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...
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Are Republicans Ready for Biden’s Counterattack?
Republicans need to be wary about becoming complacent about their chances in November or adopting the Democrats' framework on rhetoric and violence lest they make a strength out of Biden’s mediocrity.
Unpalatable Values: Culture as Gastronomy
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...
John Yoo, Totalitarian
John Yoo stands outside the Anglo-American legal tradition. His views lead to self-incrimination wrung out of a victim by torture. He believes a president of the United States can initiate war, even on false pretenses, and then use the war he starts as cover for depriving U.S. citizens of habeas corpus protection. A U.S. attorney...
The Era of Our Discontent
In scientific culture, every subject is accepted as a legitimate one for quantifiable study, including subjects no wise man would venture to approach in such a manner. Hence academic researchers, boldly rushing in where mystics and poets fear to tread, feel encouraged to establish themselves as experts in matters to which the concept of expertise...
Finding Eden
“Likewise also the chief priests mocking said . . . Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross that we may see and believe.” I have been a citizen of the sovereign state of California for most of my life. I can guarantee you, Alta California is not merely a result of the...
If My Daddy Could See Me Now
September 11, 2001, we are often told, “changed everything.” In Washington, D.C., and Baghdad, Iraq, that may have been true. President George W. Bush and a handful of his advisors, who had been itching for a fight with Iraq since before the inauguration, now saw their opening. It would take another year and a half...
You Get What You Need
So what do I know anyway? I didn’t want him to begin with. I didn’t want him until it became painfully, obviously clear that he alone stood between us and the cultural and economic pillage contemplated by Hillary Clinton. And so, with never a backward look, my wife and I colored in the straight-Republican oval...
“This Is An Hard Saying: Who Can Hear It?”
Not too often these days does a church service offer me a moment of startling revelation, a line of scripture that stops me in my tracks. This past Easter, though, I was attending an Episcopal service, when I heard a line—or, more exactly, did not hear a line—that had just that effect. The minister, a...
Promise, Progress & Confusion
Ruth Horowitz: Honor and the American Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community; Rutgers University Press; New Brunswick, NJ. Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez: Bonds of Mutual Trust: The Cultural Systems of Rotating Credit Associations among Urban Mexicans and Chicanos; Rutgers University Press; New Brunswick, NJ. Mexican-Americans have been more maliciously stereotyped than blacks at times,...
All About Trump
Today, all books by liberals really are about President Trump. Such is Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, by MSNBC far-left fake-news host Lawrence O’Donnell. This book’s proxy is Richard Nixon and his 1968 victory for president against Aunt Blabby, a.k.a. Hubert Horatio Humphrey. For Nixon, Humphrey, South Vietnam,...
The American Proscenium
Politics and Prayer One of the high points of this fall’s campaign season was the vigorous debate over the place of religion in America’s public life. In retrospect, it may some day be regarded as the most meaningful public discussion of the question in this century. The exchange began early in the campaign when...
The Cold War Never Ended
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
The Courage to Live
“Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.” —Vittorio Alfieri, Oreste (1785) This volume is the first complete English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry—a cause for rejoicing. And, although Alissa Valles’s translations are a bit gray, as if sprinkled with fine dust, they are invariably precise and never overstated. While there...
Roger Stone, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Crackup of America’s Leadership
Roger Stone was recently convicted in federal court on seven felony charges, stemming from the since-closed Russian collusion investigation. Stone’s main crime was lying to Congress about who he had, or had not, spoken to about Russia. By the time Stone’s trial began in Washington, nobody was talking about WikiLeaks anymore. Nobody cared. Yet prosecutors...
Composer Anton Bruckner: A Sign of Contradiction in the Modern Age
Nineteenth-century composer Anton Bruckner was one of the last great Christian paladins of the arts to engage the enemies of our civilization. Our culture is dying today for the lack of such giants.
Between Two Worlds
Reflecting on his upbringing in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul denies cultural identity to his part of the Caribbean: “Nothing bound us together except this common residence.” Indeed, the area called Caribbean is constantly redefining itself. Its tongues include English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Its population shows large deposits of Chinese and Indians as well as African...
