A recent film festival sponsored by Human Rights Watch at New York’s Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center attracted the hard-core sandalistas of the Upper West Side, who filed in to watch—what else?—the Sandinistas and Contras in a cartoon of a Canadian documentary called The World Stopped Watching. The accompanying flyer asked, “What happens to...
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Boehner’s Right—It’s Trump’s Party Now
“There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party,” John Boehner told a Mackinac, Michigan, gathering of the GOP faithful last week. “The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.” Ex-Speaker Boehner should probably re-check the old party’s pulse, for the Bush-Boehner GOP may not just be napping. It could be comatose. Consider....
The Life You Save Could Be Your Own
The thesis that modern ideologies are a secular replacement for transcendent religions is old hat even to the half-educated in Western society. (The phrase “immanentizing the eschaton” was coined by Eric Voegelin and popularized by William Buckley in the 60’s.) And so a cursory glance at James Schall’s book suggests that the author is simply...
In the News Again
The Confederate battle flag is in the news again—specifically the one that has flown from the state capitol dome in Columbia, South Carolina, by legislative resolution, every day since 1962. A combination of leaders of civil rights organizations, out-of-state-owned mass media, and big business powers has been trying to get the flag down for years....
Not a Live Tribe
Alphabetical order is useful for miscellaneous collections of items such as indexes, directories, dictionaries and encyclopedias, address books, and musings and bits of lore (Voltaire’s Alphabet of Wit, for example). Elsewhere it serves a pedagogical purpose, as in children’s readers and old collections (medieval bestiaries, botanical compendia). John Ashbery’s latest volume, Planisphere: New Poems, contains...
Tainted Love
Conservatives rightly honor George Washington, but why should any conservative so much as like Washington, D.C.? The answer seems as perplexing as the desire of a tourist to buy an “I Love D.C.” T-shirt from one of the Third World vendors on Capitol Hill. Tell me, Mr. Smith of Heartland, U.S.A., does wearing red-white-and-blue schlock...
The War on Terror Ended
Unlike some of my readers, I’m old enough to remember the time, during the American occupation of Baghdad, when this part of the city was known as the Green Zone. It was renamed the Yellow Peace Zone ten years ago, after Iraq joined the China-led Association of South-West Asian Nations (ASWAN). In fact, I’m digital-delivering...
Yes, You’re Next
A bunch of charlatans and clowns met in Athens, Greece, at the end of September and, to use an old Greek expression, managed to make a hole in the water. In other words, they accomplished nada, but they stuffed themselves with feta and tasty Greek food, stayed at the best hotels, accepted honorariums, pumped up...
To Die for Charlie Hebdo?
“I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it.” That maxim of Voltaire was among those most invoked by the marching millions in Sunday’s mammoth “Je Suis Charlie” rally in Paris. This week, in the spirit of Voltaire, French authorities arrested and charged...
The Gentile Church Act II: An Excursus
To understand how the Church disentangled itself from Judaism, it is necessary to know a little bit about what the term “Jew” means. Modern Christians often seem to think that all the Old Testament patriarchs are Jews, though Adam and Abraham are obviously the ancestors of many nations. The “children of Israel” are, in tradition,...
A Southern Tradition
A southern tradition ended on August 19, when Beth Anne Hogan, a 17-year-old ponytailed blonde from Junction City, Oregon, signed the Virginia Military Institute’s matriculation book. With help from Janet Reno’s Justice Department and the U.S. Supreme Court, Miss Hogan and some 30 other young women have done to VMI what the corpulent Shannon Faulkner...
Of Men and Beasts
The old man has done a bit of everything that a journalist can do. He has been an opera critic, a war correspondent, a sportswriter. He prides himself most on the years he spent covering the bullfights of his native Sevilla. For some time now he has been mumbling to his American visitor, Bruce Schoenfeld,...
The Theft of an American Classic
Country music has never been shirked in the pages of Chronicles, as any faithful reader knows. John Reed’s June column concerning the Far East’s fascination with country music, however, left out one pertinent mention: the story of Torn Mitsui. Mr. Mitsui is a fifty-year-old professor of English at Kanazawa University; he is also Japan’s foremost...
A Time to Reap
I do not know what the city-bred recollect of childhood, but one of my earliest memories is of a sunny Easter morning, when I was no more than three or four years old, standing in an unpaved lane that led down to a tiny farm: the bright new grass was pushing through last year’s burnt-over...
Neocon Armageddon!
That old agitator Mahatma Gandhi certainly knew his chops, and one of his aphorisms surely has resonance when we contemplate the Trump phenomenon: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” This is certainly what has happened in 2015, as Donald Trump defies the Establishment, the pundits,...
Middle Kingdom Rising
In 1935 the Nazi regime was two years old, fully consolidated at home, and increasingly assertive abroad. It enacted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws and announced that Germany would start a massive rearmament program, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Meanwhile, Britain and France were focused on condemning Mussolini’s intervention in Ethiopia and on punishing...
