Chaos dominates the political scene today thanks to the success of the Trump campaign and the Trumpsteria that has accompanied it. This chaos is the subject of myriad essays, commentaries, and—most significantly—power grabs both brand new and repackaged. It was, in many senses, inevitable. Donald Trump is attracting large crowds, and his poll numbers are...
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Should Speculative Bankers Be Put to Death?
The latest spectacle of disgusting posthuman monsters in expensive suits squandering other people’s billions—while displaying nothing but studied contempt for hoi polloi whose blood is their sustenance—is sickening and infuriating. Déjà vu all over again. Never mind the regulators and government officials with whom they are in existential cahoots; the bastards will continue doing their thing...
Oh, What a Stupid War!
The war on Libya now being waged by the U.S., Britain and France must surely rank as one of the stupidest martial enterprises, smaller in scale to be sure, since Napoleon took it into his head to invade Russia in 1812. Let's start with the fierce hand-to-hand combat between members ...
What Is Paleoconservatism?
Paleoconservatism is the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture—an identity that is both collective and personal. This identity is missing from the psychological and emotional makeup of leftists of every stripe—including “neoconservatives”—and is now disavowed by mainline conservatives of the Republican...
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...
Calling Bill Donohue
When cities trumpet the glories of their downtowns, they normally talk about such things as the number and variety of restaurants and stores, easy access from other parts of the city, even the availability of parking places. Here, however, we believe in “a different kind of greatness,” and I can see the ads now: “Come...
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...
New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, now in its 14th year, has had its up and downs. But some local grumblings notwithstanding, this year’s festival was much better than last, with two excellent plays and only one real miss. Promised works from Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz and novelist...
Virtue-Signalers in a Snit
Hollywood is in a snit. Hollywood is very angry. Hollywood is having a nervous breakdown. The Donald is in the White House, and Hollywood types cannot take it any more. Ditto for the New York Times and the TV networks, except for FOX. Madonna, that aging show-off whose vocabulary consists mainly of the F-word, said...
Recreating the Epic
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” —Genesis 2.7 The 19th century had an unfortunate passion for novels in verse. I have tried to read some of the more celebrated, notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora...
Threats That Cannot Be Ignored
While some communities—such as Portland, Oregon, and Birmingham, Alabama—report making progress toward police and community mental-health cooperation to reduce incidents of deadly violence, the complexities of aberrant behavior will continue to vex us until citizens and public officials are willing to intervene to prevent the violence. That is especially true when evidence clearly demonstrates that...
Exit Timianus
There is an Arabic condiment called zatar, a mixture of dry spices which is delicious on toasted bread sprinkled with olive oil. I buy it in the Edgware Road, an oasis of the Middle East in the gastronomic desert that is London. There are many brands, unpronounceable names punctuated with guttural stops one and all,...
Up to Our Eyeballs in Gaza
I listen to Rush Limbaugh about 15 minutes a day, which is the time it takes by car to go to and from my house for lunch. Fifteen minutes is more than enough time to get the gist of what any “on air personality” will say, over and over repeating himself and ringing the changes...
The Enigmatic Professor Strauss, Part II
Where are today’s Platos and Aristotles? On this question, for once, Strauss announces that he “won’t beat around the bush in any respect”—and, actually, he doesn’t. As he states flatly: “Since a very, very early time, the main theme of my reflections has been what is called the Jewish question.” His interest does not stem...
A New Path to Peace
Israel’s recent siege of Lebanon, which has imposed a crippling humanitarian, economic, and psychological setback on her northern neighbor, may return Syria to the center stage of Middle Eastern politics. Considering Syria’s enduring influence over Lebanon and the Palestinians and her close ties to Iran, ignoring Syria no longer serves America’s (or Israel’s) interests. Even...
Petitioning Satan
Talk of secession is in the air. A number of internet petitions from several states, asking to be allowed to leave the Union, have garnered tens of thousands of signatures. Unsurprisingly, Texas leads the list, and Ron Paul has endorsed the idea. According to him, “secession is a deeply American principle.” True enough, which is...
The World According to St. Mugg
If we are to believe today’s pundits—an awfully big “if”—there are many global crises threatening the 20th century. Nuclear weapons and overpopulation currently top the list. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that there are only two available responses. The first is the “liberal” response, which assumes that mankind already possesses the tools and skills to repair...
