Hell or High Water Produced by Film 44 Directed by David Mackenzie Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan Distributed by CBS Pete’s Dragon Produced and distributed by Walt Disney Productions Directed and written by David Lowery Hell or High Water has won extravagant praise from mainline film reviewers. This, I suspect, has to do more with its...
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That Infamous Diary
“Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.” —William Hazlitt Rarely does a published diary, even of a celebrated writer, become anything more than fodder for the specialist. Yet H.L. Mencken’s diary has been turned into a cause célèbre by its editor, Charles A....
It’s 10 A.M. on a School Day—Do You Know Who Has Your Child?
Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as “teachers’ unions.” Take the strange ease of a Minneapolis nonprofit corporation. Public School Incentives (PSI), which has proposed some interesting measures for public schools. PSFs founder, Ted...
Looming Large
The future of NATO looms large in the Clinton administration’s attempt to create an autonomous zone of American military presence and political influence in the Balkans that would be independent of the ups and downs of Washington’s relations with its Western European partners. By imposing its own post-Yugoslav architecture, this administration hopes to ensure that...
Can a Pope Change Moral Truth?
That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question. Asked five years ago about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” As judgment was thought to...
One Civilian Casualty
In 1942, I had never met my Aunt Ann or my four first cousins. They’d moved in the 30’s from Jacksonville to Los Angeles, where Uncle Stuart worked for Walt Disney. Among other things, he provided the voice for the hunter in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Every so often, Aunt Ann would send...
Croatian Generals Sentenced at The Hague
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Zagreb and other Croatian cities over the past week to protest the conviction of two Croatian generals by the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. The ICTY sentenced Ante Gotovina to 24 years in jail and Mladen Markac to 18 years for their role...
The Coming Republican Donkey
The end is near for our Golden Age of Republican Party rule. The first blow came in 2006, when horrified voters kicked the GOP back to minority status in Congress. And, come November, Republicans may emerge from elections without a veto-proof Senate and without one of their own demagogues occupying the White House. If the...
Deracinated Americans
It was a late night in the small-town pizzeria, and the owners were sitting at our table drinking the Antinori Chianti riserva that was “too sour” for the local Swedes, who prefer Lambrusco on the rocks when they are not drinking Miller Lite. The husband had come from Italy as a child, but his wife...
Politics as Spiritual Warfare
Can a culture celebrate those who want to destroy it and still stand? We are about to find out in this fateful November. Until recently, I thought the word “demonic” no more than a figure of speech. It carried a chill dislodged from religious myth and absorbed into literary aesthetics. As an accessory to prose, I...
The War on Homeschoolers
Homeschooling is one of the many fronts in the state’s war against the citizen. Despite the efforts of organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Rutherford Institute, and Eagle Forum, as well as longstanding laws that protect family autonomy, homeschooling parents are still viewed as neglectful if not downright abusive. With methods...
The Golden State’s Lavender Jacobins
You knew it would come to this. So did I. And yet one is still surprised by the sheer boldness of it all. From my local paper: California public schools do an inadequate job of teaching students about gay and lesbian history, despite a 2011 law that requires schools to teach such lessons, according to...
Ave Maria
Tammy Ormson gave much of herself to Catholic education, both as a student and as a teacher. And yet so much was taken from her. Ormson lost her alma mater, Mount Scenario College, when the Ladysmith, Wisconsin, school closed a few years back because of financial trouble. She then lost the school at which she...
Truth and Reconciliation
On the day my Brazilian student gave me the kind of reverent statements about Nelson Mandela that I would expect of such a fierce socialist, he also gave me an interesting history lesson. He reminded me of the coup that had led to 21 years of military rule in Brazil and said that, since the...
A Divided Subcontinent
A 31-gun salute boomed at daybreak on August 14 in Islamabad to mark Pakistan’s 60th anniversary of independence from British rule—or, to be precise, her birth as a Muslim state that resulted from the bloody partition of India in 1947. That event was accompanied by the largest mass migration in history, as over ten million...
Alien Invasion of Europe: Now a Deluge
The Italian navy rescued 3,000 “migrants” aboard more than a dozen boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday. Like hundreds of thousands of others before them, they were taken to Europe for de facto permanent settlement. At the same time, any semblance of border control along the southeastern land route has collapsed. Thousands of migrants stormed...
Rethinking ‘National Security’ in Light of War in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a military “special operation” in Ukraine, which, through the fog of war, looks like an attempt to overthrow the current authorities there and “demilitarize” that country, has prompted the usual globalist/neo-con talking heads to throw around irresponsible comparisons of the Kremlin boss to Hitler. The truth is that...