Affirmative Action and the Lubavitcher Rebbe
As if it wasn’t bad enough that the 92-year-old Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, died without an heir, or that he sorely disappointed a considerable faction of his most zealous disciples by refusing to cheat death and thus show himself as the Messiah, what followed the traditional seven days of mourning turned out to be...
Drain the Racket
When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was first passed, “help wanted: men” and “help wanted: women” ads were common in newspapers. Private employers could hire and fire for discriminatory reasons. Title VII made discriminatory ads and the hiring practices they represent illegal. In their new book, Unequal, two law professors, Sandra...
“Zip to Zap”
The first “Zip to Zap,” or “Zap-In,” made headlines around the world, in places as different as Pakistan and Russia, to say nothing of Washington and Miami. It was 1969, with civil rights and anti-Vietnam marches, US forces in Southeast Asia at an all-time high, and, the year before, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the Democratic...
Thirst for Empire
Tacitus, writing about Caesar Augustus and the beginnings of the Roman Empire, says, “How few were left who had seen the republic!” How few are left. Tacitus also mourns that the “State had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old morality.” John Dickinson, who, like many of the founders of...
Willie Sutton Answers Eric Holder
Born in a Cadillac in Beverley Hills Raised on gin and vitamin pills, Robbed him a bank, when he was only three Now he’s locked up in the penitentiary, Willie, Willie Sutton.. Someone taught me this parody of “Davy Crockett,” when I was ten years old, I am not sure I remember the concluding words...
The Agrarian Burden
Recently, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute hosted a panel discussion on the “great books of conservatism,” among which was Richard Weaver’s 1948 work Ideas Have Consequences. The title, as one panelist noted, has become something of a catchphrase on the right, even as the memory of Weaver and his own influences, the Southern Agrarians, fades into...
Conservative Relatives
Howard Phillips, a giant of the conservative movement and a founding member of the New Right, passed away on April 20 at the age of 72. A graduate of Harvard University, Phillips was appointed by President Nixon to head the Office of Economic Opportunity with a mandate to shut it down. When Nixon gave in...
Letter From Pale: The War Industry
There were two reasons for my visit to Belgrade last fall. His Beatitude, the Serbian Orthodox patriarch Lord Paul (82 years old), invited me to his official residence to honor me for “my endeavour to interpret objectively the all-Serbian tragedy.” I was decorated with the Order of St. Sava I, the highest decoration of the...
American Artisan
Whenever Robert Valade embarked on a commissioned piece, or simply took his hammer and chisel to cut an exquisitely fashioned design into a gift for a friend, he first bowed his large head and prayed to God to help him finish the job right. It was a simple ritual Robert performed some 14,000 times during...
At Last, America First!
Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution going on in America. The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing a great divide, and there is no going back. Donald Trump’s triumphant march to the nomination in Cleveland, virtually assured...
A Supreme Disqualification
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court once again trampled on the rights of the states. The media took little notice. Since it became a state in 1912, Arizona has had a citizenship requirement for voters. In 2004, the people of the state, in an effort to combat voter fraud, enacted Proposition 200. This initiative requires...
We Hardly Knew You
First, you realized that “Holden Caulfield” wasn’t innocent anymore; then, that he was old; then, that he is dead. J.D. Salinger was 91 when he passed away recently in Cornish, New Hampshire, and that means not only that he had been disappeared and aged for a long time, but that he never was young even...
Little Jimmy’s Last Hurrah
“A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.” —James Freeman Clarke James Madison was not “The Father of the Constitution.” I know you were probably taught that in school. I myself am guilty of having foisted that old truism of the history classroom off on countless sullen but gullible undergraduates....
Shane On Wheels
Drive Produced by Bold Films and Odd Lot Entertainment Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn Screenplay by Hossein Amini from the novel by James Sallis Distributed by Film District At the close of George Stevens’ 1953 big-screen version of Jack Schaefer’s novel, Shane, ten-year-old Joey Starrett (Brandon De Wilde) called repeatedly to his wounded idol,...
Naked Men in National Museums
What in the name of Gilbert Stuart is going on at the National Portrait Gallery? A week ago, CNSNews’ Penny Starr reignited the culture war with an arresting story about the staid old museum that began thus: The federally funded National Portrait Gallery, one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, is currently showing an...
Olmert’s Bombshell
Israel’s outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel will have to give up almost the entire occupied West Bank, including most settlements and East Jerusalem, as the price for peace with the Palestinians. “What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” he declared—and he was right. ...
To the Pretoria Station
Governments, Lenin once wrote, never fall unless they are first pushed. Whatever his faults, the old Bolshevik must have known something about how to get rid of unwanted regimes. In the Revolution of 1917, it was the Imperial German government that helped to push over what was left of the Russian state by dispatching Lenin...
