“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...
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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...
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...
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...
Slaviansk: Civilians Under Attack
Six-year-old Polina Sladkaya became the latest lodger of the Slaviansk morgue. She was killed on June 8 by a Ukrainian mortar shell. Everyone knows that morgue workers are not distressed by the sight of dead bodies, because of a natural coping mechanism. But even the morgue workers wept when they saw this blonde-haired toddler with...
When Sex Conquers Love
Much as I hate to admit it, AIDS czarina Kristine Gebbie got it right. The message to youngsters these days does indeed give the impression that sex is ugly, dirty, and a more perverse than pleasurable experience. Ms. Gebbie bungled only when she took on the role of anti-Victorian-morality crusader. In the space of a...
Why Milosevic Must Go
Experience teaches us that dictatorial regimes are anything but indestructible. They are inherently irrational and therefore unstable. Sooner or later they collapse. To reach ripe old age and die in bed, like Tito, is exceptional for a dictator; to set his country on the steady road to democratic reform, like Franco, is unique. The method...
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...
We’re All Sikhs Now
The shooting of Sikhs at a temple in Milwaukee is generating the usual blather about senseless violence, the paranoid racialist right, and the patriotism of Sikh immigrants. I finally heard, this morning, the inevitable, “Today, we are all Sikhs.” Excuse me, but no, I am not now and shall never be a Sikh. Sikhs,...
I’m Sorry You’re a Terrorist
It’s 9 a.m. Do you know where your government is? An April 7 report issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security caused a stir among veterans and pro-life activists. It was published to alert state and local law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials that the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis Assessment has suggested that right-wing...
Loose Rigging: Scandal and the 102nd Congress
Early last February, Representative John Lewis took the House floor and demanded, “How can our constituents expect Congress to address the nation’s economic ills when tens of thousands may have been embezzled and stolen right here in the Capitol? How can they expect Congress to deal with a drug epidemic if cocaine is in fact...
Stage Fright
“And there was a great cry in Egypt.” —Exodus 12:30 A friend, though less in the sense of an intimate confidant, perhaps, than that of the famously urbane hobgoblin that was the guiding spirit of the old New Yorker, writes: Having just plowed painfully through your latest (and last!) May 2002 “Letter From (so-called) Milan,”...
Storytelling
Constitutional lawyers like to tell the story (probably apocryphal, since it’s too good to be true) that, sometime in the 1960’s, when the Warren Court was engaged in its effort to rewrite the Constitution, one crusty old Harvard Law professor, upon reading the latest product from the Supremes, stormed into his constitutional law class, roared...
Indispensable Petrarch
Old-fashioned English professors like to speak of “the Canon” in reverential tones, as if there were a list of great books as ancient as the Spartan king list and as hallowed as the kyrie. In fact, what they usually have in mind is a rummage sale assortment of a few really essential works jumbled together...
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...
The Discovery
The old saw tells us that all things come to those who wait. And what a joy it is to find Andrew Lytle, in his vigorous 80’s, receiving his just due, however late. The Richard Weaver Award by The Ingersoll Foundation, a generous grant by the Lyndhurst Foundation for his contribution to his Southern culture,...
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...
Joe Biden Is Too Dangerous to Mock
If the right keeps laughing at Joe Biden, it risks sleepwalking into another devastating defeat for itself and the country.
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...
The Tyranny of Non-Thought
The sullen self-righteousness of the progressive left (i.e., “We’re right, and the rest of you can go to the hot place!”) glows on college campuses everywhere but also in big cities—such as my beloved New Orleans, come to think of it: a locality embroiled in useless controversy over the removal of four Confederate-themed statues. City...
Separate Sexual Identity and State
What gives the LGBTQ community a right to an official presence in public that’s denied to religious believers?
Christian Martyrdom
I like and respect Pat Buchanan, whose heart is always in the right place. I feel compelled to offer an addendum to his recent article on the suffering of Middle East Christians, not because I disagree with anything he says but because the whole story deserves closer scrutiny. Persecution and martyrdom are inseparable from Eastern...
Deep as Dante
Brenda Wineapple’s new biography of the most brilliant flower of the New England Renaissance reminded me that it was time to reread Hawthorne. She delineated the man very well, got his politics almost right, but barely did justice to his work. Writing in 1847, ten years after the publication of Hawthorne’s first collection of stories,...
The Last of the Royals
When historians survey Europe’s 20th century, rarely do they question the fundamental evil of the old irrelevant monarchies and aristocratic regimes, and the obvious necessity of replacing them with progressive socialist and nationalist substitutes. A strong case can in fact be made that those ancien regime states disappeared some decades too early, and that had...
A Wittgensteinian Reading
Increasingly I find myself in the position of the dissident in an old Soviet joke, protesting against the regime on a street corner by handing out leaflets. A passerby takes one, sees that it’s a blank sheet of paper, and asks why there are no words. “Who needs words?” counters the protester. “Isn’t it all...
Running the Big Khan in Philly
If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, Scoundrel Time to the nth degree was on full display in Philadelphia last week. The closing days of the Democratic Convention featured an orgy of frenzied flag-waving (never mind the minimal presence of Old Glory at the opening) and orchestrated chants of “USA! USA! USA!” (doing double...
In Remembrance of My Brothers
Three New York firefighters raise Old Glory over the rubble of the World Trade Center. The dramatic moment is captured from afar by a photographer. Within a day or two, the photo is featured in newspapers across the United States. It becomes as recognizable as the Marine flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi. T-shirts soon appear with...
The Decline and Fall of Rock
The twists of fate have resulted in rock becoming the conservative music of the age, but specifically conservative, not right-wing, which would have been truly counter-cultural and "dangerous."
