“Open the files!” demands Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. And right fully so. The files in question involve the federal government’s attempt to entrap Qubilah Shabazz into a conspiracy to assassinate Farrakhan, who has long been accused of involvement in the 1965 murder of Shabazz’s father, Malcolm X. Federal prosecutors suddenly agreed in May...
456 search results for: Wayne%252525252BAllensworth
Post
Sing Me Back Home
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...
Post
University of Michigan
Nowhere is the right of free expression more hotly debated than on our nation’s campuses. The recent controversy at my school, the University of Michigan, is a prime example. On January 9, U-M sophomore “Jake Baker”— a/k/a Abraham Jacob Alkhabaz, a 21-year-old Kuwaiti-American who uses his mother’s maiden name—did what he often did: he signed...
Post
A Surprising Threat of Veto
Vladimir Putin, during his February trip to Germany and France, surprised Kremlin watchers east and west by threatening to veto any U.S.- or U.K.-sponsored resolution on military action against Iraq. In Paris, Putin told reporters that, if a resolution on the “unreasonable use of force” against Baghdad were made “today,” Moscow “would act with France...
Post
More Human and More Tragic
An associate and I were waiting for a flight to Washington, D.C., flying out of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, in the fall of 1996. I spotted another waiting passenger in the lounge and made a bet with my partner, a native New Yorker, that the man was a fellow Texan. My partner took the bet, and...
Post
Oscar Oversights
Black actors and authors are still ignored in Hollywood—including some with very revealing stories to tell.
Post
The Revival of Russian Paganism
“The predisposition to religious belief,” wrote sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, “is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature.” Christians would agree with Mr. Wilson, but it is his fellow atheists, not Christians, who have dominated the religious (though not the truly spiritual)...
Post
On Celebrity
I must take up computer and mouse in indignation. How could you include Elvis on your “celebrity” cover? What possessed you to put the King amongst a group of the world’s great sleazeballs? And at the head of the table? Have you no shame, gentlemen? True, the King was famous, and true, in his latter...
Post
Commodity Culture—August 2009
PERSPECTIVE Johnny Rocco’s Worldby Thomas Fleming VIEWS “Vampire-Loving Barmaid Hits Jackpot”by James O. TateThe commodification of culture. Unpalatable Valuesby Andrei NavrozovCulture as gastronomy. Watching the Moneyby George McCartneyBrought to you by NokiaTM . NEWS The $15 Trillion End Runby William J. QuirkAn “oligarchy of interests.” REVIEWS Decline and Fallby Tom Piatak Theodore Dalrymple: Not With...
Post
Iraq as “Intelligence Failure”: We Told You So
“W,” a.k.a. “our Commander in Chief,” is apparently even more blindly stubborn and willfully ignorant than I had thought. As of this writing (December 2006), he is still distancing himself from the Iraq Study Group’s efforts to provide him cover for a withdrawal from the Middle East morass he has drawn us into. Bush Senior,...
Post
Details, Details
Dancer in the Dark Produced by AV-Fund Norway, Arte France Cinéma, and the Danish Film Institute Directed and written by Lars von Frier Distributed by Fine Line Features The Contender Produced by Battleground Productions Directed and written by Rod Lurie Distributed by DreamWorks Distribution Best in Show Produced by Castle Rock Entertainment Directed by Christopher...
Post
Hollywood Remakes the Culture
If you thought “woke” hysteria killed comedy, fear no longer: Hollywood has come to the rescue. The Academy—a misnomer if there ever was one—has decreed that a movie can no longer be eligible for an award unless it meets certain criteria. All “Best Picture” nominees must include storylines about underrepresented groups, and a significant percentage of...
Post
Fire in the Minds of Men
Recently, we marked the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, an event sparked by the revolutionary fire in the minds of men that has burned for as long as there have been men on the earth. In the modern era, revolution ignited in France in the 18th century. It caught fire again in 1848,...
Post
A Place Called Home
Kazan was preparing for her 1,000-year anniversary last August when Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived to address the World Tatar Congress in what once had been the center of a Tatar khanate. The goal of the congress was the “spiritual unification” of the Tatars, scattered across Russia and the world. I do not know whether...
Post
Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.
On June 5, we lost not only one of our finest writers but a true American storyteller and one of the last of the book people. For Ray Bradbury, who passed away at the age of 91, was, like the remnant that Montag joins at the end of Fahrenheit 451, a book person, a walking...
Post
The Russian Demon
In the year 1818, Aleksandr Pushkin penned these lines in his well-known verse “To Chaadaev,” addressed to his friend Peter Chaadaev, one of the leading Russian liberals of the period: Comrade, believe: joy’s star will leap Upon our sight, a radiant token; Russia will rouse from her long sleep; And where autocracy lies, broken. Our...
