An established authority on film, Professor Basinger has updated her monograph on the films of Anthony Mann for good reason. Not only has her original edition of 1979 long been out of print, it has been in much demand. This second edition of Anthony Mann will mean that a new generation of students of film,...
On Palm Sunday, I took a walk. It’s the first day of spring, and the sky is china blue, decorated with small cotton-like puffs of clouds. Flowers are blooming, and the ducks at the pond have laid their eggs. The beaver are back—I can tell by the trees they have gnawed down near the pond,...
“The Price of Empire is America’s soul and that price is too high.” —Senator J. William Fulbright August 8, 1967 The oily whoremaster in the White House dodged the draft thanks to another Arkansas Oxonian named Bill, but the debt remains unpaid. For the shirker is viciously conventional, as the ambitious young always are, while...
In the years just before America’s entry into World War II, thousands of people, shaken and scattered by the Great Depression, made their way to Houston, where the shipyards were booming. My people wound up there, too. The place they lived was called West End, rows of little white houses set up on cinder blocks,...
The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing and potentially rather promising. The depressing...
Lehi, Utah, is somewhat familiar to those who have seen the movie Footloose. The small Mormon community provided Hollywood with the perfect setting for a tale of adolescent rebellion against parental and religious authority. Yet shortly after the movie’s release Lehi’s pious image was ruptured by a child abuse scandal. One morning in the summer...
December was a tense month for Russia’s ruling “tandem.” President Dmitri Medvedev and Premier Vladimir Putin were confronted with violent protests after “Kavkaztsy” (natives of the volatile North Caucasus) killed Yegor Svidirov, a leading member of one of Russia’s unruly and often violent soccer fan clubs, in a Moscow brawl on December 6. On December...
I write with bittersweet excitement to reveal the new interim editor in chief of Chronicles. As our readers know, Aaron Wolf was to become the editor in chief this year, but passed away suddenly on Easter Sunday. Aaron was an exceptional man and a wonderful, loyal editor for Chronicles, serving the institution for 20 years....
“Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.” —William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus In his 1990 pamphlet “How to Revitalize Russia,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “When our fathers and grandfathers threw down their weapons during a deadly war [World War I], deserting the front in order to plunder their neighbor at home, they in effect made a...
PERSPECTIVE Our Fathers’ Fields by Thomas Fleming Weaver, property rights, and conservatism. VIEWS Property Rights and the Founding by Marco Bassani The classical-liberal reading. The War on Blight by Steve Berg You may be next. Where Did Our Property Rights Go? by Steven Greenhut Not in my back yard. Of Landlords, Leases, and Calico Indians...
The Bush administration could be cooking up an “October surprise”—an attack on Iran—to boost the lagging fortunes of the President and the Republican Party, according to a recent editorial by Patrick J. Buchanan. With midterm elections coming in November, the Bush White House has been cranking up the anti-Iran rhetoric, presenting Tehran’s nuclear program as...
Though my wife and I make our part-time home in Florida, in the port town of Fort Pierce, for the past six years we have made it a custom to attend Memorial Day services at Vero Beach a few miles up Route AIA. How this custom began we cannot recall; but each year, rain or...
The day after Christmas 2006, the U.S.-military death toll in Iraq overtook and then surpassed the total number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001. Some Democrats, even before the symbolic number was reached, were calling for a withdrawal, either immediate or gradual, of U.S. forces. President Bush, although he had abandoned his signature tune...
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds. . .is every hit as hitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better than to go out gunnin for hayseeds.” —George...
The sun is shining on a typical warm day. I roll my sleeves up, let the window down, and watch the train go by. The battered Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Santa Fe boxcars roll past, clackity-clacking and swaying just a little on their way to “Cow Town.” Then they are gone, so I turn...
—”Imperialism is absolutely necessary to a people which desires spiritual as well as economic expansion. —Benito Mussolini America has survived, the Last and Only Superpower, while so many others have fallen by the wayside, their bones littering the road from empire: Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and—closest to ourselves—a once-great Britain,...
A January 24 bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport left 35 dead and scores injured, as the Russian capital’s transportation system was targeted by terrorists for the second time in less than a year. The most likely culprits are Muslim terrorists from the North Caucasus who had struck Moscow’s metro system in March 2010. In the...
