A Superfluous Man
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A Superfluous Man

From the July 1987 issue of Chronicles. “I once voted at a presidential election. There being no real issue at stake, I cast my vote for Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. I knew Jeff was dead, but I voted on Artemus Ward’s principle that if we can’t have a live man who amounts to anything, by...

A Superfluous Man
Post

A Superfluous Man

“I once voted at a presidential election. There being no real issue at stake, I cast my vote for Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. I knew Jeff was dead, but I voted on Artemus Ward’s principle that if we can’t have a live man who amounts to anything, by all means let’s have a first-class corpse.”...

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Rendezvous With Billy

The established church in Washington didn’t know what to make of Billy Graham. By “established church,” I don’t mean the main-line Protestant churches: They were too busy trying to convert their churches into instruments of Democratic foreign policy to care very much about religion. The only established church that counts in Washington, as everyone knows,...

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California Monologue

Author of one previous history of the American West, Richard Batman has attempted in The Outer Coast to provide a history of foreigners in California from the founding of the first mission in 1769 until the attempted annexation of Monterey by a drunken American Navy captain in 1842, which, in Batman’s eyes, marked the end...