Russians / For you can’t deprive a gangster of his gun. / Though they’ve been a little nasty...
Kamala Harris’s ancestry matters less to the left in defining her than does Harris’s consistently woke politics which, for them, is part and parcel of black identity.
“It has been well said of Bertram Wooster that though he may sink onto rustic benches and for a while give the impression of being licked into a custard, the old spirit will come surging back sooner or later.” —P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season Robert McCrum demurs from critical comparisons of P.G. Wodehouse with the...
Hitler’s Germany attacked Stalin’s Soviet Union 80 years ago today, thus unleashing the greatest, bloodiest, and most meaningless clash of titans in history. Thanks to the German Führer’s obsession with Lebensraum (“Living Space”) in the East, and his equally self-defeating, criminal race theory, Operation Barbarossa resulted in the mutual near-destruction of the two nations. Flawed from the outset,...
To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran’s Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories. In January 1968, LBJ’s last year, 82 sailors of the Pueblo were captured by North Korea and held hostage with...
“Justice” in America today is an arrangement where the living and dead are judged to be guilty or innocent on the basis of race.
One way of telling the story of American culture and politics in the second half of the 20th century is to present it as a revolt against the group of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males who dominated the country from the time of William Bradford to that of Dwight David Eisenhower. This narrative helps to explain...
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum Doubleday 224 pp., $25.00 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat W. W. Norton & Company 384 pp., $28.95 For some among the chattering classes, the electoral defeat of Donald Trump in November must have been a mixed blessing, though they doubtless could...
For several months after last November, the American media raved about Barack Obama’s achievement in becoming the first African-American president of the United States. I didn’t—and couldn’t—join in the jubilation, for several reasons. First, it had always seemed to me obvious that we would have a black president someday. When I was in junior-high school...
Brokeback Mountain Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Ang LeeScreenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a story by Annie Proulx An enlightened colleague recently asked me what I thought of director Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain. When I told him I thought it a dreary, sappy soap opera, he smiled pityingly...
“Poetry is the Devil’s wine.” —St. Augustine In his prophetic poem “The Silence of the Poets,” Dana Gioia imagines a time in the not too distant future when poetry will be a completely lost art. “A few observers voiced their mild regret / about another picturesque, unprofitable craft / that progress...
A maritime artist I know tells me that he once met an eminent critic who claimed to have given up the brush and taken up the pen because he had won all the prizes in art school. Those laurels must be testimony that he was washed up—how could an artist of genuine importance, he despaired,...
A victim of media “bombholing” explains how the media drive their ratings and profits by publishing an unending series of wild, unsubstantiated stories, never stopping to correct the ones that came before.
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not...
From the September 2015 issue of Chronicles. Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the...
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete ...
The Left has had a violent streak going back at least as far as Karl Marx's calls for a global revolution of the proletariat—and the French Revolution even before that.
One hundred years ago today, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, the Duchess of Hohenberg, visited Sarajevo. Waiting for them was a band of would be assassins, who planned to use bombs to kill the heir to the Habsburg throne. The bombs...
A critique of the destinarian political philosophy of Francis Parker Yockey.
The war in Iraq has left many casualties; Social Security reform is one of them. For so long, Democrats surrounded the issue with demagoguery. And now that the Democrats control Capitol Hill, Republicans seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone confront, Social Security’s impending financial collapse. And yet the need to confront the problem has never...
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
Two long established Trump critics have recently berated the President quite differently. One, National Review Editor Rich Lowry, offered constructive criticism of the way Trump has handled himself in the closing weeks of his campaign; the other critic, a National Review Online Founding Editor and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, offered more of the same dyspeptic...
There are few issues more emotional than abortion. The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...
“Trust no one.” The landmark TV series The X-Files used that catchphrase in depicting a world riven with conspiracies that reach to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agents who attempted to unravel these grand conspiracies, make the occasional appearance in Kathryn Olmsted’s Real Enemies. Man...
From 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. As one of the...
One vocal U.S. political tribe argues vociferously that capitalism is the source of all economic problems. Another tends to ignore that the current economy is not working for all Americans. French economist Thomas Philippon’s work should interest those who aren’t satisfied with either the complaints of the left or the indifference of the right. Philippon...
“We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way—divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed—and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.” —Hilaire Belloc Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that...
In Our Interest Another Chronicles read cover to cover, with great delight. Srdja Trifkovic’s essay “Travel Ban, and Beyond” (The American Interest, August) was a thoughtful and excellent argument for a closer examination of immigrants and visitors to our great land. Thank you for another excellent issue. —Mayor David Theiss Ellaville,...
Our present world feels more and more like Orwell’s dystopia but unlike in his story, we have the power to stop the party we live under.
Thomas Carlyle was a bundle of intellectual and literary energy in the Victorian age, but his forceful ideas may have even more relevance to our present-day problems.
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
Feminist lifestyle prescriptions aren’t resulting in feminism sending America its best.
To paraphrase one observer of Albanians, “Mexico is not a society with corruption; Mexico is a corrupt society.” Mexico has been undergoing a social crisis since the end of the Partido Revolutionario Institucional’s 71-year monopoly on political power. Gone is the state’s patronage of competing interests, populism that succeeded by co-opting all opponents. The coffers...
[This article first appeared in the June 1990 issue of Chronicles.] The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite,...
Political correctness has, since the 1990’s, been a tool the left has used to silence the proponents of traditional morality, society, and culture. Under the banner of “sensitivity,” which has the veneer of a Higher Morality, p.c. has infected the university, the high school, the grade school, the media, business, public office, and public discourse. ...
Edmund Spenser (1554-99) decided while still a student to make himself into the great English poet on the model of Vergil. So he began his publishing career with a set of 12 pastorals, and planned an enormous 24-book allegorical romance-epic, The Faerie Queene, to glorify Elizabeth I and her Britain as Vergil had glorified Rome...
Equality is a pernicious and dangerous political policy, but that’s exactly what President Obama declared in full voice in his Second Inaugural Address in January as the cause and preoccupation of his administration for the next four years. Of course equality in the abstract is meaningless. It becomes concrete only when we figure out what...
According to pious American folklore, there was in 1787 a “Miracle at Philadelphia” in which demigod Founding Fathers gathered and gave the world the “U.S. Constitution”; thereby, as chanted by former Chief Justice Burger in a juvenile bicentennial panegyric, they changed human history forever—and got rid of the awful Articles of Confederation, which stood in...
When an acquitted William Kennedy Smith emerged from the Florida courtroom last December declaring his faith in the system, a viewer could only query, “Why?” There stood a young man who was indicted for rape and forced to spend over one million dollars defending himself on the basis of the word of one person, the...
That mob that split off from the Donald Trump rally of Jan. 6 to invade the Capitol has proven a godsend to the left. The death of a Capitol cop has enabled the left—which spent the summer after George Floyd’s death trashing “racist cops” and shouting, “Defund the Police!”—to posture as fighting allies of the...