It is time to ring down the curtain on the troubled rule of Theresa May. May became Prime Minister as the result of a series of flukes, which a scriptwriter would have dismissed as too implausible to work. She was home secretary in the Cameron Government, and cannot have entertained serious hopes beyond retaining her...
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Offsides for the Kneel-In
Let’s not stress out, shall we, while endeavoring to make sense of the fuss and foolishness over mass NFL boycotting of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” That would be because the fuss and foolishness themselves make no sense: save as a window for viewing the lunacies of 21st century life. Are we a nation or a holding...
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E
“First grubs obscene, then wriggling worms, Then painted butterflies.”—Alexander Pope, Phryne Maybe I’m bewitched, but I’m not bothered and certainly I’m not bewildered by Sean Griffin’s too divinely unbelievable disquisition on one of everybody’s favorite topics, and I’m not going to waste space by saying what that is, because you just...
Politics in American Letters
The following was presented in acceptance of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, presented at Longwood College, Farmville, Virginia, September 20, 1991. The Dos Passos Prize is awarded to a writer in mid-career for a distinguished body of work; previous recipients include Graham Greene, Paule Marshall, Robert Stone, and Tom Wolfe. * * *...
From 1984 to 2024
All the clocks are striking thirteen.
Class Allegories
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Produced by Chernin Entertainment Directed by Matt Reeves Screenplay by Mark Bomback and Rick Jaffa Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Snowpiercer Produced by Opus Pictures Directed by Bong Joon-ho Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson Distributed by The Weinstein Company As titles go, Dawn of...
The Unnatural History of Giant Ideology
Born in a Parisian coffeehouse during the first year of the 19th century, Ideology has grown gigantic in our time. Infant Ideology was consecrated to an educational reform; the colossus Ideology that now bestrides the world is engaged successfully in the extirpation of culture. There comes to my mind often, when someone innocently utters such...
Declaring China “Normal”
The annual process of extending “most-favored-nation” (MFN) trade status to communist China was to have a new twist this year. Beijing’s friends in Washington were pushing for an end to this embarrassing review of Beijing’s brutal behavior by granting MFN to China on a permanent basis. The move was to be attempted before China takes...
The Publishing Industry
Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weakly in my book), though it is one of the most depressing magazines in America, obviously considers itself a sprightly, thoughtful, and somewhat “irreverent” publication, gifted with the insight to see that the emperor has no clothes on and blessed with the courage to stand forward and say so. In the bold...
On Social Security
In his May editorial, R. Cort Kirkwood felt compelled to speak for Ayn Rand and to castigate “entitlements” for “home-owning, white Republicans” with retirement income in excess of $50,000 per annum. Kirkwood is sorely confused. Rand would indeed have been offended by the compulsory form of savings for retirement that Social Security imposes on “home-owning...
Israel’s Lesson for 2024: A Liberal Crackup
The new New Left has the potential to spark a civil war among progressives, especially as causes like Black Lives Matter and anti-police policies entwine with "anti-colonial" and anti-Israel ideology.
NATO, R.I.P.
At the European Union summit in Nice last December France initiated plans for a new European military structure. While the stated purpose of the emerging 15-member alliance is to complement NATO rather than replace it, there is growing concern in Washington that the ultimate objective of French and German strategic planners is to sever the...
Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost
Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit” is the best essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), not only because it focuses on the small, independent farmer, the class the Agrarians most admired, but also because Lytle nails the volume’s primary thesis to the church door, the dilemma his region and nation faced in 1930—the choice between...
Inside the Court of the Gentiles
Tolstoy once referred to Mormonism as “the American religion.” I only know that because one of my former assistants, a Mormon himself, used to quote the statement as corroboration of the Mormons’ belief that they are quintessentially American. Despite all of his proselytizing efforts and the gift of a Book of Mormon, I took no...
Medical Control, Medical Corruption
The vested interests are sick over it: Americans are beginning, just slightly, to take charge of their own health care. Such best-sellers as the Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies, the Physician’s Desk Reference, and the Merck Manual can keep you out of the doctor’s appropriately named waiting room, or at least help you understand what...
The Post-Suburban Jesus
By a generous estimate, evangelical Christians are as much as one third of the U.S. population. In fact, they are the only Christian demographic that has shown exuberant growth in recent decades—a period during which church attendance overall has been steadily eroding. A significant part of this growth has taken place in the nondenominational or...
A Family Business
The Schwinn Bicycle Company, which was run by the same family for 97 years, has gone bankrupt. No more Schwinn bikes? I remember mine, and brother Jack’s, and those I bought my children in the 50’s—visions of delight with their balloon tires, chrome springs, and coaster brakes. The last of my four children actually got...
