The “Iran Nuclear Deal” was killed by President Trump on May 8, which came as no surprise to anyone who had heard a Trump campaign speech in 2016 or to those who were aware that Trump had recently hired John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Surprise or not, it was an imprudent move. Ever since the...
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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...
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Paul’s Last Hurrah
At this point it is clear that Rep. Ron Paul is not going to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Yet it seems likely that he will outlast all his rivals but for Romney, and that he will have a substantial bloc of delegates at the convention. Paul has the money, and the...
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Plus ça Change . . .
In the December 27, 2002, issue of the English edition of Forward, self-described Orthodox Jew David Klinghoffer attacks Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for his recent book Two Hundred Years Together. In this historical work, Solzhenitsyn deals with Jews and Russians living side by side from 1775, when Russia came to occupy the heavily Jewish regions of Eastern...
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In Focus – Mixed Drinks & False Faiths
To a world of parched souls, Jesus Christ offered the Water of Life. Unlike club soda, however this Water is not a good mixer: in order to refresh, it must be taken straight, and on the Rock For centuries, men have attempted to concoct heady new “Christianity-and-” brews, but the disappointing result is always temporary...
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Beat the Clock
The Rookie Produced by Walt Disney Pictures and 98 MPH Productions Directed by John Lee Hancock Screenplay by Mike Rich Released by Buena Vista and Walt Disney Pictures Clockstoppers Produced by Nickelodeon Movies Directed by Jonathan Frakes Screenplay by Rob Hedden and Andy Hedden Released by Paramount Pictures I have no idea whether Oscar Wilde...
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Piping Hot
Concocted by four editors of something called Equator magazine (I am told it is a large glossy tabloid of odd people doing odd things), Hot Type‘s subtitle is: “Our Most Celebrated Writers Introduce the Next Word in Contemporary American Fiction.” On the basis of the writing selected, I don’t know if I would let some...
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Supreme Court’s Drifting Days Are Done
This scrupulously objective book may be considered a gift to conservatives who have long despaired about the possibility of principled legal tenets regularly prevailing in Supreme Court opinions. For decades this long-suffering group has watched Republican Supreme Court appointees concur in various left-wing crackpot decisions that have become the law of the land. Thankfully, such...
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Adam Lanza’s America
Newtown has now joined the ranks of Columbine, Aurora, and Virginia Tech as ominous names that evoke memories of tragic violence. This one stings especially because 20 children, ages six and seven, were among the 26 murdered at the hitherto tranquil Sandy Hook Elementary School by a punk named Adam Lanza. Celebrities and news anchors...
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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.
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Flogging
“Boys had been beaten since history began and it would be a bad day for the world if ever, inconceivably, boys should cease to be beaten.” So said C.S. Forester in Lieutenant Hornblower. Clarence Davis, a black Democratic member of the Maryland House of Delegates, courageously proposed restoring judicial flogging in Maryland last year. Courts...
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The Other Lindbergh
While the most famous member of the Lindbergh clan is undoubtedly the aviator and World War II-era isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the qualities for which he won renown—his courage, his Scandinavian severity, his willingness to stand against the tide of popular opinion, his dislike of cities and the elites they spawned, and (most of...
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Putin and the Polish Gesture
In 2002, Vladimir Putin told a French reporter who asked about “innocent civilians” killed in Chechnya that—since the journalist evidently sympathized with Muslims—he would arrange to have him circumcised, adding: “I will recommend that they conduct the operation in such a way so that afterwards nothing else will grow.” People of the pompous persuasion were...
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Dance With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight
There was a notable convergence some decades ago, one that was noticed musically as two separate and distinct phenomena, but not as a convergence—or even as a conspiracy, or a rivalry. I never heard or saw any acknowledgment that two of the foremost instrumentalists in the world were fiddling around pretty much at the same...
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A Pack of Lies
“The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries History is a pack of lies.” —Bishop Willkin Stubbs Marc Ferro sets out to broaden our horizons. He picks 14 countries (or sometimes ex-countries) to tell us “the vision of the past which is proper to each.” By “proper” he clearly does not mean “correct,” for he puts his stamp...