Post
The British Invasion of the Ozarks
Chronicles readers may recall my “Old Route 66” (September 2013) and “Keep the Water on Your Right” (February 2015) motorcycle travelogues, in which I rode through small towns and rural areas to reconnect with the land and people of America. A road trip can do this like no other kind of journey, and doing one...
Post
On Romantic Fighting
I read Roger McGrath’s engaging memoir, “Boys Will Be Boys” (Views, March), with real pleasure but found the skeptic in me thoroughly awakened afterward. McGrath offers a surprisingly romanticized vision of schoolboy fighting, which he regards as a healthy expression of boys’ natural competitiveness and, indeed, as a key institution, a defining ritual in an...
Post
Surviving the Next Depression—July 2009
PERSPECTIVE The Good Life by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost by Tom Landess Or did they? What
Post
No Country for Honorable Men: The Prosecution of the “Border Patrol Two”
The prosecution of, and harsh sentences meted out to, two Border Patrol agents involved in a shooting incident at the Texas-Mexico border tell us all we really need to know about the Bush administration’s plans to erase U.S. borders once and for all. On February 17, 2005, Border Patrol agent Ignacio Ramos responded to a...
Post
Robbing Peter, Paying Wal-Mart
When Americans debate the merits of Wal-Mart, the discussions often become contentious, centering on whether this megaretailer is a corporate predator that drives wages down and Main Street businesses into ruin or is a corporate good guy because it offers decent jobs to the jobless and low prices to consumers. Whatever one’s opinion of Wal-Mart,...
Post
Homesick in America
“Darlin,’” she said, “I’ll get that. Go ahead and take it.” She was a weathered-looking woman with mousy light brown hair drawn back in a bun and the plain, honest look of one of those faces you see in Depression-era photos from the Dust Bowl, faces that don’t smile—they are just themselves, making the best...
Post
Planned Parenthood: Hearts and Minds, and Livers
On Tuesday, July 14, the Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress released the first of three videos aimed at exposing some of the horrifying practices of Planned Parenthood, including the harvesting of baby organs through elective abortion for sale to biomedical research groups. The hidden camera shows Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Senior Director of...
Post
Avoiding a Crisis
Russia may have avoided a full-scale political crisis, at least temporarily, thanks to the Bush administration’s decision in mid-March not to pursue a U.N. Security Council vote on its latest resolution on Iraq. Russian President Vladimir Putin had appeared ready to accept Washington’s planned “regime change” in Baghdad in exchange for a piece of the...
Post
It Will Be Sudden, It May Be Soon
The Roswell Alien Museum and Research Center is on Main Street, an avenue dotted with trinket shops and ads featuring a big-eyed “alien” hawking hamburgers, gasoline, and the wares of various convenience stores. At the north end of Roswell is the New Mexico Military Institute, while the flat, brown-gray expanse of the staked plains surrounds...
Post
The Marine Corps’ Answer to James Bond
Legionnaire, Spy, and Marine Colonel Peter Ortiz is unknown today, but his daring exploits during WWII are incredible.
Post
Getting to Know the General
The rise to political prominence of former Airborne Forces General Aleksandr Lebed, and especially his emphasis on law and order as the only real basis for proceeding with reforms, has raised the specter in the Russian mind of the proverbial Man on a White Horse, the military savior whose iron-fisted rule puts the national house...
Post
George O’Brien: American Star
WWI veteran George O’Brien became a star in Hollywood with his breakout performance in John Ford’s silent film epic, The Iron Horse. Handsome and built like the top athlete he was, O’Brien appeared in 11 more Ford movies and 85 films altogether, a successful career punctuated by voluntary and selfless distinction in two more wars,...
Post
On Last Rides
I appreciated very much Scott P. Richert’s comments on what passes nowadays for American identity and how we wound up with rootless, abstract notions of “Americanism” (“Last Ride,” The Rockford Files, May). Referring to the Americanization campaigns of the past, Mr. Richert pointed out that “It is relatively easy, in a modern, affluent, industrial society...
Post
The Economic Impact of Immigration: Paying for the Privilege
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly ...
Post
The Yuma Amnesty Files
President Bush was back in Yuma, Arizona, in early April, one year after making promises to secure the border in exchange for a “comprehensive” immigration-reform bill that would increase legal immigration, open the door for up to 20 million illegal aliens to remain in the United States, and encourage yet another surge of illegal aliens...