Why the West Has Won
One of the important lessons of Victor Davis Hanson’s riveting new book, Carnage and Culture, is that the only civilization or culture that can defeat the West is the West. “In the long history of European military practice,” Hanson writes, “it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western army for...
Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime
For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work. Not really. Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States. I am still naive enough to think that national sovereignty should...
Love And The Ruins
What with baby boomers running our instruments of communication, what were we going to talk about this month but, yes, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock? Lay it on me, man! Peace! Love! All that ’60s stuff! Or some of it. The marginality of Woodstock as a Great American Event will grow more obvious as—I hate...
Election Suspense
Where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find? Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant Mind? —Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” At the time of writing in late August, the coming U.S. election is hard to call, so that dull Suspence must indeed prevail for a few more weeks. One need not let...
What Is America’s Goal in the World?
For the World War II generation there was clarity. The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before—in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however,...
On ‘Islam’
Tomislav Sunic’s (“The Gulf Crisis in Europe,” May 1991) proposal of an Islamic conversion for neo-pagan Western Europe as some type of alternative cultural synthesis is an eyebrow raiser. But to state that the Moslem religion’s “record of zeal and intolerance is no worse than that of other monotheistic beliefs” is a denial of the...
Church and Democracy
There is no documentary evidence of any period in the history of the Church when dignitaries such as bishops would have been “democratically” elected by the assemblage of “voters.” On the other hand, popular election was never excluded in the form of acclamation. A famous ease of acclamation was that of St. Ambrose, bishop of...
The State That Didn’t Forget
The Confederate battle flag still flies every day over the capitol building of South Carolina. Readers may remember that I have several times reported in these pages on the attempts to remove this lonely anti-imperial symbol from public view. One discussion a few years ago even elicited a complaint to Chronicles from then-Governor David Beasley....
The Salami Fallacy
A few months ago in this space I described the Pecorino Effect, referring not so much to the Italian cheese as to the shopper’s inability to refuse any merchandise he has sampled, irrespective of what he thinks of the quality. I diagnosed this modern malady, with myself as a specimen of social tissue in the...
Will Churchill’s Statue Be the Next to Fall?
On Gen. George Washington’s orders, the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, was read aloud to his army. On hearing it, the troops marched to Bowling Green, decapitated and pulled down the statue of George III, and sent the remnants to be melted down into musket balls. It was a revolutionary act, a symbolic statement....
Stop It
A review of 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). [amazonify]B0013FSL1Q[/amazonify]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...
Light in the Dark
George McCartney is to be commended for his astute review (“Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” In the Dark, August) of the new film adaptation of Madame Bovary. Dr. McCartney’s close acquaintance with Gustave Flaubert’s novel serves him well. In connection with the 19th-century belief in progress, and its pitfalls, illustrated by the unsuccessful operation on Hippolyte’s...
The Present Climate
When Lorena Bobbitt startled her hubby one evening with a knife through his privates—vigorously severing an intimate part of their relationship—a lot of women apparently admired the, uh, statement Lorena made that night. I own the conversation radio station for Lancaster & York counties in Pennsylvania, and the other morning Lorena Bobbitt talk poured from...
Clap & Trap
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 pieces, an American Army flying into Arabia....
Russia’s Chechen Crisis
Russia’s ill-fated decision to intervene in the Chechen civil war has precipitated a political crisis at least as heated, and far more bloody, than the 1993 presidential-parliamentary showdown. Consider the following; all the major “democratic” parties, including former prime minister and Yeltsin backer Yegor Gaidar’s “Russia’s Choice,” have denounced the intervention and called for a...
How NPR Taught Me to Worry About the Police and Trust the Jab
I am a social scientist who has written a little bit on media over the years, so sometimes, in the spirit of research, when I have a few extra minutes in the car, I put on the radio. In just 15 minutes or so this morning I gathered the following information. I heard this segment on...