Democrats Will Not Benefit from Their Own Republic-Destabilizing Lawfare
Democrats have no idea what they have unleashed. Perhaps worse, they don't even care.
Mildred Indemnity Always Twice Pierces the Double Postman
The sheer inanity of so much fiction today sends us necessarily to the past, and not always to Balzac and Trollope. If we are looking for something readable and American and modern, then this gathering is just the thing. Indeed, for sheer readability (if not for the finest quality), James M. Cain is hard to...
Did the GOP Just Dodge a Bullet?
When he took the floor of the Senate to reject the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Commission, Mitch McConnell may have salvaged his party’s chances to recapture the House in 2022. For that commission, being spun as a “bipartisan” effort to learn what “really happened” in the Capitol that fateful day, is a Democratic scheme to have...
Dim Young Things
Bright Young Things Produced by Doubting Hall Limited Written and directed by Stephen Fry from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies Distributed by Icon Film Distribution and Think Film, Inc. Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things is a vibrant, hectic, but finally disappointing adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies (1930). Although Fry has assembled an...
What the Thunder Said
“The earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.” —Numbers 16:32 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 convinced Voltaire (who didn’t need convincing to begin with) of the nonexistence of God. The Great California Earthquake, when it comes (as it must),...
You Can Go Home Again
As some of you may have heard, the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, June 19 to win the NBA Championship, making the Cavs the first Cleveland team to win a major sports championship since Jim Brown and Frank Ryan and Gary Collins and the rest of the Cleveland Browns defeated the...
Empire of the Ants
“America,” noted H.L. Mencken, “is a land so geographically tilted that everything which is loose rolls to California.” In the last few years, however, it seems that most of the great untethered mass has run out of steam amid the cactus groves of nearby Arizona, known in these parts as the poor man’s California and...
It Takes a Crisis
While Europe’s monetary crisis spreads, Americans watch in astonishment as the German government bails out its feckless co-unionists. Greece’s financial predicaments boiled over last summer with baton-wielding riot police pummeling Greek civil servants who objected to their government’s modest proposal to raise the official retirement age from 61 to 63 by 2015. In response, Germany...
The Ghosts of Christmas Past
“Now in history,” wrote Chesterton, “there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration.” A collective memory, a vague but compelling collection of shadows that bind us to the past, seems to whisper a perennial, bittersweet hymn to the numbed ear of man, particularly modern man. Every nation, tribe, or clan has passed on tales...
Deal With the Devil
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...
Socialist Realism from Giotto to Warhol
In the 1960’s, a fashionable subject of conversation among the Russian intelligentsia was Mikhail Sholokhov’s plagiarism. Sholokhov, it was alleged, had found the manuscript of And Quiet Flows the Don among the personal effects of a certain Cossack, published it as his own, and eventually pocketed the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature. Just look at...
Libyan Complications
In his latest interview with Serbia’s most-watched private TV channel, Dr. Trifkovic looks at the renewal of tensions in Libya. [Translated from Serbian, abbreviated] Q: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has confirmed that he is sending his country’s soldiers to Libya to support the Government of National Accord in its fight against the forces...
Neonatal Circumcision: Preventive Medicine or Mutilation?
During most of human history, religious explanations and rituals imparted meaning to people’s lives and justified controlling their conduct. Today, medical explanations and rituals often perform those functions. For example, masturbation and homosexuality were first forbidden on religious grounds, then on medical grounds. Being a male infant is, of course, not behavior. Accordingly, routine neonatal...
The Glory and the Myth of John Ford
A year ago, the University of Maryland held a special screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), followed by a two-hour discussion of the film led by representatives of the departments of history, English, philosophy, and communications. John Ford would have been publicly contemptuous of this attention from the egghead professors. In private, he probably...
Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask,
Thoughts On Mikhail Bulgakov
I always think of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov with tenderness, as if he were my relative, and a very close and dear one at that. Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was not my relative. I was not even fortunate to know him personally—he died a few years before I was born. Once, in a conversation with the editor...
Thoughts From Europe on the Eve of an Historic U.S. Election: “Crossing the Threshold of Hope”
As an elected European parliamentarian in one of NATO’s newest members, Poland—whose people are proud to be paying their agreed-upon 2% fair share for our common defense—and as Vice President of the European Parliament, I would like respectfully to offer my thoughts for the next president of the United States. First, in Europe generally, and...