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Maybe Forever
Is the current wave of immigration to America, mainly from the Third World, an invasion? Wayne Lutton and John Tanton maintain that it is. The authors effectively argue that our unprecedented level of immigration, forced on the country by selfish interests, is remaking America in many negative ways, especially by eroding our national culture. But...
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Trump and His Enemies
To the extent that a man may be judged by his enemies, Donald Trump is a very good man, indeed. And the more extended and successful his campaign becomes, the more it proves that everything he has ever said about the conjoined political and media establishments in America is spot on, beginning with his charge...
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The View From Mount Nebo
Last summer this expansive sagebrush basin at the lower end of the Wyoming Range made the annual encampment of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, spawn of a congestive civilization. Fifteen thousand strong, they organized according to their various pursuits: drinking, drugs, nudity, fornication, and—for all the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department knows—cannibalism and human sacrifice....
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Beyond the “Strategic Partnership”
The E.U.-Russia Centre Conference, Munich, September 15, 2011 The “Strategic Partnership” between Berlin and Moscow is usually understood in the English-speaking world in somewhat simplified terms: Russian energy meets German technology with a lot of high-minded political rhetoric on top. In the meantime, the received wisdom goes, Germany remains firmly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic framework...
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Luck and the Mass Man
Why was Christ put to death? Because Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, had told the Sanhedrin, “Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people.” Literally, Caiaphas was inviting the Pharisees to reason through—logizesthe is the Greek word—to calculate, or to...
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Return of Capital
One of the great ironies of the late-1990’s stock-market bubble is that more Americans followed the advice of Wall Street scam artists than that of Omaha billionaire Warren E. Buffett, the best money manager in the second half of the 20th century. The “New Paradigm” fooled much of America; Buffett and his partner, Charlie...
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Sacrificing Northam Will Not Be Enough
“Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue to be the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia.” So decreed Terry McAuliffe, insisting on the death penalty with no reprieve for his friend and successor Gov. Ralph Northam. Et tu, Brute? Yet Northam had all but...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Beyond the “Strategic Partnership”
The E.U.-Russia Centre Conference, Munich, September 15, 2011 The “Strategic Partnership” between Berlin and Moscow is usually understood in the English-speaking world in somewhat simplified terms: Russian energy meets German technology with a lot of high-minded political rhetoric on top. In the meantime, the received wisdom goes, Germany remains firmly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic framework of...
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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...
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Versailles-on-Hudson
“Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.” —R.W. Emerson A critic who tries to stay abreast of the literature of his time, in any time, deserves respect as well as sympathy from less heroic readers content to pick and choose from among the deluge of titles that sends one literary...
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Clap & Trap
From the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. I had heard about, but not read, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama’s star-burst essay published in 1989; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for him as his critics chortled and pointed at history rumbling anew: people dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falling to...
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The New Kohlonization
The euphoria that accompanied the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, should still be fresh in our minds. We remember the scenes of people dancing on the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, total strangers embracing each other, sharing bottles of champagne. We remember the party atmosphere that culminated in reunification...
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What Should We Fight For?
“We will never accept Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea,” declaimed Rex Tillerson last week in Vienna. “Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns full control of the peninsula to Ukraine.” Tillerson’s principled rejection of the seizure of land by military force—”never accept”—came just one day after President Trump recognized Jerusalem as...
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Parenting and the State
In my day, and my day was not so very long ago, boys respected and even feared the fathers of the girls whom they dated. Growing up, I went out with a lot of Italian girls. I knew that their fathers ruled their households, their daughters, and me when I was with their daughters. If...
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Vocation
Calvary Produced by Reprisal Films and The Irish Film Board Directed and written by John Michael McDonagh Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce has the father of his protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, bitterly complain of the Irish people, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden...
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Happenstance Phenomena
Patricia Highsmith is a peculiar taste, nasty and unpalatable to many. Readers who like her, however, tend to like her enormously. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, the unwanted daughter of a graphic artist who attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine. Her father left home before she was born, and she...
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The Reminiscences of Earl Wild
I was thinking recently about Earl Wild for several reasons: his achievement as a pianist; his substantial and extended contribution to the “Romantic Revival” through his performances and recordings; and my own memories of exchanges with him after three of his appearances in New York City. When I beheld him backstage, standing far away from...
