To walk along a narrow ridge or cliff path, German-speakers will tell you, you have to be schwindelfrei. The French word vertige exists in English (vertigo), but we would be more likely to say “dizziness.” The German word is for vertige or dizziness der Schwindel, but Schwindel also can mean what it does in English—swindle....
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Renaming God
We were ambushed last Christmas Eve by a gang of politicians disguised as Presbyterian clergy and elders. The scene was a sanctuary; the occasion a candlelight service. The weapons our assailants used were so subtle: newly printed orders of service with the lyrics to all those familiar Christmas hymns set forth where they were to...
Crash Course
Crash Produced by Bull’s Eye Entertainment Directed by Paul Haggis Screenplay by Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco Distributed by Lions Gate Films Last month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its 78th annual awards ceremony. Dreamt up by Louis B. Mayer in 1927, the Academy’s advertised mission was to confer legitimacy on...
An Aix to Grind
As though in memory of those antediluvian Playboy “pictorials” in which the hapless young lady posed with whatever attribute of her metier the photographer had unearthed in the props room—an alleged student of architecture with a carpenter’s wooden compass, a presumed graduate of the police academy with a sheriff’s badge, a putative nurse with a...
Time to Talk Turkey
Turkey is currently negotiating to join the European Union, with the full support of the British government and of U.S. President George W. Bush. If she does join, it will be a disaster for Europe and for Britain. Turkey has 70 million people, nearly all of whom are Muslims and, by European standards, poor. She...
The Redeemed Imagination
“The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power), a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.” —John Ruskin Few concepts in contemporary intellectual debate are more hotly contested than the idea of the postmodern. ...
The Meaning of Decadence
When people speak of a society being “decadent,” they commonly understand decadence in terms of standards of personal behavior and the sense of morality, or want of it, that behavior expresses. For conservatives, personal morality begins with sexual morality grounded in revealed religion; for liberals, with what they call an “ethical” approach to human relations...
It Could Have Happened to Anyone
Kobe Bryant, according to heavyweight sociologist Mike Tyson, is a victim of circumstance. “It could happen to anybody,” Tyson explained. The ex-champ referred not to filing for bankruptcy, going Muslim, or biting off a piece of an opponent’s ear, but to getting charged with rape—something apparently as random and undiscriminating as getting struck by lightning. ...
Chewing the Toad
There’s a sucker born every minute. For just $99.00 and a used ticket stub for Wonder Woman, if you order by midnight tonight, you can enroll in a course on Healing Toxic Whiteness. It is taught by a young woman named Sandra Kim, a person of “multiple marginalized identities,” as she describes herself; with what...
Beware the Limelight
“Who can keep up with anything these days?” —Denis Donoghue, The New Republic, 3/10/86 “If a National Theater is to be in only one city, it should, of course, be in New York, the center of the country’s cultural life and the fount of its theatrical traditions. That’s where the acting and directing talent would...
Marching Through Whatever
This gathering of essays, studies, reviews, and occasional pieces is united by its subject and fused by the imagination and knowledge of the author. Clyde Wilson has responded not only to a host of opportunities as a professional historian and scholar but to sundry provocations as a lively contemporary who knows the implications of ideological...
The United States, In Congress Assembled
“All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States . . . ” Thus run the first words of Article I, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution, clearly laying out the Framers’ understanding of the nature and the role of Congress. Everything else enumerated in Article I—the various powers...
The Forgotten Fire
“I am on the one hand a kind of New York State Republican, conservative. On the other hand, I am a kind of a Bohemian type. I really don’t obey the laws. I mean to, but if I am in a hurry and there is no parking here, I park.” —John Gardner Batavia’s wandering native...
Adventure Fiction: The Machinery of the Dark
Adventure fiction is vigorously alive. Although virtually ignored by critics outside specialist newsletters, the genre has long been a dominant force both in bookstores and in Hollywood. Such adventure films as Die Hard, Jaws, and the Indiana Jones epics draw millions of viewers. Tom Clancy’s technological thrillers and Robert Ludlum’s volumes of struggle and terror...
Forgive My Nausea!