A Postmodern Yahweh for Episcopalians
I had expected to find a small gathering of eccentric Episcopalians in a basement lecture hall. Instead, the National Cathedral was overflowing with a Christmas Eve-sized crowd. The draw was not a holiday but a debate between “Jesus scholars” Prof Marcus Borg of Oregon State University and the Rev. N.T. Wright of Litchfield Cathedral, England....
Western Is as Western Does
“People first, place second,” William Faulkner wrote; J. while Ford Madox Ford—whose last book was The March of Literature, described by its author as a survey of world literature from Confucius to Conrad—believed that great writing transcended not only national and cultural boundaries but those of time itself. There is, nevertheless, describably such a thing...
Finding Eden
“Likewise also the chief priests mocking said . . . Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross that we may see and believe.” I have been a citizen of the sovereign state of California for most of my life. I can guarantee you, Alta California is not merely a result of the...
The Reminiscences of Earl Wild
I was thinking recently about Earl Wild for several reasons: his achievement as a pianist; his substantial and extended contribution to the “Romantic Revival” through his performances and recordings; and my own memories of exchanges with him after three of his appearances in New York City. When I beheld him backstage, standing far away from...
On Beslan
Srdja Trifkovic’s conclusion to his piece on the Beslan tragedy (“After Beslan,” The American Interest, November) hits the mark precisely. Orthodox Christians have had it proved to them over and over again that the West will prefer the friendship of the Mohammedan to ours, unless we volunteer to forsake our convictions and identity to become...
Mother and Daughter
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Villa slept much that night from worry over Contracepción and her love interest. From time to time, one or the other would drift off—AveMaría into nightmares of a Muslim wedding, Héctor to dream of thrashing the lusty young Islamist within an inch of his life. But they would soon wake and...
Journalism
These are conflicting notions: warm feelings, no matter from which spiritual or emotional fount they emanate, must end in a bit of unfairness. The only human construct that firmly believes in and widely proclaims its ability to be exempted from this rule is, of course, the New York Times. For many years, the Times succeeded...
End Game
The latest, and perhaps the best, book to be written in the wake of the Great Recession raises an important question: Why is it that America’s self-appointed elite refuses to learn from its long record of failure and futility in economic management that its ideas and policies are all wrong? The answer is provided by...
The Courage to Live
“Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.” —Vittorio Alfieri, Oreste (1785) This volume is the first complete English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry—a cause for rejoicing. And, although Alissa Valles’s translations are a bit gray, as if sprinkled with fine dust, they are invariably precise and never overstated. While there...
Between Two Worlds
Reflecting on his upbringing in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul denies cultural identity to his part of the Caribbean: “Nothing bound us together except this common residence.” Indeed, the area called Caribbean is constantly redefining itself. Its tongues include English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Its population shows large deposits of Chinese and Indians as well as African...
Babes in Gangland
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,...
Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner
“Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty,” ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he...
What the Editors Are Reading
Having read Sir Philip Magnus’s biography of William Gladstone in graduate school, I recently picked up a copy of his King Edward the Seventh, published in 1964 and made the basis of a very excellent series by Masterpiece Theater, with the superb British actor Timothy West in the title role, a decade or so later. ...
Land of Obama
“A corrupt society has many laws,” observed the Roman historian Tacitus. The Founding Fathers knew this aphorism, and their work reflects it, from the Articles of Confederation to the Federalist to the Tenth Amendment. They designed these documents to save this country from the plague of “many laws.” And the inaugural addresses of nearly all...
Dead Souls
Barack Obama’s second presidential triumph has left many American conservatives feeling stranded. It is as if they have become aliens in their native land. Are conservatives simply sore losers, or does their sense of alienation correspond to a seismic disturbance in America’s political terrain? It is hard to say, but this much seems clear: When...
The Problem of Industrialism
Many years ago, on a train trip from New York City to Philadelphia, a friend (a city girl, actually) remarked to me, as we passed through the Jersey industrial swamps, that she would happily cancel the Industrial Revolution, supposing only that modern dental technique could be rescued for the benefit of a restored pastoral society....