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On the Via Descartes
I enjoyed Thomas Fleming’s article in praise of Aristotle (“Back to Reality,” Perspective, September). The best way to introduce our children to philosophy is to teach them Aristotle’s proof for the existence of God and his proof for human immortality, with some embellishment and clarification from the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, then to bring...
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Comment
The Editorial Comment was presented as a speech by Dr. Carlson, Executive Vice-President of The Rockford Institute at the April 16, 1984 meeting of the Philadelphia Society. Whole forests have been sacrificed in the last two years to the latest phase of this nation’s perennial debate on education. Yet the debate swirling about us has...
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Are the Good Times Over for Biden?
Are the Democrats headed for their Little Bighorn, with President Joe Biden as Col. Custer? The wish, you suggest, is father to the thought. Yet, consider. On taking office, Biden held a winning hand. Three vaccines, with excellent efficacy rates, had been created and were being administered at a rate of a million shots a...
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Market-Driven Solutions to Public Education
“If we elect new school board members or run for the board A ourselves, we can expect improved schools.” This is our national misunderstanding. Nothing in the traditional public school system inherently promotes excellence. Even the free election of school board members—a token nod to democracy—fails to overcome this system’s fatal flaws. As a good...
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They’re Coming, They’re Coming
Thinking about unidentified flying objects can be a useful exercise, whatever we believe about extraterrestrial life and its presence among us. If nothing else, it forces us to deal seriously with those perennial questions that are as useful to scientists and philosophers as they are to lawyers and politicians on congressional investigating committees: What do...
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The Aesthetics of Ruins
Archaeology is an academic discipline different from most others in that it attracts tourists. Most laboratories and library carrels don’t get busloads of vacationers dropping by in season, hoping for something entertaining to do between visits to the beach and forays into the bazaar. But the ruins of ancient temples—or stadia or theaters or whole...
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The Trojan Chicken
Albany, Kentucky, has a stay of execution for at least a little longer. But more than a few townspeople are preparing to mourn her passing—and leave before the funeral. Albany is a town of 2,000 in the rolling limestone hills of southern Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee line. Founded in the early 1820’s, it...
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Wreckers and Builders
Twenty-five years is a long time to get back to where you started, but two-and-a-half decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the United States, not the Russian Federation, that has succeeded in restoring the threat of nuclear annihilation to the global conversation. And, by means of economic sanctions, energy-infrastructure intrusions, and...
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End Game
The latest, and perhaps the best, book to be written in the wake of the Great Recession raises an important question: Why is it that America’s self-appointed elite refuses to learn from its long record of failure and futility in economic management that its ideas and policies are all wrong? The answer is provided by...
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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...
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Polish-German Reconciliation in an Historic Town
On August 29, 2004, just before my departure from Poland, I attended an important ceremony at the small, historic town of Nieszawa, which lies near the Vistula River, about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, in the Kujawy-Pomorze (Kuyavia-Pomerania) region or Voivodeship (Wojewodztwo). It was a sunny and rather hot day. The town, which currently has...
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Burning Bright in the Darkness
I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. To discover, at his memorial service, that Dr. John Addison Howard’s favorite verse of Scripture was Philippians 4:11 came as no surprise to anyone who knew him well. Those who had simply met him once or twice, or never...
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Someone Else’s Backyard
Wars, according to the one-dimensional view of world history favored by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, are caused by bad or mad men. Once we, the almighty, self-appointed arbiters of worldwide justice, determine who the bad guys are, we can go in, blow them away, and make the world safe for democracy. This approach is...
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The Bankruptcy Crisis
Personal bankruptcies are being filed at a rate 25 percent higher than in 1995, and if the current rate is maintained, the absolute numbers, estimated at 1.1 million, will surpass the record of 900,000 set in 1992. The situation surprised the New York Times (August 26, 1996) because normally high bankruptcy rates occur during recessions....
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Elk Country
As the supernatural world is eternally at work behind events in the natural world, so the world of man-in-nature continues to operate behind the synthetic, abstracted, and unreal world of man-outside-of-nature. For that reason alone, I shall always hunt elk. (Though of course, I really don’t need any reason.) On the afternoon before the start...