Post
Exhibitionists
In the Cut Produced by Pathe and Red Turtle Productions Directed by Jane Campion Screenplay by Jane Campion and Susanna Moore Distributed by Screen Gems Shattered Glass Directed by Billy Ray Screenplay by Billy Ray from an article by Buzz Bissinger Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions Distributed by Lions Gate Films Actors are exhibitionists. They feel...
Post
High Stakes in the Immigration Battle
The presidency of Donald Trump has made some things many of us suspected for a long time perfectly clear, as a former president used to say. Our enemies no longer hide what their agenda is, and job #1 on that agenda is replacing what Archie Bunker used to call “regular Americans” with foreigners. Thus, the...
Post
The Wolf Week in Review: Race to the 90’s
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Republicans Want to Draft Your Daughter Whether your daughter ought to be compelled to sign up for spilling her guts in a regime-change adventure that will ultimately bring to power another Islamic regime is a question that has gone mainstream. And...
Post
Hardened Line
Vladimir Putin, prodded by a reporter’s question regarding the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, remarked that Russia, for “economic and political” reasons, “has no interest in the defeat of the United States.” Putin’s comments were seen by Russian media observers as a sign that the Kremlin had come full circle on the Iraq question. ...
Post
CPAC moves to Rockford?
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
Post
Jazz Standards
The new millennium brings with it the formal end of jazz’s 20th century, although serious historians recognize that some elements of the music trace back to roughly two-thirds of the way through the 19th. Yet even with the undeniable brilliance of much that was produced during the Dixieland, swing, bebop, and subsequent eras, as the...
Post
Giving Up, Giving In
“But what if Juárez is not a failure? What if it is closer to the future that beckons all of us from our safe streets and Internet cocoons?” —Charles Bowden, Murder City On September 30, 2010, David Hartley and his wife, Tiffany, were jet-skiing on Falcon Lake along the Texas-Mexico border when a speedboat approached...
Post
White Self-Hatred and the Christian Spirit
At the first Congress on Racial Justice and Reconciliation, held in Washington in May, the Reverend Earl W. Jackson, the black director of the mostly white “Samaritan Project” of the Christian Coalition, told 500 mostly black Christians that, despite many blacks’ warnings that he was selling out to the “religious right,” “our agenda” is “the...
Post
From El Paso to Plymouth
Last November, a delegation of citizens from the far West Texas border city of El Paso made the long journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts. The purpose of the El Pasoans’ visit was to challenge Plymouth’s long-held—and nearly universally accepted—claim that it was the site of the first Thanksgiving to be held on what is now United...
Post
On Dr. Samuel T. Francis
I first met Samuel Francis more than 30 years ago, when he was a graduate student in Chapel Hill and a stalwart member of the Carolina Conservative Society—subsequently, the “Orange County Anti-Jacobin League” when it lost its university recognition on a point of principle. I was a brand-new faculty member, a refugee from Columbia University,...
Post
The Murderers of Christianity
Sunday, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they...
Post
Our Terror Sanctuary
The “Fort Dix Six” may not be the smartest group of would-be jihadists we have seen, but their story should tell us something about how lax immigration and border-security policies put this country at risk. The six Muslims were arrested in New Jersey in May, for plotting to attack Fort Dix, which is known as...
Post
Religion and Critical Theory
In his 1935 essay “Religion and Literature,” T.S. Eliot argued that modern literature had become progressively secularized. In response he proposed that “literary criticism should be complemented by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint.” Eliot introduced his arguments with the famous statement, “The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards;...
Post
The Angry Summer
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . —Psalm 144:1 According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.” So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.” ...
Post
K Is for Vendetta
And it came to pass that fear did grip all of the Swamp, from Foggy Bottom to DuPont Circle; and it did spread unto all of the region beyond the Potomac. For behold, Steve Bannon had come. Or, if we prefer not to use the familiar “Steve,” Stephen K. Bannon. The K must not be...
Post
Murder in Politics
Sergey Yushenkov’s murder on April 17 may have been the result of machinations aimed at destroying Russian President Vladimir Putin politically and personally, as well as undermining U.S.-Russia relations, seemingly on track again after the rift over Iraq. Gunned down outside his Moscow apartment, Yushenkov, the leader of the Liberal Russia political party, joins a...
Post
CPAC Moves to Rockford?
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: when the Conservative Political Action Conference moves its annual meeting from Washington, D.C., to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Or Murfreesboro. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. Conservatives flock from around the country to CPAC, expecting to advance...
Post
The Diner’s Refrain
With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th. For almost 40 years, the family-owned restaurant...
Post
Welcoming Terrorists, Locking Down Citizens
Terrorist bombings that killed 3 and wounded and maimed over 260 at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 prompted the militarized “lockdown” of an American city for days, as police in full combat gear took part in a massive manhunt that may have given us a glimpse of our future. As...