Wayne Webster’s Rockford abortuary takes the lives of about 35 babies per week. In that same time frame, however, there are two or three “turnarounds”—mothers who decide at the last moment not to execute their children. The most likely cause is the doughty band of Christians who gather to pray outside the slaughterhouse on the...
456 search results for: Wayne%2BAllensworth
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Cultural Suicide—May 2004
PERSPECTIVE Cultural Suicideby Thomas Fleming Multiculturalism and Western self-loathing. VIEWS America in Europe, Europe in Americaby Claude PolinA shared disease. Europe and Americaby Srdja TrifkovicIdentity of decrepitude. Dreams of Old Placesby Anthony BukoskiA personal essay. NEWS Europe’s Population Implosionby David A. HartmanA diagnosis. Strange Bedfellowsby Wayne AllensworthBush and Soros unite against Georgia. REVIEWS Smear Campaignby...
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Brief Mentions
[The Fatten Mind: The Professional Development of an Extraordinary Leader, by Roger H. Nye (Wayne, NJ: Avery Publishing Group) 224 pp., $12.95] The perfect gift for the armchair warrior. The Patton Mind traces the intellectual development of a “profane man of action” who, Roger Nye notes, “left behind the most complete record of exhaustive professional...
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Men of the West—July 2005
PERSPECTIVE Heroes in the Age of the Antiheroby Thomas Fleming Unbreaking glass. VIEWS Guys of the Golden Westby Chilton Williamson, Jr.A glorious sunset. A Place to Standby Wayne AllensworthTexas and the making of men and heroes. Cowboy Heroesby Roger D. McGrathLearning the Code of the West. Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christiansby Aaron D. WolfFrom authority to...
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Fool’s Mate: America’s Strategic Failures—June 2005
PERSPECTIVE The Suicide Strategy of the Westby Thomas Fleming Turkish bizarre. VIEWS The Emerging American Empireby Douglas WilsonMammon versus Allah. The Rise of Chinaby William R. HawkinsSeeing is believing. Transforming the Middle Eastby Ted Galen CarpenterWashington’s high-stakes gamble. Getting Europe Straightby Srdja TrifkovicSlouching toward Eurabia. NEWS Why Russia Does Not Fear an Iranian Bombby Wayne...
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Losing the War—February 2005
PERSPECTIVE Selling Muhammad the Ropeby Thomas Fleming Cutting off our nose . . . VIEWS War on the Home Frontby Wayne AllensworthReal homeland security. Is There a Khilafah in Your Future?by James George JatrasThe coming Islamic revolution. NEWS The Saudi Presence in the United Statesby Robert SpencerThe most lethal terror front of all? Islam: Africa’s...
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Down But Not Out
NRA “Extremism”—down but not out. A year ago the National Rifle Association’s internal politics, by tradition kept out of the public spotlight, erupted into the mainstream press. According to NRA management and Beltway spin doctors, a group of extremists on the NRA Board of Directors was trying to fire NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre...
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Athens and Jerusalem V: The Germanization of Christianity
Some Tedious but Necessary Preliminaries The title of James C. Russell's The Germanization of Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation does not sound like the opening shot in a war against Christianity. However, ever since Sam Francis' apparently glowing review, conservative neopagans, atheists, and Nordicists have trumpeted the book ...
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Islam, Immigration, and the Alienists Among Us
In his Introduction to Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith, G.K. Chesterton casts himself as a man on a yacht seeking the world and finding home. The seeker, he writes, may have entertained us with his efforts to find “in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish...
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Edward Abbey: Conservative Conservationist—and Controversialist
Edward Abbey never met a controversy he didn’t like. Philosopher of the barroom and the open sky, champion of wilderness, critical gadfly, fierce advocate of personal liberty, Enemy of the State writ large: For 40-odd years, Ed roamed the American West, a region, he wrote, “robbed by the cattlemen, raped by the miners, insulted by...
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The Theft of an American Classic
Country music has never been shirked in the pages of Chronicles, as any faithful reader knows. John Reed’s June column concerning the Far East’s fascination with country music, however, left out one pertinent mention: the story of Torn Mitsui. Mr. Mitsui is a fifty-year-old professor of English at Kanazawa University; he is also Japan’s foremost...
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A Manner of Speaking
On a hot day in late June, looking to buy some cheap tires for an old car of mine, I pulled into a tire shop on a stretch of highway near Fort Worth. We’d recently had a lot of rain, and the sun was glaring, seeming to draw a screen of haze off the pavement...