Stop It
Stop-Loss Produced by Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, and MTV Films Directed by Kimberly Peirce Screenplay by Kimberly Peirce and Mark Richard Distributed by Paramount Pictures On March 29, 2008, Suffolk County police officers vigorously fulfilled their sworn duty at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, New York. Alerted by the mall’s security...
Trespass Against Us
Larry Woiwode, the North Dakota novelist (I do not mean that in a diminishing way), has described his fiction as “a continuing spiritual exercise that any reader may join in on.” His fifth novel, Indian Affairs, is a fitfully satisfying workout. Indian Affairs reintroduces us to Chris Van Eananam, a graduate student, and his wife Ellen;...
The Great Portcullis
In the third week of August someone pushes the button and brings summer to an end in the Mountain West, though beautiful weather and Indian summer lie ahead. Typically the change comes with the discharge of a powerful thunder cell, seemingly no different from any other electrical storm but collapsing into a gray leaden overcast...
The West’s Fear That Dare Not Speak Its Name
With the drowning deaths of 27 migrants crossing the Channel from France to England, illegal migration from the Third World is front and center anew in European politics. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has proposed that France take back to its shores all migrants who cross the Channel illegally and come ashore in Britain. In the...
The Critic and the Conservative Imagination
Because of the great range of his interests, it is very difficult to predict what Professor Jeffrey Hart will next produce. Hart writes out of a devotion to literature as “the principal vehicle for transmitting the ideas and feelings that constitute our shared public culture.” Following the examples of public-spirited critics running from Samuel Johnson...
The Ethnic Partitioning of England
Londonistan: The content is in the book’s title. Melanie Phillips, the author, had great difficulty in finding a publisher; no main house would take it, even though she is a distinguished and successful writer, and in the end it came out in 2006 with a minor publisher, Gibson Square. The book’s theme is that Britain...
No More Girls in Bikinis
Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts. On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my ...
Facts Are Stubborn Things
It took only 22 years after he left the White House for conservatives to turn Ronald Reagan into a totem. The celebrations surrounding his 100th birthday on February 6 made George Washington look like a back-bench legislator. Conservatives hailed Reagan as the apotheosis of political wisdom and prudent action. Liberals conceded that he had done...
Neonatal Circumcision: Preventive Medicine or Mutilation?
During most of human history, religious explanations and rituals imparted meaning to people’s lives and justified controlling their conduct. Today, medical explanations and rituals often perform those functions. For example, masturbation and homosexuality were first forbidden on religious grounds, then on medical grounds. Being a male infant is, of course, not behavior. Accordingly, routine neonatal...
Change and Its Consequences
Last October I journeyed to Moscow by invitation for a conference on conversion from military to civilian production. Upon arrival, my colleague, Professor Constantine Danopoulos of the political science department at San Jose State University, and I were informed that the meeting had been shifted to December to coincide with the Congress of the Supreme...
Tame Monster
Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville in 1914 and grew up in Tennessee and Southern California. He studied under poet and critic John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University and followed him to Kenyon College, where he lived in Ransom’s attic with the young Robert Lowell and wrote his thesis on A.E. Housman. Encouraged by Allen...
The Tribe Above Madrid
The sun was low as the luxurious chartered bus labored up the steep dirt track to the wedding reception in the hills above Madrid. We walked up the last of the slope from the buses to the lawn in front of the hunting lodge, where we looked down on the distant city. Middle-aged men and...
Madness in Great Ones
The American poet and man of letters John Berryman created in his half-memoir, half-short story “The Imaginary Jew” what is very likely the most powerfully compressed vision of vulgar, visceral racism in our literature. In this present, honorably intended biography of Ezra Pound by an apparently Jewish and leftist professor at Queens College (whose previous...
“Hello, Lenin!” Three Components of America’s Misguided Foreign Policy
by Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy could almost have been designed to undermine our national interests. Whether under Republican George W. Bush or Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we have seen “regime changes” and “color revolutions,” facilitation of global jihadism while claiming to combat...
Southern Supplements
“We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians?” —Herman Melville The great classicist and poet A.E. Housman once wrote that the work of a scholar in the humanities is not like that of a scientist examining specimens under a microscope—it is more like the work of a dog searching...
Is Algeria Next?
On January 16 Islamic militants staged an audacious attack on a major natural gas complex in southeastern Algeria, 800 miles southeast from the capital. A jihadist group calling itself the Masked Brigade—led by Moktar Belmoktar, the fierce one-eyed veteran of the Afghan war and a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—claimed responsibility...