Americans Before the Fall
For those of us who love the Old Republic, a new book by David Hackett Fischer is a cause for celebration. His newest will not disappoint the high expectations created by his previous work. Washington’s Crossing is really a successor volume to Paul Revere’s Ride (1994), about the battles of Lexington and Concord and the...
Afghan Lies: Continuity of Deceit
[above: Office of War Information research workers, 1943] The Afghanistan Papers, published by The Washington Post on Dec. 9, have demonstrated that successive U.S. administrations have deliberately and systematically disinformed the nation about the nature of the conflict, its course, and prospects. This should be no surprise to those who have studied the modern history of foreign affairs...
Kidnapped
This book was first published in England as The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century. Neither title describes the book very accurately. It is really an extended meditation on Browne’s life and interests as they strike a 21st-century science writer who likes to ride a bicycle and who, like Browne, lives in...
Trump, the West and the Left
The political left really, really, really doesn’t approve of Western civilization. If you doubt it, reference the maledictions poured out by the left on Donald Trump’s Warsaw speech last week. Trump had the effrontery to say, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Followed by rhetorical inquiries:...
A Fork in Europe’s Road
European leaders have a decision to make: treat Russia as an integral part of Europe with legitimate security concerns, or treat her as an Asiatic pariah to be crippled.
A Gen-X Sense of Risk Is Needed to Save Generations Y and Z
Modern life feels depressing for today’s youth because so much of it is lived online. The answer lies in embracing risk and adventure away from screens.
On Decter’s Philly
Samuel Francis is to be congratulated for having written one of the best essays on the American conservative establishment (“Queen of the Damned,” Principalities & Powers, August) that I have seen. Dr. Francis correctly notes that the appointment of Midge Decter as president of the Philadelphia Society, a once stimulating conservative debating club, points to...
The Klondike Stampede, Part II
For Part I of “The Klondike Stampede,” see Sins of Omission in the December 2017 issue. The 250 Indians who inhabited Dyea on the eve of the gold rush were Chilkats, members of the Tlingit tribe. They were short and stocky, and excellent packers. They commonly carried packs of 100 pounds or more. They charged...
Literacy Before the Revolution
Publishers Weekly must be the most depressing magazine published in the United States. Oh, there are others like Esquire that make us despair for the affluent numskulls who swap life-styles as if they were wives, or The New Yorker that makes us remember how really boring New York can be. But for the sick feeling...
Was George Will Wrong?
If Rush Limbaugh can pass for a conservative these days, it’s no marvel that George Will can, too. Unlike Limbaugh, he at least reads books, especially Victorian ones. (He even named his daughter Victoria.) But he shares with Limbaugh an easygoing approach to defining conservatism, to the extent that a tabloid tramp such as Rudy...
Oriental Fumin’
It was not what we have come to expectwhen John Paul II arrives in a Christian country—or in any country, for that matter. In place of adoring crowds lining the streets along which the popemobile made its stately progress, there were scattered groups of demonstrators hurling imprecations both angry and somewhat bizarre: “arch-heretic, two-horned, grotesque...
The Eudaemonic Serb
The Ritz Club, the casino arm of the venerable and resplendent hotel in Piccadilly, is, for the discriminating player with an 18th-century sense of what gambling is all about, “the other place.” Apart from the late John Aspinall’s hallowed sepulchre in Curzon Street, this subterranean alhambra is the only privately owned gambling club in London. ...
Don’t Tread on Us
In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...
The Novel and the Imperial Self
Preoccupation with the state of the novel was until about 10 years ago one of the major bores of American criticism. From the early 1950’s well into the 60’s, it was scarcely possible to get through a month without reading as a rule in the Sunday book review supplements or the editorial page of Life—that...
‘One Percenter’ Barack Obama Hopes to Rescue the Hapless Harris
The one we have been waiting for is back on the campaign trail, this time to shill for Kamala Harris and secure his virtual fourth term.
Rendering Unto Lincoln
“Now he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton is supposed to have said, when he learned of President Lincoln’s death. In a trivial sense at least, Stanton was obviously correct. We have Lincoln’s face on the five-dollar bill—a bill that used to be worth more than a Happy Meal, before Lincoln’s disciples degraded the currency—and...
Biden vs. Biden on ‘Is America a Racist Country?’
“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.” So declared Sen. Tim Scott, a Black Republican, in his televised rebuttal to Joe Biden’s address to Congress. Asked the next day what he thought of Scott’s statement, Biden said he agrees. “No, I don’t think the American people are racist.” Vice President Kamala Harris also...
The Unbearable Illegitimacy of American Law
For some time now, American law and lawyers have had a legitimacy problem. Most Americans must wonder how it is that unelected federal judges have the power to declare that no state government can punish consensual homosexual relations, prohibit abortion, or permit prayer in the schools (to mention just a few of the striking things...
Orwell in Chains
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” remains a lighthouse, the beam sweeping past the scene for a moment of blinding illumination before passing on to darkness. Though Orwell enjoined us against cliché, Hamlet’s “More honoured in the breach than the observance” applies: Everybody lauds Orwell, but few appear to have read him. And of...
Italian Lessons
Two or three times a week, after dinner, I watch the traffic jam outside Franco’s bar. What causes it nobody knows, but a perfectly ordinary intersection of two perfectly ordinary country roads is suddenly blocked. Nobody knows why the best watermelon is the one with the smallest spot on the bottom, or how come the...
Send in the Clowns
Karagiozis is a mythical Greek character created sometime during the Ottoman occupation (1455-1827). He manages to outwit the Turk at every turn by being funny, dishonest at times, and a very quick thinker. For example, he discusses a business with a Turk and proposes an equal sharing of the wealth. “What’s yours is mine,” he...