They’re Back
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Jonathan Mostow Screenplay by John Brancato, Michael Ferris, and Tedi Sarafian The Hulk Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Ang Lee Screenplay by John Turman, Michael France, and James Schamus Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black...
The Trials of Trifkovic
Chronicles‘ distinguished foreign affairs editor has a way of exciting controversy. Often the cause is his view of Islam. Despite the fact that he has declared, over and over, that he opposes the aggressive policies and measures taken by the US against Iraq and Afghanistan, his historical critique has been sufficiently on-target to create...
An Election Without a Mandate
Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman somehow contorted the mixed, and yet unresolved, 2020 election results to simultaneously claim that mandates do not really exist, but that Joe Biden nonetheless has one. It is important to refute this spurious claim because Biden and Kamala Harris will use any excuse they can to push a laundry list of progressive legislation...
A Deserved Death Denied
A new plea deal spares the life of three surviving masterminds of the 9/11 terrorist attack. It's indicative of our legal system’s refusal to mete out fitting punishment for even the most vile criminals.
Out of Korea
Another futile round of the six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear program ended in Beijing last September. The communist authorities in Pyongyang subsequently declared that further negotiations involving both Koreas, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States were pointless, but China said it was working to arrange a second round of talks. For once, I...
The Know-It-Alls
The multiple thousands who marched throughout America and the world last weekend hoped to whip up support for “Science.” Well. I’m sold. And what next? Do more than a handful of people doubt the indispensability of science to the enrichment of the human condition? Science’s God-given nature may, in these secularizing times, meet with less...
The Ephemeral and the Historic
The International Criminal Court’s sham indictment of Vladimir Putin for war crimes is overshadowed by China’s truly historic rise in diplomacy.
Claudine Gay Is Not a Martyr
The disgraced former president of Harvard University is representative of the DEI regime and the massive undertaking it will be to dismantle it.
A Mississippi Homecoming
Chauvinistic Southerners like me are hard to please. We don’t like it when visitors pop in and out and say that the South has changed so much that it looks like everywhere else; but we don’t like it when folks come calling and say that nothing important has changed, either. In a recent article in...
Where the Buck Really Stops
“The question is,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “which is to be master—that’s all.” As overused as the quotation may be, it nevertheless communicates a perennial truth that most people forget when it comes to understanding not only the answer but also the question itself, a truth that explains much of...
The Untold Story of Kosovo Negotiations
Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia’s prime minister for the past three years, has one of the most challenging jobs in the world. He nevertheless seems at ease with that burden, and appears more confident than while he was Yugoslavia’s last president (2000-2003). When we met in ...
Stir-Fried Scholarship
There is a fairly long gestation period for alumni wrath, which does not fully come into being until the end of the year. That’s when every organization in the world calls or sends letters asking for a tax-deductible donation. With the chirpy dunning notices and billets-doux come the hard choices: do I send money to...
A Useful Tool
The Birth of a Nation Produced by Argent Pictures Directed by Nate Parker Screenplay by Nate Parker and Jean Celestine Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Nate Parker has entitled his debut film The Birth of a Nation. He chose his title as a rebuke of D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking 1915 film. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation...
A Highly Personal History
We’re about 50 miles east of Toledo, cruising along the Ohio Turnpike on our way to Cleveland for the wedding of longtime Chronicles contributor Tom Piatak. Satisfied from a lunch of cabbage rolls, paprikas dumplings, and Hungarian sausage at the original Tony Packo’s, I have Amy’s MacBook open on my lap and Bruce Springsteen’s Born...
Writing Poetry & Striking Poses
”When he wriggles,” Ambrose Bierce once wrote of the politician, “he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice.” Bierce might well have said the same about modem writers who cannot distinguish between propaganda and art or between political sermons and poetry. Within the last year college bulletin boards and newspapers...
Books in Brief: August 2024
Short reviews of New Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God by José Carlos González-Hurtado, and The Paleolibertarian Guide to Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & the Aberrant Economy by Ilana Mercer.
Securing the Lincoln Memorial
It is a beautiful prospect, looking east from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We were there recently on a fine March day, and could see past the Vietnam and Korean Memorials up through the Reflecting Pool (currently under repair for a leak), to the giant fountain of the World War II Memorial (dry also),...
A Melancholy Centennial
After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War—the most catastrophic event in all of history—ended one hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918. That war destroyed an effervescent civilization, unmatched in its fruits and vigor. A decent and on the whole well-ordered world was wrecked for ever, thrown into the abyss...
