Just lay your hardware on the table, cowboy, and keep them hands up high. Last Sunday, I bumped into Ron at the hardware store. In the central Midwest, where I live, it’s not unusual to meet an old friend pushing his cart full of home repairs, especially on a Sunday. True Value and Ace are...
456 search results for: Wayne%25252525252BAllensworth
Post
The Trees of Autumn
It is a warm night for November, even in Texas. Thanksgiving is a few days away, and the warm weather, interrupted by a cool snap, has returned, reimposing itself like an unwelcome guest on an autumn background of falling leaves and brown, seemingly endless prairie stretching north to distant Canada. Southeast from Waco, along Highway...
Post
Life in the Borderland
Returning from a Slavic land on a Slavic airline after serving a mission aiding the Catholic Church in Slavic Eastern Europe, I craved a little freedom from Slavdom. So I eschewed the late Slavic pope’s tradition and refrained from kissing the earth after touching down at O’Hare. Instead, I enjoyed a quiet cigarette outside arrivals,...
Post
Crisis and Denial
At CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), U.S. Rep. Allen West (R-FL) cited the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as the cause of the financial crisis. He has a point: As long as Glass-Steagall was in place, we had no systemic collapse. Banks that were busy underwriting crazy subprime securities—synthetic CDOs, synthetic CDOs squared,...
Post
Child Abuse, the State, and the Russian Family
It was another episode in a series of shocking crimes against children. Little Sasha, just three years old, was pulled from the frigid waters of the Pekhorka River in January 2009. He was bound to a car battery with adhesive tape, his body battered and bearing the marks of cigarette burns. It was the second...
Post
Real Men’s Studies
The negative critique of American education has grown from a mere trickle back when Albert Jay Nock delivered his lectures on Theory of Education in the United States at the University of Virginia in 1931 into a roaring flash flood. When the sound and fury of the various Jeremiahs of American education have ceased echoing...
Post
U.S.A.: The Global Commons
Roper’s February polling of Americans reveals a clear consensus against high levels of immigration. Eighty-three percent favor a lower level of immigration than the current average of over a million a year, and some 70 percent support a level of immigration below 300.000 per year. This view is held by 52 percent of Hispanics, 73...
Post
The Ethics of English
“When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.” —William Hazlitt The treason of the teacher of English: that is the principal subject of Professor Booth’s discourses over two turbulent decades in the academy. Dr. Booth, a temperate rhetorician, does not call this dereliction of duty...
Post
An Obsolete Alliance Turns 75
NATO has undermined the security of its members and created enemies that, in turn, justify further NATO interference in an increasingly unstable “security environment.”
Post
New Words for Old—February 2006
PERSPECTIVE Lost in Translation by Thomas FlemingThe art of reality. VIEWS Mind Your Language!by James O. TateA sea of ruined words. Manners, Morals, Languageby Chilton Williamson, Jr.Forsaking the Beau-Ideal. A Trip to Smart-Mouth Collegeby Aaron D. WolfThe loss of sacred words. NEWS Riots in the Suburbsby Claude PolinThe programmed suicide of France. REVIEWS Seasoned Travelsby Catharine...
Post
Losing the “War on Terror” at the Border
According to a host of news reports, the porous, virtually unprotected southern border of the United States has attracted the attention of Islamic terrorists, as many of us warned it would at the outset of the “War on Terror.” In March, Time, citing U.S. intelligence officials, reported that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a ring leader of...
Post
Tough Tamales
Maybe I should hop a jet to Vegas for a weekend at the dice tables or hang out in Beverly Hills for a while. Maybe I should bang a couple of hookers or sniff some cocaine—you know, something recreational to change my mood. I went in the library again and it didn’t do me any...
Post
The “Trumpening” and Conservative Christians
Many conservative Christians have reservations, at least, about supporting Republican front runner Donald Trump, and not without reason. He has had a less than completely convincing conversion to a pro-life position; has said (more than once) that Planned Parenthood has done some good (on screening for cervical and breast cancer, for instance), while declaring that...
Post
Christmas, Texas
I am fumbling in the console, looking for my Jim Reeves Christmas CD, when I notice the wall of rolling, gray clouds approaching from the east. The sun is sliding slowly beneath the horizon in the west, shooting shards of orange-red hues into the purple-blue sky, presenting a striking contrast to the dark gray wall,...