It’s Time for (Yawn) Another Election
It hasn’t escaped attention down here that it’s an election year. My buddy Eugene, who cares about these things more than is good for him, explained to me the other day why George Bush is going to be our next President. “Well,” he said, “first we had Jimmy doing his Woodrow Wilson impression, right? Upright...
Fascism in Montford
During the early morning hours of Monday, March 31, an unidentified person or persons smashed out the window of a ten-year-old Honda Civic parked on Cumberland Street in the neighborhood of Montford in Asheville. The car is registered in my name. My son, who works here in Asheville, had used the car for several years...
Moldovan Elections: A Deadlock on Europe’s Periphery
Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million...
An Op-Ed Ode to Abortion
The NYT recently published a brief op-ed piece by one Judy Nicastro – a self-described “non-religious”, “old school liberal” from Seattle. In fashionably maudlin prose, Nicastro writes about aborting her son at 23 weeks. That repulsive little article is a good example of the worldview of abortion proponents. Now, what was the reason for Nicastro’s decision...
Why Democracy Doesn’t Work
Critical stands against democracy, when not simply ignored or mechanically rejected as mere fascist outbursts, are usually met with a supposedly wise objection: You may be right, except that you’re targeting an imperfect form of democracy. Thus, Tocqueville never addressed the principle; he decreed democracy would perfect itself as it matured. This is why I...
Going Down With the Good Ship Lollipop
“As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt Have you been to a toy store lately? Barbie’s got some heavy competition these days. The Bratz collection, for instance: Yasmin, Sasha, Cloe, Jade—all household names for several years now. Check out that hot little number Sasha in her...
A Journey to the Bottom of the World
The plane took off to the east out of Denver, banked steeply right, and came round on a southwest heading: over Pike’s Peak, the Sangre de Christo Mountains, and the Great Sand Dunes National Monument; across the San Luis Valley, the upper Rio Grande, and the San Juan Mountains; over Chaco Canyon, with a view...
Deadly” “Kiss Me
My title is not the title the film is known by, but it is, with familiar strangeness, the title that we see, as the credits crawl “the wrong way” (in this film, the right way), imitating the unwinding of the road as seen from a speeding vehicle. In other words, the plane of the screen...
The Terminal Playboy
When he died on September 27 at the age of 91, Hugh Hefner was no playboy. He was an old man trapped in what amounted to a factory, surrounded by silicone, plastic, and hydrogen compounds. Playboy’s circulation had peaked 45 years earlier with its November 1972 issue. Even before then, Hef’s magazine had long ceded...
Still Fighting the Civil War
The influx of Northern migrants to these parts continues to produce misunderstanding. Some time ago, the good people of Hillsborough, North Carolina, gave up their right to shoot marauding vermin in their own backyards to an official municipal squirrel-shooter. Citizens whose nut trees were being sacked, gardens despoiled, or houses chewed up (it happens) could...
Italian Justice
I have always hated students, a class as concrete to my mind as workers were to Karl Marx’s, a race as particular in my imagination as the Jews were in Alfred Rosenberg’s. Visiting a city like Florence, for me, is a painful experience, somewhere between what joining a gay-rights march would be for Taki or...
A Giant Beset by Pygmies
Most newspaper and magazine articles are forgotten not long after they appear. Does anyone read the 25-year-old columns of Norman Podhoretz, William F. Buckley, or Richard John Neuhaus for insight into current events? It therefore tells us something when First Things prints a 20-page essay about a political journalist who has been dead for almost...
Letter From Kentucky: Covington and the Cannibals
Having mistakenly thought that he had killed his rival during a fight over a girl, 16-year old Simon Kenton headed west from Virginia into Kentucky. Before he turned 20 Kenton had established himself as a first-rate ranger and Indian fighter, and he had become a frontier icon by the time he died in 1836 at...
Jewish Antisemistism
“The only thing missing is the sign Arbeit Macht Frei,” said an English friend as we watched a British-made documentary on the children of Gaza. My wife, a German, winced. I did not. Watching a Palestinian father break down and cry while an Israeli official refuses him an exit permit so his seven-year-old son can...
Naked Men in National Museums
What in the name of Gilbert Stuart is going on at the National Portrait Gallery? A week ago, CNSNews’ Penny Starr reignited the culture war with an arresting story about the staid old museum that began thus: The federally funded National Portrait Gallery, one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, is currently showing...
Tom Wolfe, R.I.P.
When Tom Wolfe’s debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in November 1987, the book was greeted with effusive praise and became a best-seller, although some literati seemed offended by Wolfe’s highly descriptive prose, the hyperbole, exuberant punctuation, and occasional sound effects. After film rights were sold for $750,000 that winter to Peter...
Re: Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame
Tom, I’m pretty optimistic about the lawsuit filed by Notre Dame and 42 other Catholic organizations. Filing essentially the same case in multiple federal district courts increases the possibility of getting the right result out of at least one, and getting mixed results will kick this issue up to the Supreme Court. So it seems likely...