Bruce Springsteen
For the life of me, I can’t see why anyone under the age of, say, 55 would want to listen to Bruce Springsteen, never mind revere him as a deep and important artist, or pay upward of $200 to be crammed into a football stadium to attend one of his concerts. Surely the only pertinent...
Rolling Stone Gathered No Facts
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault—and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual...
Christianity and the Legitimacy of Government
The late Paul J. Tillich (1886-1965)—not exactly a hero to conservative Christians, Protestant or Catholic—spoke of the rival impulses that cause agony in personal and community decisionmaking, which he defined as the clash between autonomy and heteronomy. In autonomy—literally, “self-law”—individuals think of themselves as a law unto themselves; in heteronomy, “other-law,” they see themselves as...
Virtue-Signalers in a Snit
Hollywood is in a snit. Hollywood is very angry. Hollywood is having a nervous breakdown. The Donald is in the White House, and Hollywood types cannot take it any more. Ditto for the New York Times and the TV networks, except for FOX. Madonna, that aging show-off whose vocabulary consists mainly of the F-word, said...
Don’t Have a ‘Merry Little Christmas’
I was sitting in my local coffee shop when “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” began playing over the café’s speaker. Perhaps because this Christmas is so fraught with fear and uncertainty, this song caught my attention. I pushed aside my other thoughts and gave my full attention to the music, hunting down the lyrics...
A Promising Year
On this month’s form, 2018 will be an interesting year. So far it has brought rich rewards to us world affairs aficionados. The overall global tempo is accelerating, affrettando, like de Falla’s Danza Ritual del Fuego. What would have been considered bizarre if not outright insane but a few years ago is now commonplace. Take...
Mormons and Modernism
“So pale grows Reason at Religion’s sight, So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.” —John Dryden Leonard Arrington: Brigham Young: American Moses; Alfred A. Knopf; New York. Richard L. Bushman: Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Jan Shipps: Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Ernest...
The Stone Wall Has Crumbled
Last June, the tradition of 157 years at single-sex Virginia Military Institute was changed by the vote of seven Justices in Washington. The statue of Stonewall Jackson still guarded the parade grounds, but the general who stood like a stone wall at Manassas could not prevail against those seven Justices. His slogan is still emblazoned...
The Strange Death of the Yellow Dog
Perusing the conservative press in the days after the Republican victories in the November 2002 elections was like watching the triumph scenes in various sword-and-sandal movies of the 1950’s and 60’s, with the reader almost expecting to see outgoing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle dragged in chains through the streets of Washington. The Stupid Party...
Up to Our Eyeballs in Gaza
I listen to Rush Limbaugh about 15 minutes a day, which is the time it takes by car to go to and from my house for lunch. Fifteen minutes is more than enough time to get the gist of what any “on air personality” will say, over and over repeating himself and ringing the changes...
Trump—Middle American Radical
President Trump is the leader of America’s conservative party. Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party’s heart. Who,...
Homeland, Homesick, Homework
In 1836, Robert Schumann told the composer who had dropped by that his favorite of Chopin’s compositions was the Ballade in G minor, Op. 23, and the composer agreed with his judgment. Anton Rubinstein thought that everything to be revered in music died with Chopin in 1849, and for this declaration, he has been condemned...
Vol. 2 No. 10 October 2000
The anti-Christian and anti-European bias of the United States’ elite is nowhere more apparent than in its decades-long, love affair with Turkey. President Clinton argued in Ankara last November that Turkey will not only bridge “the gulf between the West and the Islamic World” but is also slated to become “fully a part of Europe,...
Border ‘Gotaways’ are Getting Away from Justice
Since the start of the Biden administration, 1.7 million “gotaways” have entered the country. Many of them are running away from justice in their home countries and bringing their criminality to the United States.
You Can Go Home Again
As some of you may have heard, the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, June 19 to win the NBA Championship, making the Cavs the first Cleveland team to win a major sports championship since Jim Brown and Frank Ryan and Gary Collins and the rest of the Cleveland Browns defeated the...
Shine, Republic
“It is by building our own strength and character at home—not by crusading abroad—that we can contribute most to civilization throughout the world.” —Col. Charles Lindbergh The America First Committee of 1940-41 was the largest antiwar organization (800,000 members) in American history. Although it was founded by a group of Yale law students in the...
The Myth of Equality
In 21st century America, institutional racism and sexism remain great twin evils to be eradicated on our long journey to the wonderful world where, at last, all are equal. What are we to make, then, of a profession that rewards workers with fame and fortune, yet discriminates ruthlessly against women; an institution where Hispanics and...