Allow me to express my displeasure bordering on nausea over the predictably gutless way in which Conservative Inc. and its most prominent representatives have responded to the riots in American cities. Although our authorized conservatives have indicated that vandalism, mayhem, and killing should not be tolerated on our streets, and although they generally accept President...
On Jefferson’s Honor
As a long-time reader and supporter of Chronicles, I am a little puzzled by your persistent efforts to debunk the “myth” that Thomas Jefferson took his quadroon chambermaid Sally Hemings as a concubine. While I agree with Samuel Francis, Egon Tausch, and now Matthew Rarey (Cultural Revolutions, September) that the legacy of Thomas Jefferson is...
Books in Brief
Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey From a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (New York: Penguin Books; 320 pp., $17.00). I read Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s memoir of his illegal residency in the United States last week while on vacation in Germany, another country arguing about immigration. The book answered several questions...
Nor Shall My Sword Rest in My Hand
When the United States government was seeking to retaliate for the terrorist attacks last year, it was not too difficult to name the obvious targets: Afghanistan (of course), Iraq, Somalia, and the rest of the world’s bandit states. Opponents of military intervention could make few effective arguments, but one point that was quite widely raised...
Is Putin’s Russia an ‘Evil Empire’?
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump. To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from...
NATO After Libya: A Threat to European Stability
Address given on Monday, August 29, at the international conference Central Europe, the EU and the new Russia at the Czech Parliament in Prague. More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, NATO is an obsolete and harmful anachronism. It has morphed into a vehicle for the attainment of misguided American...
Who Cares Who’s Number One?
President Obama, in his State of the Union Address last January, called upon American students, teachers, scientists, and business executives to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” We are living, the President announced, in a “Sputnik moment.” As polls show the majority of the country considers the United States to be rather...
The New Reality
The Washington Post calls it “The New Reality.” Today, women aren’t just flying fighter aircraft or serving on ships, away from action on the ground: They fight in ground combat units, lose limbs, and die in battle. Amputee Lt. Dawn Halfaker, the main subject of the Post’s article (“Limbs Lost to Enemy Fire, Women Forge...
Petraeus and the Senate Chickens
The central character in the little morality play spun out by the Bush administration in making the case for “staying the course” in Iraq is Gen. David Petraeus, commander of our forces in Iraq and the savior of the neocons’ war. His much-vaunted report was to elucidate the conditions for “victory” once and for all,...
Dante’s Human Comedy
Prima sedes a nemine iudicatur: “The First See is judged by no one.” Thus reads Canon 1404 of the current Code of Canon Law of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, and Canon 1556 of the previous code. Romanus Pontifex a nemine iudicatur: “The Roman Pontiff is judged by no one.” That is Canon...
At It Again
Boris Yeltsin has been at it again, sacking Russian Premier Yevgeni Primakov and his entire cabinet, pushing the country to the edge of the political abyss. The phlegmatic Primakov, who resembles Jabba the Hut of Star Wars fame, had opened an investigation into the machinations of the “oligarchs,” the gangsters-cum-businessmen who have dominated Russia in...
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...
Broad Political Views
Wendell Berry’s new essay collection, Another Turn of the Crank, gives definition to broad political views that the author has previously left obscure. Regarding foreign trade, for example, he asks: “How can any nation or region justify the destruction of a local productive capacity for the sake of foreign trade?” Berry indicts both the liberals’...
Old Times There Are Not Forgotten
I’m sure some readers of these letters are tired of hearing what a special place the South is. So I’ll warn you: I’m going to say it again. And I’m going to quote all sorts of other people who say it, too. Come back next month if you can’t take it. The South is a...
Fateful Choices
There are few issues more emotional than abortion. The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...
Obama’s Mosque Visit: Wrong Message, Wrong Venue
President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preacing radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny. OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who...
On Environmentalism
We who look to Chronicles for some cogent commentary on our environmental dilemmas aren’t getting enough from Chilton Williamson, Jr. Not that those campfire meditations, gut-wrenching elk hunts, and encounters with the West’s fast-vanishing anarchists aren’t worthy stuff; sometimes we can hear an echo of Ed Abbey. But we need some Real Truth about resources...