Causes and Catapults
For over a thousand years, Western civilization was defined by the shifting religious frontier between Christianity and Islam, and the Muslim religion was the ultimate enemy. Whenever Western Christians wished to condemn a person or a movement, the obvious tactic was to compare it to Islam. When a medieval French king wanted to justify his...
Not the Venice of the North
I have always disbelieved those who would argue that the topography of a country, that is to say its purely geophysical characteristics, is dominant in the shaping of the personality of its people. Stalin used to call them vulgarizers of Marxism and shoot them, but we in the West may simply murmur that they exaggerate...
What Really Happened
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” —Yogi Berra I call 2016 the Chronicles Election. The issues discussed in this magazine, often a lonely voice in the wilderness, for more than 30 years finally caught up with the national political discourse and got a president elected. They are bum trade deals, an eroding industrial...
After Iraq
As soon as the long-anticipated war with Iraq has been brought to a temporary close, the United States will be able to get on with the post-September 11 agenda declared by President Bush: the eradication of evil. Even a minimal definition of evil would include the acts of terrorism inflicted every day by Islamic extremists...
The Future of Minority Culture(s)
Two challenging words of the title of this essay stand somehow between us and ourselves, so that we will have to get around the distortions unnecessarily presented by minority and culture in order to see the freedom and even the substance that is closer than we are ordinarily able to perceive. The lesser is minority,...
Education to the Rescue
In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen). These studies—named the “Dunning School” for historian William A. Dunning, whose students applied his interpretation to individual Southern...
Standard Fare
Canada’s role in World War II was relived last year on Canadian national television via a mini-series entitled The Valour and the Horror. The second part of the series, Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command, was met by protests so widespread as to cause the whole series to be placed on the agenda of the Canadian...
No Amnesty for COVID Tyrants
The establishment would love nothing more than for you to forgive and forget their tyrannical imposition of COVID policies. But simply moving on and pretending that nothing happened would be foolish, not to mention unjust.
Alvin Bragg—Nothing to Brag About
New Yorkers need a DA who watches out for them, not for himself.
Red Cloud’s War
The Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud is generally portrayed as someone who chewed up the U.S. Army in battle after battle. He was, in the words of one author, “the first and only Indian leader in the West to win a war with the United States.” This conclusion is based on the Army’s decision to...
Shooting One Another in the Land of the Free
Gods and Generals Produced and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell Screenplay adapted from Jeff Shaara’s novel by Ronald F. Maxwell Released by Warner Bros. Opening in 2003, director Ron Maxwell’s Civil War film, Gods and Generals, was swept from the multiplexes within two weeks by a torrent of critical hysteria. “Jingoistic goat spoor,” raged one...
I Spit on Your Grave
Flamboyant William Stewart Simkins, during his professorial heyday at the University of Texas a century ago and more, was known for his long, white mane and his charisma as a teacher of law. He wrote standard textbooks on equity, contracts, and estates. But, dadgum, he took pride all his life (1842-1929) in helping, as an...
Silence the Opposition
The Socialist Greek government is crafting and carrying out policies that appear to have come straight from the Soviet playbook in efforts to repress the conservative opposition, which came out of last October’s elections heavily wounded. Those who oppose Greece’s immigration law, which grants citizenship to practically everyone (Al Qaeda has found a new gateway...
Netanyahu, the Mufti and Hitler
Last Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused a stir when he told the World Zionist Congress that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, inspired Hitler to proceed with the mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel...
Remembering Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch, who for many years served as chairman of the history department at the University of Rochester and who was famous for his commentaries on American social history, including such books as The Culture of Narcissism and Haven in a Heartless World, died in March 1994 at the age of 61. Those who knew...
Up From Sharpton
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words. Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...
Silver or Lead: The Reverse Assimilation of the Southwest
Texas attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbot committed what is commonly called a political gaffe earlier this year when he said what every thinking person this side of the Rio Grande already knew: Mass immigration from Mexico means the importation of Mexican corruption and the steady erosion of law and social trust that too...