Ronald Taylor, I’d like you to meet Buford Furrow; Buford, this is Ronald. You guys have so much in common. For one thing, you both hit the headlines. Buford Furrow became a celebrity of sorts in August 1999 when he shot up a Jewish community center in Los Angeles. Buford’s a real Aryan hero, going...
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State of the Tepid
President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union Address was almost entirely focused on domestic issues. This was appropriate, considering the magnitude of social, economic, and moral problems America is facing, and the attendant impossibility of pursuing grand global themes for as long as those problems remain unresolved. His proposals for resolving them are surprisingly...
Four More Years
“Where law ends, tyranny begins.” —William Pitt On the eve of the inauguration of the second Clinton administration, reading biographies of the First Couple is like reading Airport while waiting to board a transcontinental flight. A morbid interest in gruesome facts and events is further titillated by the anticipation of horrors...
The Price of Globalism
It is paradoxical that, having led the Western world to triumph over fascism and then communism, the United States is now the vanguard of yet another world socialist order. This American Empire, based on the benevolent neoconservative principles of borderless free enterprise, trade, and migration and consisting of multicultural social democracies enforced by U.S. military...
Oscar Oversights
Black actors and authors are still ignored in Hollywood—including some with very revealing stories to tell.
The Lost Tribes of Israel
As Israel enters its 61st year, Israelis may look back with pride. Yet, the realists among them must also look forward with foreboding. Israel is a modern democracy with the highest standard of living in the Middle East. In the high-tech industries of the future, she ...
The Muslim Conquest of Britain
Many people fear that there will be a violent conflict in Britain with the Muslims. They are wrong. Al Qaeda may commit the most appalling atrocities in the United Kingdom, as it has done in New York and Madrid, but the coming struggle will not be a violent one. Most of the Muslims living in...
Deal With the Devil
For several months after last November, the American media raved about Barack Obama’s achievement in becoming the first African-American president of the United States. I didn’t—and couldn’t—join in the jubilation, for several reasons. First, it had always seemed to me obvious that we would have a black president someday. When I was in junior-high school...
The Filthy Rich
I haven’t investigated, but I’m sure of it. A pollster in ancient Babylonia was sampling the citizenry on a proposal to raise money by taxing the vineyards and flesh pots of the obscenely rich. I don’t know a word of ancient Babylonian, but can we doubt the response went something like, “You bet! Go...
Exorcisms
“Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me.” —Yiddish Proverb Moshe Leshem ends Balaam’s Curse with a warning against the growing political power of the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate. By yielding to Orthodox authorities on educational and cultural matters, he says, Israelis are sacrificing their democratic patrimony. For the sake of Israeli democracy...
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...
Germans in the Dock
“The German may be a good fellow, but it is better to hang him.” —Russian Proverb This is a disturbing book: not simply because the author, an assistant professor of government at Harvard, points an accusing finger at the German people whom he implicitly accuses of having been Hitler’s willing accomplices in the implementation of...
Wall Street Boom, Main Street Doom
America’s economy is in great shape, government officials and the establishment media tell us. “Just look at the stock market,” they say, pointing at the record-breaking Raging Bull of Wall Street which set a new 12-month high of 9,377 in July. To such “bulls,” I say, “Bull!” Using today’s stock market as a barometer of...
Chief of Men
Of the making of books about Churchill there is no end. The latest is the best to date. Andrew Roberts reduces Churchill’s epic life to some 1,100 pages, offering a précis of the great events in which he was involved while drawing on 40 new sources. These include the private diaries of King George VI...
Two Trails of Blood
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” —Tertullian The spread of Christianity was marked by a trail of blood, shed by myriad martyrs during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Another trail of blood followed: that of the Christian defenders of the Roman Empire, shed by Arabian Muslims in...
The Lost-Cause War in Afghanistan
In the wake of the lethal rampage by a U.S. sergeant who killed 16 Afghans in the early hours of March 11, the Taliban have put a halt to talks with the Americans and President Hamid Karzai, who has demanded that NATO troops pull out of the villages and return to their camps. As...
Thoughts On Mikhail Bulgakov
I always think of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov with tenderness, as if he were my relative, and a very close and dear one at that. Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was not my relative. I was not even fortunate to know him personally—he died a few years before I was born. Once, in a conversation with the editor...
Rockford in the Springtime
I first entered Rockford the way that most people do when they’re coming from the east, taking the exit off I-90 onto East State Street, where the ramp T-bones into the Clock Tower Resort and Conference Center, now closed for good but then, in November 1995, still home to “the world’s most comprehensive collection of...
Books in Brief: May 2024
Short reviews of Bartleby & Me by Gay Talese and Southern Poets and Poems, 1606 -1860: The Land They Loved by Clyde N. Wilson.
Always Low Vices?
Has Mark Brennan any evidence of Walmart getting monopoly privileges in the United States, as he claimed in “Anarcho-Tyranny Versus . . . Walmart?” (American Proscenium, July)? Is there any evidence for the truly grotesque accusation that Central American sex slaves end up in Walmart stores north of the border (or south of it for,...
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...
The Long Decline in the Middle
The "Welch Effect" has laid waste to American companies on American soil and, in the process, has sacrificed the economic well-being of the American middle class as well.
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...
The Ignorance of the Doctors
Montaigne in his Essays called it ignorance doctorale (1.54). Four hundred years later an American journalist called it “educated incompetence.” It means the sort of nonknowledge, or anti-knowledge, that can follow upon higher learning, especially when theorizing about politics, morality, and the arts. That, in the first age of mass higher education in human history,...