Post
Counterrevolution in Toyland
Among the hottest selling items in toy stores across the land is the “G.I. Joe” series of military action figures. Since the “Star Wars” movies, war toys have made a strong comeback from their depressed levels during the “antiwar” 1970’s. Model figures based on “Star Wars” characters proved so successful that others quickly entered the...
Post
Who Won the Cold War?
In his Foreword to Witness, Whittaker Chambers, writing in the “form of a letter to my children,” tries to explain the appeal of communism: I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time. You will ask: Why, then, do men become Communists? How did it happen that you, our gentle and...
Post
Arms and the Man: Clint Eastwood as Hero and Filmmaker
From the August 1989 issue of Chronicles. A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of the picture it has of itself. High art and popular art are not in competition here. Both may and do help citizens...
Post
Shades of White
“Mankind is in crisis . . . a long crisis which began 300, .and in some places, 400 years ago, when people turned away from religion. . . . It is a crisis which led the East to Communism and the West to a pragmatic society. It is the crisis of materialism.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Following...
Post
We Can’t Vote Ourselves Out of This: Organizing a Middle American Resistance
The American right needs a Middle American resistance united in its focus on internal secession and self-government, one that does not rely on national politics or bet on political saviors.
Post
War Images
Christopher Wilson was arrested in October in Polk County, Florida, on obscenity charges. Mr. Wilson’s pornographic website contains pictures of the wives and girlfriends of his paying customers posing and engaging in sex acts, and he claims that about a third of his reported 160,000 customers are in the U.S. military. When some of those...
Post
The Way Forward Is With a Broken Head
Symptoms: Health fine until reads Walker latest. Immediate somatic distress of all systems inch pulmonary; digestive crisis, upper, middle, and lower; cardiac irregularity; low and high blood pressure; skin rashes and lesions; emerging hyperallergenic reactions to paper, ink, reading process. Psychosomatic reactions: delusions of persecution, fears of apocalypse, entropic anxieties, all leading to reaction formation...
Post
The Art of Creation An Interview With Dean Koontz
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”—Samuel Johnson G.K. Chesterton was an avid reader of popular fiction, particularly the so-called “penny dreadfuls,” whose everyday morality and concentration on plot and character made them more wholesome reading than the pretentious productions of modernist literature. Chesterton’s prejudice is shared today...
Post
Trump’s was a proponent of “America First” in 1990
Republican front runner Donald Trump has been criticized for not being “conservative” in the manner of the Beltway Right, for changing his positions (especially on abortion), and for his past associations with Democratic politicians. Trump-haters frequently claim that The Donald has no fixed views, is merely opportunistically taking advantage of popular anger with political elites,...
Post
The Next Sound You Hear
We’ve crammed the Suburban with about as many people as it can carry, driving the fence line on a section of land not far from Meridian, Texas, on a cool Sunday afternoon during deer season. My brother left a message even before we made it home from church, asking us to come with his family...
Post
Origins and Outcome
To the degree that it is remembered at all, the America First Committee (AFC) has gone down in history as an organization most suspect, at best composed of good people serving a bad cause, at worst riddled with conscious agents of a Nazi transmission belt. During its heyday in the years 1940-1941, some of the...
Post
Aliens and the Alienated
American leftists today yearn for a more receptive proletariat. They have virtually given up on the white working class, which they feel has been subverted by bourgeois values and the consumer society. Instead they have turned towards people of non-European stock to build a new base. The anti-Western “multiculturalism” that has become so controversial at...
Post
Reaganism and the External Threat
“There’s a bear in the woods,” warns ad man Hal Riney, as a grizzly appears on screen. “For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it is vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right,...
Post
Fateful Choices
There are few issues more emotional than abortion. The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...
Post
A Walk on the Dark Side
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” —Thomas Adams Conspiracy theories have found a ready audience in many countries in many different times. When cataclysmic events shock a country to its foundations, when people feel impotent before history’s tidal wave, when war or economic collapse or political disintegration mark the end of a historical era and, having...
Post
Not Separate and Not Equal
Oh I’m packin’ my grip and I’m leavin’ today, ’cause I’m taking a trip California way I’m gonna settle down and never more roam, and make the San Fernando Valley my home. I’ll forget my sins, I’ll be makin’ new friends, where the West begins and the sunset ends. Cause I’ve decided where yours...
Post
Farewell to Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy is gone, having secured his place in the literary canon. At his best, McCarthy’s often terrifying, but deeply religious, tales are a moving spiritual and aesthetic experience. May he rest in peace.
Post
“American” Movies
” . . . the play’s the thing . . . “ —Hamlet, Prince of Denmark In a recent outing on this site I gave as an example of the emptiness of American culture the fact that American movies today are British Commonwealth dominated in directors, writers, and performers. I confess, I love movies, for...
Post
An Adversarial Culture
Following the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh, also known as Suleyman al-Faris and Abdul Farid, got his 15 minutes of fame the hard way. Or perhaps it is more proper to say that he was the object of a Two Minutes Hate by many on the right, even as his arrest...
Post
Twentieth Century Fox
If, indeed, the second half of the 20th century was, in our country, “the age of Nixon,” as Robert Dole declared in his eulogy for the man at Yorba Linda in 1994, then Mark Feeney has undertaken to demonstrate just how that age fits into the larger category of the 20th century itself as “the...
Post
Trump and the Anti-globalist Moment
The organized, violent, Mexican-flag waving mob that forced Donald Trump to cancel a rally in Chicago underscored the desperation of the globalist oligarchy as the Trump campaign advances toward the Republican presidential nomination. The mob was apparently backed by the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org, and a mass media that has spewed propaganda casting Trump as Hitler,...
Post
New York vs. New York
“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds . . . is every bit as bitter 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 Washington Plunkitt...
Post
All the Time in the World
The hawk, golden wings rustling in a stiff, cold breeze, floats above the prairie, eyeing its prey. A tiny movement in the sea of grass probably stirred the majestic beast from the powerline that served as a makeshift perch: The hawk takes to the air with a speed that defies my poor eyesight’s ability to...
Post
Origins and Outcome
From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. To the degree that it is remembered at all, the America First Committee (AFC) has gone down in history as an organization most suspect, at best composed of good people serving a bad cause, at worst riddled with conscious agents of a Nazi transmission belt. During its heyday...
Post
The Bookman
I remember Granddad as an old man, sitting in his reading chair or working in his garden, but you could still see the younger man in him, the one who had ridden the rails during the Depression, seeking work in California and Oregon with his brother-in-law Vines. He jumped those trains and saw the West,...
Post
Tax-and-Spend Politics, Bush-style
We can cut the deficit in half if Congress “is willing to make tough choices,” says President George W. Bush. We are doomed. Not that President Bush intends to make tough choices: His policy is borrow and borrow, spend and spend. When Bush took the oath of office, the Congressional Budget Office projected a cumulative...
Post
The Vanishing Craftsman
The house is barely six months old, but it has already begun to settle. Loose steps creak, doors hang, and cracks appear along the baseboards. If I were a carpenter, as my father was for 40 years, or knew enough of such things, I would have built my own house, as he did. But I...
Post
“You Have To Commit!”
We were on the practice field preparing for a team that ran the option. Our scout team was running the upcoming opponent’s offense. To our surprise, the scouts executed the option perfectly, which left our outside linebacker frozen halfway between the quarterback, cutting off the block of a tight end, and a trailing halfback arcing...
Post
McCarthy’s Missing Man
The Passenger reflects Cormac McCarthy's longtime internal debate over the meaning, if any, and purpose, if any, of human existence.
Post
THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH: July 2007
PERSPECTIVE Ted's Timor Mortis by Thomas Fleming Stumbling past the half-truths. VIEWS Americans Don't Die! by Roger D. McGrath Casualties, from republic to empire. Portraits by George Garrett Some notes on the poetry of growing old. The Last Adieu by George McCartney A wake for the living. A Dirge for ...
Post
Christians in Iraq
Christians in Iraq have faced continuous attacks since the U.S. invasion. On January 29, three people died and more than twenty were injured when bombers targeted six churches in coordinated attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk as Sunday evening services ended. In Baghdad, Patriarch Emmanuel III missed the bombings by minutes as he was held up...
Post
Mann of the West
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,...
Post
Palm Sunday
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,...
Post
The First Arkansas Bill
“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...
Post
Remembering Tender Mercies
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,...
Post
The Lion of Idaho
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...