From the West End, to the Square Mile, out into the most featureless South London suburbs, London is full of political resonances and the memories of old controversies. From all kinds of streets, roads, avenues, broadways, high streets, rises, hills, crescents, parks, mews, and terraces, native or adoptive Londoners have gone out into the world...
“Extremist” is a word that may conjure up images of hooded Klansmen crowded around a burning cross or of Black Panther separatists or kooky 60’s “revolutionaries.” Or perhaps images of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao come to mind. There is a supposition that those who are commonly called “extremists” are unreasonable, irrational, perhaps crazy, and quite...
I agree with Professor W. Bruce Lincoln (“The Burden of Russian History,” March 1994) that Russia’s economic and political system is prone to break society into two parts: “them,” those responsible for making decisions and managing the country, and “us,” the simple people deadly indifferent to everything that doesn’t touch them immediately—i.e., high politics. I...
Houston now has a professional soccer team, which is not something I’m especially excited about. The team’s initial moniker, however, apparently got a rise out of the Bayou City’s “Latino” residents, many of whom, we are told, “only came here to work.” Not only did these supposedly friendly worker bees get upset, but many of...
How beastly the bourgeois is, Especially the male of the species D.H. Lawrence’s lines are still quoted, though most often by writers who know nothing else of his poetry. It is taken for granted that Lawrence was right to contemn the “middle-class values” of the whited sepulchers who pretend to virtues and tastes they do...
In his latest novel, Derek Turner, author of Sea Changes and Displacement, takes his readers on a seriocomic journey with a latter-day Holy Fool. Along the way, Turner takes aim at the insanity of political correctness, celebrity culture in the Age of Twitter, and the spiritual wasteland that results from a denial of truth. A...
From the July 2001 issue of Chronicles. “The feeling between this city and the hayseeds. . . is every hit as hitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better...
The sun is breaking through, the dark green grass shimmering as it is swept back and forth by the wind like the mane of a wild mustang running along a plain. Down here, near Madisonville along I-45 South, the rains had come hard and heavy. The roadside is aglow in the white sunlight with the...
Lawrence Dennis was an outsider in a movement of outsiders, a unique and largely solitary figure whose career as a writer—and notorious “seditionist”—embodies the tragedy and bravery of the Old Right, the pre-World War II “America first” generation of conservative intellectuals and activists. In many important ways, Dennis is the prototype of modern “paleo conservatives.”...
Verbal sparring between Premier Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev over Western intervention in Libya has raised questions about a split in the Russian “tandem,” and Putin’s criticisms of the intervention may reflect Russian fears of possible U.S. interference in the political struggle in Moscow. On March 21, Putin compared the Western coalition air strikes,...
Drowned drumlins swarmed in the brilliant bay, and ravens like those that plagued Saint Patrick croaked from the chasm below my feet as they rolled lazily half a mile above County Mayo. The ravens’ harsh call was an onomatopoeic reminder of my present eminence, Croagh Patrick, the 2,510-foot cone that dominates the great inlet of...
Americans do not believe in death. At least, they live as if they will never die. This has been the case from colonial times. It is a consequence of seemingly limitless opportunity and a drive for upward mobility, denied to generations of Europeans. Indentured servants, laborers, persecuted minorities, and peasants tilling the soil of the...
PERSPECTIVE The Audacity of Hateby Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Obama Presidencyby Doug BandowThe triumph of (lots of) experience over (a little) hope? Boogaloo Down Broadwayby Tony OuthwaiteThe charade of liberal change. The Revelations of the Obama Planby David A. HartmanChange we can’t afford. Obama on Foreign Policyby Ted Galen CarpenterA mysterious work in progress. ROUND...
On May 10, Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised his audience during his annual address to the Federal Assembly. Most of his hour-long speech had gone as expected: He spoke on economics, technological innovation, and the need to rebuild the country’s infrastructure. Then the former KGB officer shifted tack: “And now for the most important thing.” ...
Leave it to Yale to hoist itself by its own snoot—the snootiest college in the country has finally given itself its own comeuppance. Yale has declared promiscuity, or at least exposure to aggressively promoted public promiscuity, to form an integral part of “the Yale experience.” They’ve told some nice Orthodox Jewish boys that, if they...