The Wolf Week in Review: The Great Political Christian Contest
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Celebrity Apprentices Here’s a lede you didn’t imagine five years ago: The Pope and Donald Trump are engaged in a public feud over illegal immigration. Trump is “not Christian,” says the pontiff. This latest brouhaha comes with Pope Francis’s visit to...
New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, now in its 14th year, has had its up and downs. But some local grumblings notwithstanding, this year’s festival was much better than last, with two excellent plays and only one real miss. Promised works from Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz and novelist...
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...
Will Elites Blow Up the GOP?
“Buchanan, if you ever hear of a group getting together to stop X, be sure to put your money on X.” So, Richard Nixon told me half a century ago, after he had been badly burned in just such a futile and failed enterprise. It was the Cleveland Governors Conference of 1964. Sen. Barry Goldwater...
The Way We Are, No. 9
Have we no shame? (No.) —Fred Reed Stimulus: $250 each for Social Security recipients; $250,000,000(?) each for bankers and stock speculators. Sounds like business as usual. With affirmative action and bailouts, the U.S. government has almost succeeded in severing the link between performance and reward. Honest Abe. Fair and Balanced. Compassionate Conservatism. Notice a pattern...
Petitioning Satan
Talk of secession is in the air. A number of internet petitions from several states, asking to be allowed to leave the Union, have garnered tens of thousands of signatures. Unsurprisingly, Texas leads the list, and Ron Paul has endorsed the idea. According to him, “secession is a deeply American principle.” True enough, which is...
La-La Land Reacts to the Immigration Protests
In a sane world, the sight of more than a half-million immigrants—many of them illegal—flooding the streets of downtown Los Angeles and waving Mexican flags would have been something of a wake-up call for Southern Californians. It wasn’t. No matter how in-your-face the protesters have become, conventional wisdom argues that these nice folks are simply...
The Dating Crisis Is Really a Maturity Crisis
Excessive insecurity and widespread aversion to commitment are driving our country’s toxic dating culture off a cliff.
Mildred Indemnity Always Twice Pierces the Double Postman
The sheer inanity of so much fiction today sends us necessarily to the past, and not always to Balzac and Trollope. If we are looking for something readable and American and modern, then this gathering is just the thing. Indeed, for sheer readability (if not for the finest quality), James M. Cain is hard to...
It Takes a Crisis
While Europe’s monetary crisis spreads, Americans watch in astonishment as the German government bails out its feckless co-unionists. Greece’s financial predicaments boiled over last summer with baton-wielding riot police pummeling Greek civil servants who objected to their government’s modest proposal to raise the official retirement age from 61 to 63 by 2015. In response, Germany...
Smiling Through Clenched Teeth
I Care a Lot Directed and written by Jonathan Blakeson ◆ Produced by Andrea Ajemian and Sacha Guttenstein ◆ Distributed by Netflix The Shrike (1955) Directed by José Ferrer ◆ Written by Ketti Frings ◆ Produced by Aaron Rosenberg ◆ Distributed by Universal Pictures Rosamund Pike is one of the most versatile and accomplished actresses in...
The Necessity for Ancestor-Worship
“It is a noble faculty of our nature which enables us to connect our thoughts, sympathies and happiness with what is distant in place and time; and looking before and after, to hold communion at once with our ancestors and our posterity. There is a moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors, which elevates the...
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...
False Redeemers
The Last Castle Produced and distributed by DreamWorks Directed by Rod Lurie Screenplay by David Scarpa Training Day Produced by Outlaw Productions Directed by Antoine Fuqua Screenplay by David Ayer Released by Warner Bros. American film would be poorer without Robert Redford. As an actor and as a director, he has given us some vastly...
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...
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...
Honor to Whom Honor
“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB). When a zealous Christian offered to help Mark Twain understand the difficult things in the Bible, Twain said something like this: “It is not...
Digging For Truth in Pravda
I confess—I know Russian. This ability has been causing me a lot of irritation lately. I have been bombarded with questions from people who don’t know the language, about what is really going on in Moscow now. In my answers, in order to be absolutely unbiased, I always rely on “Pravda.” I mean not just...
Groundhog Days, Javelina Nights
How a people as addicted to novelty as the modern American public can remain indifferent to an experience restricted to the last three or four of the thousands of human generations, drawing their airplane window shades to watch a movie or study an organizational chart, is—or ought to be—a subject of major interest to the...
A Postmodern Yahweh for Episcopalians
I had expected to find a small gathering of eccentric Episcopalians in a basement lecture hall. Instead, the National Cathedral was overflowing with a Christmas Eve-sized crowd. The draw was not a holiday but a debate between “Jesus scholars” Prof Marcus Borg of Oregon State University and the Rev. N.T. Wright of Litchfield Cathedral, England....
A Silver Lining in the Election Debacle
In the eyes of much of the world the United States is now reduced to the status of a banana republic. The sordid spectacle of the past week—with the Democratic Party machine, the mainstream media, and social media barons forming a joint criminal enterprise to steal the presidential election—is reminiscent of similar ploys in the...
Vol. 1 No. 4 April 1999
Back in 1994, a major news item proved unfit for publication in any “mainstream” media outlets in the United States. It concerned the possibility—which turned into a virtual certainty—that the Bosnian Muslim government staged the infamous “marketplace massacre” in Sarajevo, killing 66 of its own people. The U.S. government promptly blamed the Serbs. In subsequent...
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...
Trumpsteria: Dislike!
Chaos dominates the political scene today thanks to the success of the Trump campaign and the Trumpsteria that has accompanied it. This chaos is the subject of myriad essays, commentaries, and—most significantly—power grabs both brand new and repackaged. It was, in many senses, inevitable. Donald Trump is attracting large crowds, and his poll numbers are...
Exploiting Massacres to Raise Poll Ratings
It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019. In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera—police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials—were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead...