“Learn to think imperially.” —Joseph Chamberlain Imagine that, for a few years, you had been investing the money you had saved for your daughter’s college education in one of those moderately conservative plans that provide some increase in the value of the investment without exposing it to major risks. But then your financial planner—let’s call...
Bill Clinton and Richard Cobden, a 19th-century English anti-Corn Law crusader, have more in common than consonants in their surnames. As economic internationalists, both trumpeted commerce as the panacea for attaining world peace and prosperity. In their own ways, both bear responsibility for the new international economic order which rests on the twin foundations of...
For an informed insight into British politics, avoid the mainstream media. You would rest on a waterbed of misconceptions. The final ballot for the Tory leadership candidates closed with this result: Boris, 160; Hunt, 77; Gove, 75. So the top two go into a series of nationwide hustings, with the run-off put to Conservative Party...
Reviews of Blonde, adapted from the Joyce Carol Oates biographical novel of the same title, and the 1951 film, The Enforcer.
Edward Albee: An Interview and Essay; Edited by Julian N. Wasserman; University of St. Thomas; Houston, TX. Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Don Quixote; Edited by Fredson Bowers; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. We often hear that language is under siege in America today, that it is being assailed on all sides by people who, either...
This is probably my last letter from Florence, and I must say that it is with somewhat mixed feelings that I turn my back on the treasury of the Renaissance. Oh, sure, I tried to like living here. I tried it the way the French writer Andre Gide tried to like living in Stalin’s Moscow,...
There must be some mistake. After finishing Bob Djurdjevic’s “Wiping Out the Middle Class” (May), I suspect someone has sneaked the latest issue of Mother Jones inside a Chronicles cover. Such hand-wringing over an alarmist report on “income inequality” released by a liberal Washington think tank whose mission is to lobby for more redistribution of...
In case you hadn’t heard, Vice President Kamala Harris’ venture into government space propaganda for children was a galactic bust. The veep’s smarmy performance in a NASA agitprop video touting World Space Week was universally ridiculed and exposed this weekend after a local Monterey, California, TV station interviewed one of five child actors who auditioned...
When Glenn Beck took the podium at his Restoring Honor rally, he began by listing off the names of American heroes and identifying their motivation to fight for their country: “You cannot coexist with evil.” If evil has reared its ugly head, an honorable man, like Washington and Lincoln, must stand and fight. It’s a...
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...
“The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” With this defiant declaration, to a thunderous ovation at AIPAC, Benjamin Netanyahu informed the United States that East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan in the Six Day War, is not...
Thursday, Sept. 14, looks to be a fateful day in the half-century-long political career of Joe Biden. That night, a three-hour debate will be held, a marathon in politics. Biden will be on stage, taking incoming missiles for 180 minutes from nine rivals, each of whom is hungry for the Democratic nomination and has a...
In his novel 1984, George Orwell created a world devoid of freedom and justice, truth and goodness. But there is another void in the book that critics seldom notice: the utter lack of religious faith. The absence of any vestige of religion seems to Christianity’s advantage: The Orwellian world is such a desolate, inhuman, and...
It is a universally acknowledged truth that when epidemics strike, men and women turn to God. In this latest of epidemics, most churches the world over have been closed and their worshippers have been directed to websites where leaders hold virtual ceremonies. There have been reports of crackdowns on Christians attempting to worship in the...
A planned federal "red flag" gun control plan backed by Senate Republicans will make it easy for gun-owning citizens to be labeled "mental health threats" and disarmed by anyone who doesn't like them.
Witches and Satanists tax-exempt? When we raised the issue in the September 1988 Chronicles, several members of the nation’s clerical lobby scoffed. But in Rhode Island, the home of Roger Williams and other champions of religious freedom without responsibility, a witches’ coven known as Our Lady of the Roses Wiccan Church has apparently met the...
MAGA must maintain America’s longstanding commitment to being a “friend of liberty” even as putting America first may sometimes clash with the short-term interests of allies we hope to see free.
During the 1930’s many Americans were enamored of the “grand and noble experiment” called the Soviet Union. Movie stars, clergymen, authors, intellectuals, columnists, and other American opinion makers traveled to the USSR and returned with glowing reports of the joys of socialism under Joseph Stalin. Many immigrants from the former Russian empire believed these stories...
Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day, I asserted a few months ago in Chronicles (“Taking Stock,” Views, November 2000), would “seek to persuade Middle Canadian voters that the [governing] Liberals are their enemies, not their friends.” I also argued that he didn’t “play by his enemies’ rules,” and that his party was “a viable alternative to...
One of the great ironies of the late-1990’s stock-market bubble is that more Americans followed the advice of Wall Street scam artists than that of Omaha billionaire Warren E. Buffett, the best money manager in the second half of the 20th century. The “New Paradigm” fooled much of America; Buffett and his partner, Charlie...
George W. Hunt: John Cheever: The Hobgoblin Comapny of Love; Wm. B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, MI. The Rev. George W. Hunt, S J., literary editor of America, has written a valuable study of the fiction of John Cheever, one that will remain a source of lasting value for future critics and scholars to consult. However, I have reservations about Hunt’s...
Conservatives are fond of saying that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and in their appeals to the national conscience, they invoke the sacred language of republican tradition, citing scriptures from Aristotle and Cicero, from Edmund Burke and George Washington: the ride of law, a virtuous citizenry, and ordered liberty. Like most...
The decisions that determined the fate of the great nations and empires that failed to survive the 20th century are well known. For the Kaiser’s Germany, it was the “blank cheque” to Austria after Sarajevo. For Great Britain, the 1939 war guarantee to Poland. For the Third Reich, it was the June 1941 invasion of...
In his “Letter From Cork” (“The Polonization of Ireland,” Correspondence, March), Christie Davies hopefully predicts that recent Polish immigrants will reevangelize postmodern Ireland. From his lips to God’s ears, although I doubt that the Almighty will be listening. I, in turn, predict (but do not hope) that what is now a sizable Polish community will...
Year after year, a president gives a State of the Union Address, and year after year the minority party’s response is predictably awful. Admittedly, the quest to find a humanoid capable of speaking sensible and winsome words into a camera in a political context has always proved to be a remarkable challenge, even for the...
Camille Paglia, current official Court Enemy of America’s East Coast intellectual mafia, recently went on record in the New York Times encouraging federal support of the allegedly endangered American art form of rock music. She is correct in praising rock as one of American folk art’s grand contributions to world culture. Rock is definitively American,...
From the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. I had heard about, but not read, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama’s star-burst essay published in 1989; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for him as his critics chortled and pointed at history rumbling anew: people dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falling to...
The schedule is rather monotonous for a lecturer invited to the big cities where universities are usually located. First comes the airport, then the car with the polite, smiling young man as a guide, then hotel room and restaurant, podium, introduction, photo graphs, the lecture itself-then the whole thing in reverse order the next day....
The euphoria that accompanied the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, should still be fresh in our minds. We remember the scenes of people dancing on the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, total strangers embracing each other, sharing bottles of champagne. We remember the party atmosphere that culminated in reunification...
For three decades, William Jennings Bryan streaked across the sky of American politics, his brightness never fading despite countless failures. Renowned for his zealous Christian faith, he appropriately expired immediately after his final and most glorious defeat, at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. In A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, author...
I already sounded the alarm in last month’s letter. This really is an impossible city to get out of And so, having bid my farewells, I’m still here, despite the fact that the rent has been paid in advance on a perfectly adequate little aerie over the Grand Canal in Venice. The place even has...
Oxford University Press advertises its Past Master series (of which this book is one) as being “a noble encyclopaedia of the history of ideas” in which “lucid and authoritative” modern critics introduce us to the best of what has been thought and written. Oxford seems to have dropped a brick on this one. Lucid? Here...
Calvary Produced by Reprisal Films and The Irish Film Board Directed and written by John Michael McDonagh Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce has the father of his protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, bitterly complain of the Irish people, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden...
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...
With the revelation by an intel community “whistleblower” that President Donald Trump, in a congratulatory call to the new president of Ukraine, pushed him repeatedly to investigate the Joe Biden family connection to Ukrainian corruption, the cry “Impeach!” is being heard anew in the land. But revisiting how this latest scandal came about, and how...
An American television viewer will witness more violence in a single evening than an Athenian would have seen during a lifetime of theatergoing. Acts of violence were virtually prohibited in Greek drama, and Aristotle goes so far as to argue against the use of “mere spectacle” to produce the desired catharsis of pity and fear:...
This article first appeared in the December 1986 issue of Chronicles. In his novel 1984, George Orwell created a world devoid of freedom and justice, truth and goodness. But there is another void in the book that critics seldom notice: the utter lack of religious faith. The absence of any vestige of religion seems to...
The birth of modern Croatia was closely tied to the paternalistic image of one man: Franjo Tudjman. A self-described nationalist and anticommunist, Tudjman ruled over Croatia for ten years until his death in December 1999. In January 2000, presidential and parliamentary elections brought to power a motley crew of reformed communists, liberals, and globalists. The...
Sir Thomas More: Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one. Richard Rich: If I was, who would know it? Sir Thomas More: You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that. —Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons Last spring, students at Chelsea Academy performed...
In commenting on the reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s drug addiction, fellow radio talk-show host Michael Savage used the biblical quotation, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” When antidrug warrior Limbaugh was exposed as a subject of a criminal drug investigation, however, it was inevitable that the self-described “epitome of morality and...
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 people of Scotland have spoken. Scotland has voted not to secede from the United Kingdom and to remain in her long-standing union with England and Wales. Over two million Scots—more than 55 percent of the 3.6 million who went to the polls—voted against independence. Nearly all the electorate had registered to vote, and there...
Publicly Funded Art is causing a stir now in Los Angeles, where a mural citing (in part) the Pledge of Allegiance has drawn fire from a neighborhood group. The Little Tokyo Community Development Advisory Committee complained that placing a mural featuring the pledge above LA’s Little Tokyo was, at the very least, insensitive to the...
The Deer Hunter received the Academy Award for best picture at the Oscars ceremony in 1979. The film was much criticized by some for its Russian roulette sequences, especially the alleged “racism” on display in the film’s depiction of the Viet Cong. But The Deer Hunter is truly a mythic, poetic work of art. The...
Joseph de Maistre, a brilliant wordsmith, was an elegant defender of the old order, while John Stuart Mill, in his plodding prose, helped to usher in welfare democracy and the modern administrative state.