Character and Nuclear Anxiety
American society is widely recognized as youth-oriented, but it has been a long time since any authoritative source has given us really good news about the young. Recent reports from the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Council of Physical Fitness have been especially discouraging: the young exercise too little, eat too...
Return to Manor Farm
The protagonist of a novel I’m now writing speaks in the voice of George Orwell, except that he uses the manly, tobacco-and-gin accents of reason, detachment, and persuasion to discuss love, rather than politics. The novel is called Earthly Love, and it will be the ninth book I’ve written, which is a painful thing to...
Inheriting a Mess
President Putin is inheriting a mess. After almost a decade of Boris Yeltsin, Russia is reduced to a neocolonial wreck with collapsing birthrates, moribund industry, and a fractured body politic. A narrow stratum of robber barons, who do not give a hoot for the country or its people, are busy squandering Russia’s still ample resources...
Collegiate Bread and Circuses
Ah, the good ol’ days! If only they were as frolicsome and fulfilling as they commonly seem in the rearview mirror! All that notwithstanding, the shaky balance that, in university settings, once seemed to prevail between academics and athletics gives the past a certain golden glow. You know what I’m talking about if you recall...
General Mladic: The Facts
The circumstances surrounding the arrest of the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, General Ratko Mladic, seem puzzling. On May 26 he was captured in the house of a close relative with the same surname in a village north of Belgrade. Prima facie this means either that Mladic was entirely left to his own devices...
Define “Imperialism”
Lewis Namier liked to tell the story of an English schoolboy who was asked to define “imperialism” on an examination paper. “Imperialism,” the budding proconsul wrote, “is learning how to get along with one’s social inferiors.” In the Edwardian twilight of the British Empire, that answer might have sufficed to win a scholarship to Balliol,...
The Camelot-Chequers Axis
Christopher Sandford of this parish is not only an adorner of these pages but has also garnered considerable status as a cultural historian. His inquiring eyes range widely, playing over everything from cricket to Kurt Cobain, the Great War to The Great Escape, Conan Doyle to Eric Clapton, and countless other late-19th- and 20th-century Anglospheric...
You May Say You’re a Dreamer
The unconstitutional Obama executive order known as DACA was rescinded by the Trump DOJ on September 5. Even as the courageous and unassuming A.G. Jeff Sessions made the announcement, thousands of tweets painted him as a hood-donning white-supremacist Russian agent. Nancy Pelosi effectively called for more public displays of Antifa violence across the fruited plain,...
Barack Obama’s Reassuringly Vacuous State of the Union Address
President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union Address was almost entirely focused on domestic issues. This was appropriate considering the magnitude of social, economic and moral problems America is facing, and the attendant absurdity of pursuing grand global themes for as long as those problems remain unresolved. The clichés and the rhetoric were kitchy...
An American Tragedy
American Sniper has generated more commentary, both scathingly critical and laudatory, than any film in recent memory. The story of “America’s deadliest sniper,” Texas-born and -bred Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (credited with more than 160 “confirmed” kills), himself shot down in 2013 by a disturbed war veteran he was trying to help, has become a...
A Mortal Blivet
The Edge of Darkness Produced by GK Films, Icon Productions, and BBC Films Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell from the original television script by Troy Kennedy Martin Distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures In The Edge of Darkness, director Martin Campbell has tried to compress the six hour-long episodes...
The Machine in the Sacred Wood
The applicant for our research fellowship was a likeable physician who spoke with passion about the mind-brain problem. My professional world is overrun by people who believe that, if we just do enough imaging studies, in which a subject works on some cognitive test while complex machinery detects which parts of the brain are activated,...
Hitler’s Legacy
Stratfor’s George Friedman published an interesting article on September 1, “Pondering Hitler’s Legacy,” to mark the 76th anniversary of the beginning of World War II. The first outcome of Hitler’s war, he says, was that it destroyed Europe’s hegemony over much of the world and its influence over the rest: Within 15 years of the...
Winning the War Against War
One recent morning an opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post arrived unbidden in my email inbox. “Should Putin act, it would arguably be the greatest provocation since the end of the Cold War,” Rubin claimed. “Like the Berlin Wall and the blockade of Berlin before that, movement into Ukraine would be...
How I Spent My Christmas Vacation
The day after Christmas this family took off for the National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship in Orlando, Florida. The National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship is not the kind of event a parent—this parent, anyway—ever anticipates attending. It is the kind of event a parent discovers herself at because of...