It was about 1965, in Jimmy Dengate’s “club” in Charleston, when I got my first clue to what the 50’s had been all about. I met an unusual sportswriter. Let us call him Jack, if only because it was his real name. Jack was unusual, because he could write decent prose, knew something about sports,...
The Mirror Test is John Kael Weston’s testament and witness to seven years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weston worked as a State Department political officer alongside U.S. Marines and Army soldiers in some of the most dangerous areas of both countries, advising—and sometimes overruling—American military commanders in what became political nation-building operations growing...
“Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” is a working paper by Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The authors found that media coverage of COVID-19 has been much more negative in the U.S. than in international media. They found, “Ninety one percent of...
It was hot out there, the sun glaring down on us in our suits and ties. The air was sort of smoky, the way it usually is down here near the Gulf Coast. A parade of suits and uniforms marched behind the fire truck. The casket was sitting in back, and the sun glared off...
From the November 1998 issue of Chronicles. The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing...
Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs, announced on May 1, gives (theoretically, at least) Washington the opportunity to make an exit from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it most certainly underscored the surreal nature of Washington’s relationship with its “ally” in the region. Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in...
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...
As always. Rabbi Jacob Neusner’s February article (“Letter From Inner Israel: Christmas, That Winter Festival“) is of interest to this hard-shell, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic. The attempts to secularize the synagogues that Rabbi Neusner discusses could have come from a page out of Call to Action and from various dissenting groups intent on “desacralizing” the...
The European Union will set up rapid-reaction teams to deal with an increasing flood of illegal African immigrants on Europe’s southern flank. The decision was made by the European Commission at a July 19 meeting spurred on by complaints from Spain, Italy, and Malta. Illegal immigration to Spain via the Canary Islands has increased sharply...
Something curious happened in South Carolina on June 10. While Sen. Lindsay Graham easily prevailed over his challenger, Buddy Witherspoon, garnering two thirds of the vote in the Republican U.S Senate primary, the Democrats (voting on the same day) chose a candidate who everyone admits is well to the right of Graham himself. Of course,...
For months, we’ve seen stories on polls being cooked to boost Hillary Clinton’s numbers and demoralize Trump voters. Others have noted the possibility of a “Brexit” type surprise on election day. Meanwhile, in the wake of the re-opening of the FBI investigation of the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal, the race is tightening, according to numerous...
A U.N. resolution concerning weapons inspections in Iraq made October a month for hard bargaining among Washington, Paris, and Moscow. Washington and London both desired a resolution that would allow the automatic application of force should Iraq obstruct any proposed arms inspections. Paris and Moscow balked, but by mid-October it appeared that both the French...
We were driving back to Michigan after a conference on Herbert Hoover that I had organized for the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, in 1984. After you get past Hammond and Gary, Indiana is flat but quite nice. Our beautiful Buick 225 Ultra blew the head gasket on the Indiana Toll Road near...
As of this writing, stories describing the horrifying bombing and shootings committed in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik are still coming in, but there is enough information available for an attentive reader to draw some preliminary conclusions about the self-identified mass-murderer. Breivik’s actions and certain sections of his lengthy manifesto belie the mainstream media’s portrayal...
Virginia, the cradle of the American Republic, has proved to be a particularly tempting locus for the designs of the capitalist Utopians. Our own conservative Republican governor, George Allen, with the general support of the state party and Washington’s Republican press organ, has led the charge of the developers’ earth movers on the state’s countryside,...
Kudos to Chronicles for “Sovereignty for Sale? The Free Trade Debate” (July) and high praise to Brother Pat for “Toward One Nation, Indivisible“! One thing, though: the Buchananite fair trade “Long March Back” will only come via the third-party route. The Republicans are but the Fabian wing of the Socialist Party, the Democrats being the...
PERSPECTIVEBeastie Boysby Thomas Fleming VIEWSFederales, Gringo Styleby Roger D. McGrathThe exponential growth of federal police. Do We Want a Federal Police Force?by William J. QuirkThe Supreme Court and Congress versus the people. Jack Bauer, Agent of Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.by R. Cort KirkwoodAmerica’s most wanted. NEWSThe Surge “Success”by Ted Galen CarpenterTriumph of hope over experience. REVIEWSTowers of...