El Paso del Norte . . . the Jornada del Muerto . . . Tiguex . . . Santa Fe: The trip that for Don Juan de Oñate was a weeks-long ordeal up the Rio Grande on the Camino Real in 1598 for me is an hour-and-20-minute flight, including 20 minutes on the ground at...
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The Intransigent Uninvited
Today the United States takes in annually more than twice as many immigrants as all other countries in the world put together. Many Asian countries permit no immigration at all, and openly despise foreigners. The top U.S.immigrant exporter last year, Mexico (with 95,039), is also a vigorous deporter, sending back an average of 150 Central...
Passage to India
Though he never came here, Walt Whitman knew India was more than a country: a subcontinent, madhouse of religions, seedbed of civilizations, primordial and immemorial. “Passage to more than India.” How to cope with this vital mess, this messy multiplicity? These hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of thousands of villages? I have learned...
The Road to Cascadia
They call it Cascadia—a land of plunging waterfalls and snowcapped mountains, a mythical kingdom of towering trees and raging rivers. Here in Seattle, capital of this Arcadia, the sleekly modernistic Space Needle rises up against the backdrop of Mount Rainier, which dominates the horizon—a distinctly Cascadian juxtaposition of mountain and cityscape, forest and skyscraper, greenery...
The Pilgrimage of Malcolm Muggeridge
From the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. In the second segment of the several-part BBC documentary on his life, Malcolm Muggeridge smoothed his white feathery hair away from his cherubic face, smiled cryptically, and said in his deep, rolling, gentle English voice, “There’s nothing in this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself...
Circles of Hell
Dr. Bernard Nathanson has written an important book that in time will rank with Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain and Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time as books which our descendants, familial and spiritual, will examine closely in the 21st and 22nd centuries in order to understand both man’s inhumanity to humanity and to his personal...
DEMOCRATISM
The move toward mass, direct democracy in the large nationstate derives much of its appeal from an image of direct democracy reminiscent of the Athenian Assembly, or of the New England town meeting. But such an appeal is mistaken. The social conditions for face-to-face interaction and deliberation present on a small scale are not present...
Greater Than the French Revolution
On July 15, 1870, the French Empire mobilized its armed forces, and the following day, the North German Confederation—led by Prussia—followed suit. Once the Franco-Prussian War was declared, actual combat began with startling rapidity. The Prussians won a decisive victory at Sedan at the start of September, capturing French Emperor Napoleon III. Even so, the...
Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency
In the long run, history will validate Donald Trump’s stand on a border wall to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States. Why? Because mass migration from the global South, not climate change, is the real existential crisis of the West. The American people know this, and even the elites sense it. Think...
The American Myth of World War I
In 1917, two revolutions engulfed war-ravaged Europe. The first was America’s military intervention in France on June 26, which prolonged World War I and, thus, made possible the second: the communist seizure of power in Russia on November 7. To win maximum public support for their respective revolutions, the two rivals, Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir...
Dominion Mosque
If the definition of a liberal is a person who won’t take his own side in a fight, Adam Ebbin and Kaye Kory, Democrats who represent Virginia’s 49th and 38th districts in the commonwealth’s House of Delegates, should have their pictures next to the word in Webster’s. Ebbin, a homosexual Jew, invited Johari Abdul-Malik, a...
Books in Brief: April/May 2021
The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, by William Deresiewicz (Henry Holt; 368 pp., $27.99). Members of a book club at my highly selective undergraduate business school were stung by William Deresiewicz’s portrait of careerist, grade-grubbing college students in his scathing 2015 book,...
Dixie Choppers
The Confederate flag, which had been in a place of honor (though not sovereignty) above the South Carolina capitol for almost 40 years, was removed in the stealth of the night of June 30/July 1. The removal was made possible because all but a handful of Republicans in the legislature, who had pledged not to...
Another Brown Scare
In the run-up to World War II, when FDR was locked in a political struggle with his conservative Republican opponents, Roosevelt’s “brain trust” came up with a scheme to win the war of ideas and get rid of the President’s bothersome critics. Today, we call it the “Brown Scare.” It was a campaign of vilification...
Even More Questions About the Way We Are Now
If you were a patriotic “American” of Mideast origin, wouldn’t you willingly cooperate with “ethnic profiling” since it would help to save the lives of your “fellow” citizens? Want to know how many traffic deaths in my State last year were caused by aliens, mostly drunk illegals? 807. How many Americans are aware that Osama...
Snow Princess Does Beijing
Poor Gu Ailing, or, as we call her here in the country of her birth, Eileen Gu. She claims to have jumped ship to join the Chinese team for this year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing because she hoped to inspire young athletes on both sides of the Pacific, and to spread goodwill between the nation...
Solzhenitsyn and the Religion of Revolution
The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood more clearly than most that the revolutionary spirit born in France was a perpetual revolution, one that would spawn revolutionary movements across the political spectrum and around the globe. During his exile in the West from 1974 to 1994, he recognized that among these new political religions was...
Envy and the Consumerism of the Have—Nots
You can make a good argument that, by the late 20th century, the Seven Deadly Sins had become the Seven Lively Virtues. In the 1960’s, the media lauded the anger of students who bombed police stations and set dormitories on fire. Hollywood glorified lust the way it had once glorified chastity. Government at every level...
Anti-Imperial Judo
The basic principle of judo, so I have been told, is to use your enemy’s strength against him. I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be to...
How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
The cinders of the World Trade Center had barely fallen to the earth before George W. Bush had it all figured out. “America was targeted for attack,” the President explained to the nation barely 12 hours after the first plane hit the Manhattan skyscrapers, “because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the...
The Perpetual Family
“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” —Genesis 3:20 The first time I ever visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, it was in the company of a pretty Irish-American girl from Massachusetts named Evelyn. Her father was some kind of Democratic politician back home. She and...
Bring Back the Iron Duke
The United States was founded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and became the political, economic, and military leader of the free world under their guidance. The conscience, industry, practicality, antisensualism, and sense of civic responsibility that characterizes the classic WASP became definably American characteristics. When immigrants entered the melting pot, they were to come out looking...
The Matter of Money
Over the last year, the doings of the media have occupied center stage in the media themselves, an obsession that seems harmless if somewhat incestuous. There has been a tournament atmosphere surrounding the issue of whether the damsels CBS or ABC would fall to one or another suitor, and a sense of awe at the...
Bad Georgie
The facts of George Garrett’s literary career are laid out in the bibliography here: his 24 books include novels, plays, and collections of poems and short stories. In addition he has served as editor of 17 other books—interviews with contemporary writers, literary criticism, books on film scripts. He has also written a biography of the...
The Politics of Dante
I propose, in the two weeks I have before going to Florence, that we look at two works of Dante: the Convivio and the De Monarchia . Although the whole of the Convivio is worth our attention, I am only going to talk about Book IV, in which Dante talks about the empire, Rome, the...
Trumpism: The Myth, the Man, and the Mandate
Trump and the movement he started have suffered from inconsistent objectives and dubious accomplishments. It is increasingly hard to believe that his comeback campaign can succeed.
One Nation Divided
Since 1892, when the original text was composed, the Pledge of Allegiance has been revised three times. Viewed chronologically, the alterations appear to have aimed at a greater specificity, but also a wider and deeper self-assurance. The current text, dating from 1954, capitalizes “Nation” and adds “under God,” as if the editors (a committee, no...
To Catch a Terrorist
The watershed U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, we are told, “empowered women” to control their lives. In reality, they empowered the Police State and set the U.S. Imperium on a trajectory where it not only could deny the personhood of the unborn but could legally classify whole groups of...
Cancel Culture Fights for ‘Dr.’ Jill Biden
A career as a writer offers many thrills as one piece after another gets picked up and published. Today, however, it also offers many nervous chills, as the specter of cancel culture could broadside a writer at any moment. I experienced one of the former thrills of writing when a piece of mine was published...
Snow and Chocolates
I shall not easily forget my first visit to Switzerland. The end of the war left my battalion encamped north of Perugia. Leave was suddenly generous, and rides in military transport easy to find, at least for a young ensign in the Brigade of Guards. Hoping to flush a retired uncle in the Bernese Oberland...
Pimp Dreams
Hustle and Flow Produced by Crunk Pictures and New Deal Productions Directed and written by Craig Brewer Distributed by MTV Films and Paramount Classics Bulletin: Pimps and rappers have hearts; they have yearnings; they have midlife crises, for heaven’s sake! Sure, they exploit and abuse women, deal dope, and occasionally shoot one another; but, hell,...
Music and the Tooth Dentist
As my many devoted readers have already noticed and let me know, though I do love good music, it’s hard to convey the intensity of that devotion. So it occurred to me to write about abject rather than exalted musical experiences. They’re easier to deal with, yet also productive, particularly as the experience of ugly...
Beauty and the Brutalist: The Architectural Effect on Our Souls
There is a beautiful conservatory in my hometown that houses flower gardens year-round despite our chilly northern clime. Its soaring glass dome was built in 1915 and gracefully presides over a beautiful pond and manicured grounds in a stately way reminiscent of the Capitol dome. Several years ago, the park hosting the conservatory must have...
Choosing Independence
There are those moments in which you travel back to some time and place you visited earlier. A trick of light, a confluence of sounds on a summer evening. Sometimes I am fooled into thinking that I am back in Latvia, where August nights around a white wrought-iron table on the grass lasted the length...
Gathering the Desert
It is ironic that the modern environmentalist movement was founded bv men with whom most modern environmentalists would have nothing to do today: game hunters, many so avid for the chase that they would spend fortunes to collect antlers and skins and skulls from far-off places. Theodore Roosevelt, to name one distinguished early conservationist, was...
The Pilgrimage of Malcolm Muggeridge
[This article first appeared in the December 1992 issue of Chronicles.] In the second segment of the several-part BBC documentary on his life, Malcolm Muggeridge smoothed his white feathery hair away from his cherubic face, smiled cryptically, and said in his deep, rolling, gentle English voice, “There’s nothing in this world more instinctively abhorrent to...
Of Murder and Morality
In the alternative culture that has grown around modern American religion, music stars such as Amy Grant have commanded much attention. Disgusted by the filth that is popular music, teenagers are encouraged by well-meaning parents to listen to Grant instead of, say, Madonna. Likewise, Frank Peretti is seen as a Christian substitute for mega sellers...
Worst Secretary of State in History
Attending a “holiday party” at the State Department in December 2010, President Obama congratulated himself on appointing Hillary Clinton and declared that “there’s a consensus building that [she] may be one of the best secretaries of state we’ve ever had in this country’s history.” She is relentless, tough, and does not quit, Obama said, “so,...
Winning Is Everything, Isn’t It?
A review of Vincere, written and directed by Marco Bellocchio; produced by Offside and Celluloid Dreams; distributed in America by IFC Films. Feminists began proclaiming that the personal is the political during those dreamy 70’s of the last century. This, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is a proposition that every sane ...
The Path of Less Resistance
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office) since 1983, has exercised enormous influence within the Catholic Church. In late 2002, he was elected dean of the College of Cardinals, a largely ceremonial and honorary position to be sure, but one that reflects his continuing influence...
Give Us Your Huddled Masses
“Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me.” —Emma Lazarus The publication of a Julian Simon book is a cause for rejoicing among advocates of laissez-faire and open-border immigration. According to Dr. Simon, who teaches business administration at the University of Maryland and is an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute,...
Do Cops’ Lives Matter to Obama?
Barack Obama, as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, is going to have to stop acting like a conscientious objector in this war on cops. Wednesday, another officer, in Fox Lake, Illinois, Lt. Charles “GI Joe” Gliniewicz, was gunned down. Last Friday, Darren Goforth, a Houston deputy sheriff, was shot 15 times by...
Richard Holbrooke, RIH
On his deathbed in Washington, Richard Holbrooke allegedly told his Pakistani surgeon, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.” Perhaps the story is true. After all, Holbrooke, though one of the greatest liars in public life, must have told the truth occasionally and his words may even have been delivered accurately by the...
Socialist Nostalgia
Since May 1981, when they won a sweeping electoral victory in the parliamentary elections, France’s Socialists have suffered two sobering shocks which, while they have brought many of their soaring dreams plummeting to earth, have made many malcontents. The first shock was administered in 1983 when, after two years of ideological debauch, which resulted in...
Recessional
If drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” address was a remarkable performance in many ways: It simultaneously marked the zenith of American triumphalism and the nadir, not only...
An Open Letter to National Public Radio
Kudos to the Morning Edition staff! I have been an NPR listener almost from the beginning, and while I am constantly impressed by the errors and distortions that pepper your reporting on literature and history, I must confess that even I was bowled over by Robert Krulwich’s conversation with Stephen Greenblatt on the subject of...
Unbaptized America
The Godless Constitution is a self-described polemic against those who believe that the United States was, is, or should be a “Christian nation.” Essentially a historical analysis of the religious influences on the Kramers of the Constitution, the book explores the superficially curious omission of God, even the simplest and most formal invocation, from that...
Nationalists of the World, Unite?
If there's going to be any democracy in the 21st century—in America, Europe, Israel or anywhere—there must be nations and nationalists willing to stand for them.
Ruth M. Besemer, R.I.P.
Ruth Miller Besemer of Boulder, Colorado, and I exchanged letters for several months before we met. She sent the first in 1999, when The Rockford Institute held the annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in Georgetown. The Saturday-evening debate topic was: “Resolved: Conservatives in D.C. haven’t done a damn thing.” To a check for...
The Wheel of Fortune
On the morning after Election Day, the front-page headline of the Philadelphia Daily News said it all, not just about the events of the day, but about the possible future of Philadelphia: Goode Squeaks In Rizzo Won’t Quit Incumbent Mayor W. Wilson Goode won, by unofficial count, by about 14,000 votes (2 percent of the...