Corruption and Contempt
“Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.” —Thomas Babington For those readers who know very much about Niccolo Machiavelli, the most striking feature of Michael Ledeen’s new book, which tries to explicate a number of...
A Highly Personal History
Scott P. Richert remembers local historian Jon Lundin. 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, ...
A Long History of Leftist Hatred
James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, who aspired to end his life as a mass murderer of Republican Congressmen, was a Donald Trump hater and a Bernie Sanders backer. Like many before him, Hodgkinson was a malevolent man of the hating and hard left. His planned atrocity failed because two Capitol Hill cops were at...
Welcome to Holyland
God is back! And He has His own amusement park right here in Florida—you know, home of Disneyland, Universal Studios, and Seaworld. Welcome to Holyland! Complete with a replica of Jesus’s tomb, a bookstore and gift shop appropriately called “The Old Scroll,” a legion of actors in biblical-era costume (including armored Roman soldiers) detailing the...
The Politics of Peace
Step by step America is being primed for war with Iran. President Trump has not actually torn up the “Iran deal”—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that is supposed to defer the day the Islamic Republic might seek a nuclear weapon—but he “decertified” it in October, and his administration is under constant pressure from the...
The Christian Zionist Threat to Peace
In assessing the political conditions necessary to establish a lasting peace in Israel-Palestine, Americans are confronted with a theological question: Does the Bible insist that Christians take a certain view regarding the treatment of the Jewish people in particular, their presence in the Holy Land, or the placement of the borders of Israel? One particular...
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...
A City-State on a Hill
Mark Peterson’s new book traces the development of Boston from its founding in 1630 to the end of the American Civil War. In large part the book is a biography of the city, but from the unique perspective of Boston as a city-state and a commonwealth Peterson calls “remarkable for its autonomy, including an independent...
A Mortal Blivet
A review of 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...
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...
Gearing Up for the Third Gulf War
Will Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Tehran Face Off in a Future Cataclysm? With Donald Trump’s decision to shred the Iran nuclear agreement, announced last Tuesday, it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking about what a Third Gulf War would mean. The answer, based on the last 16 years of American...
Don’t Quit Your Job to Raise a Litmag
“Poetry is the most overproduced commodity on the market, next to zucchini.” —Judson Jerome, Writer’s Digest poetry columnist since 1960 According to a 1985 study cited by Writer’s Digest Books, 23.3 percent of all people who think of themselves as writers—or “more than two million people“—write poetry for publication. It follows that there are then...
To the Lighthouse
When Camilla, the elderly spinster daughter of the infamous Captain Jack Fennel and matriarch of the Fennel family, sees her house guest holding an antique spyglass, she comments, “My father’s glass. Dr. Danvers. Are you planning a voyage?” Actually, the voyage is already underway for the young history professor who shows symptoms of seasickness the...
Snowden’s Asylum
“We’re extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and in private to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. He added that Barack Obama might now boycott a bilateral...
4.0 and You’re Out!
When I was a junior at the Trinity School in New York, Mr. Clarence Bruner-Smith, head of the Upper School, assured me that I had an excellent chance of being accepted at Yale if I accepted the editorship of the school literary magazine. I thought that a ridiculous reason to be accepted anywhere, and that...
Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be
I cannot remember the occasion, but I will not forget the voice—female, authoritative, and poised—that intoned a dismissal of the so-called yuppies as follows: “They oversee the distribution of toilet paper!” I was a bit thrilled by the superior attitude, being even then no young upwardly mobile professional myself. I thought about the matter and concluded...
Sounding the Trump
In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest...
Revisions – The Wild (and Tranquil) West
American intellectuals have spent much of this century blaming the frontier experience for everything from cultural poverty (John Crowe Ransom) to “our lawless heritage” (James Truslow Adams). The high rates of violent crime in modern cities, they insist, cannot be caused by anything we are doing now that is, hamstringing the law enforcement system, handingout...
American Italics, or Revelation According to P.T. Barnum
As in some picaresque dream, the carousel that has been spinning out a tale of broken hearts and mistaken identities begins to slow down, the roulette wheel grows disenchanted with the last bourgeois revolution, and all of a sudden even the drum of the concrete mixer that is shadowing the Venetian’s limousine all the way...