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Running the Psychosocial Gauntlet
To prepare couples for the sacrament and life of matrimony, Roman Catholic canon prescribes sensible requirements for “Pastoral Care and What Must Precede Celebration of Marriage.” According to Canon 1063, “Pastors of souls are obliged to see to it that their own ecclesiastical community furnishes the Christian faithful assistance so that the matrimonial state is...
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Paying the Price
Iraqi Christians are paying the price of the Bush administration’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iranian Revolution and the rising influence of militant Islam have already forced the secular Iraqi dictatorship to make concessions to proponents of Iraq’s Islamicization, but the threat of a U.S. attack, together with a widespread feeling in the Arab...
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Raw Bits
Some undigested odds and ends this month. Let’s see—let’s start with some survey research on regional differences, real and perceived. From California comes word that the Stanford Research Institute has come up with a typology of Americans based on their (excuse the expression) life-styles. Not surprisingly, the types are not distributed uniformly across the U.S....
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Unspoken Questions
We live in interesting times. In June of this year, the U.S. national soccer team played an “away” game against Mexico—in Los Angeles. Many of the 93,000 fans in the Rose Bowl booed the U.S. squad, chanted obscenities directed at the U.S. goalkeeper, and blew air horns during the U.S. national anthem. After Mexico won...
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The Nationalist Imperative
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” —Albert Einstein When James Bowie took his considerable reputation as a brawler and duelist, along with the famous knife his brother Resin had fashioned for him, to Mexico, married the daughter of the vice-governor of the province of Texas, and became a respected citizen...
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On Propoganda and Piety
Reading Chronicles has provided me, in equal parts, education, philosophic inspiration, and new words to add to my vocabulary—until now. Justin Raimondo’s review (“The British Were Coming!” December 1998) of Thomas Mahl’s Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 is one of the best examples of misinformation, damning indictments unsupported by facts,...
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Goodbye, Mr. Bond
Casino Royale Produced by Barbara Broccoli, Andrew Noakes, and Anthony Waye Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis Based on the novel by Ian Fleming Released by Columbia Pictures It is with great trepidation and some sadness that I must announce that James Bond is dead. Granted, there is...
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Rockin’ in the 50’s
When the mode of music changes, Plato remarked, the walls of the city shake. When the mode of music changed back in the 1950’s, the denizens of Plato’s Pad—sorry, but there are so few opportunities to get in an allusion to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis these days—and their peers saw more fingers than...
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Never and Always
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” Precious memories, unseen angels Sent from somewhere to my soul How they linger, ever near me, As the sacred past unfolds I...
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Reproductive Tyranny
Absolute control of women over fertility has been the unparalleled dream of radical feminists for decades. Millions of women now view this aspiration as their sacrosanct right and have, with the advent of anti-fertility and other reproductive technologies, exercised this new right vigorously. This feminist dream, however, is fraught with irony. Many of the very...
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Memorial Day
We used to go there on every Memorial Day—a small national cemetery off the road a piece in the woods. It was usually warm; the woods, deep, green, and moist. We would walk down a dirt path to the stone wall encircling the graves, sometimes passing others who had just visited there before us. My...
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Gary, Martin, and John
I started this letter back when David Garrow’s biography of Martin Luther King appeared, with its revelations about Dr. King’s sexual habits, just in time for Christmas 1986. I put it aside because I wasn’t happy with it. In the summer of 1987, the Hart and Bakker scandals made me dust it off and try...
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The Best Are Not the Brightest
Some years ago, in a discussion with the late Joe Sobran about the motivations of those managing our vastly overstretched empire, I pointed out that, for certain strata of the bureaucracy (the people who meet with E.U. officials in Brussels and attend cocktail parties in Georgetown, for example), as well as think-tank warriors theorizing about...
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American Citizens or Tribal Members of Sovereign Nations?
American Indians compose a nation within a nation. They enjoy American rights and privileges, but also tribal rights and privileges.
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Radical Populism on the Volga
On May 8, 1995, President Boris Yeltsin addressed an auditorium filled with gray-haired war veterans, their chests bedecked with rows of ribbons and medals, and told them of the cost of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Citing new archival research, Yeltsin revealed the “terrifying figure” of 26,549,000 Soviet citizens “lost” in the war against...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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“Open the Files!”
“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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Oscar Oversights
Black actors and authors are still ignored in Hollywood—including some with very revealing stories to tell.
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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)...
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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...
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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
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...