“Put Christ back in Xmas” was the slogan of a popular campaign to cloak America’s prime commercial holiday with Christian decency. Its promoters meant well, of course, even though the offending “X” was nothing other than the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christos, and a common symbol both for Christ and the cross....
This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. Mr. Marcolla is well known to many conservatives in Europe and the United States for his observations on modern philosophy contributed over the years to Osservatore Romano. He is a keen student of Anglo-American conservative thought as well as having been a friend and translator of...
“The whole world, without a native home Is nothing but a prison of larger room.” —Abraham Cowley His father used to say that the country was good; it was only the people that made it intolerable. Now his father’s son was headed up to that north country, where he had not...
The FBI/BATF raid on the David Koresh home (not compound) has been the subject of controversy since the first day the BATF zealots tried to storm the house. All along, the FBI and the Justice Department have fabricated stories and information with an effrontery that would astonish even the Clintons: Koresh was stockpiling illegal arms,...
NATO has emerged victorious from the war in Yugoslavia, and the real power within NATO, the United States and its Armed Forces, has given the world a salutary demonstration of its ability to enforce peace and security in Europe. This, say Mr. Clinton’s pundits, was America’s finest hour since the end of World War II....
The past half-millennium that began with the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent discovery of the New World has gone by so many titles that its name might be legion: It has been the age of “progress” and “discovery,” a period of “enlightenment,” the era of “democracy.” However, all these glorious nicknames that stud the...
“I grow old learning many things,” said Simonides, a poet X well known for his wisdom and for his longevity: He lived to be almost 90. Although, as my old teacher Douglas Young pointed out, Simonides’ statement might be interpreted to mean “too much education makes one prematurely old,” the point is clear enough and...
Henry Luce coined the phrase “The American Century” as an expression of the militant economic globalism that has characterized American policy from the days of William McKinley. Luce, the publisher of Time and Fortune, was the child of missionaries in China—a product, in other words, of American religious and cultural globalism. It is no small...
Slovakia’s presidential race was not big news in May, as the world’s attention was focused on NATO’s destruction of a small Slavic country to the south. The predictable first-round results pitted the controversial former leader of the fledgling democracy, Vladimir Meciar, against the ex-communist mayor of Kosice, Rudolf Schuster. Throughout his stormy career, Meciar, who...
Every month, some corner of the United States becomes the scene of a brutal and bizarre murder: in Jasper, Texas, where rednecks dragged a man to death behind their truck; in Las Vegas, where a high-school student assaulted and killed a little girl as his friend and fellow student looked on without lifting a finger...
My father often told me the story of how he, as a small boy, had sat on the knee of Wyatt Earp. The former marshal] of Dodge and Tombstone, as an old man, came to Chicago to give a lecture. He had heard of my Great-Uncle Garret’s heroism in rescuing a lady from an armed...
The phrase “family values,” as it is used by politicians, marks one of the official borders between left and right in the United States. The fact is infuriating to Republican moderates who want to turn their party in the direction of opportunity and choice, which—translated into moral terms—mean adultery, divorce, and infanticide, the apparent credo...
Abortion has been a part of the American national religion for several decades, and in February a federal court in Oregon decided that it was blasphemy to criticize the ritual sacrifice of unborn children. At issue was a pro-life website (“The Nuremberg Files”) featuring Western-style wanted posters for “physicians” who made their living by practicing...
“States’ rights? You can’t be serious! What do you want to do—restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether a David Corn leftist at the Nation,...
President Clinton’s $1.77 trillion budget proposal is an insult, and not just to the GOP-dominated Congress that will not pass it; It is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. Predictably, Sen. Pete Domenici, Republican point-man on budget, and new Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert both condemned the plan to raise taxes...
Midatlantic It has been a long day for this straight European male. O’Hare Airport is a decompression chamber between Middle America and the rest of the world: rude United clerks who act as if they own the airline; the gauntlet of guards at the X-ray machines, none of whom is able to speak English; and...
The impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton poses a serious threat to the prosperity of our economy, the stability of our government, and the peace of the entire world. That, more or less, is the line being taken by the Democratic leadership. Whatever Messrs. Gephardt, Daschle, and Moynihan may think privately of the President’s fitness to...
If a civilized man, as it is sometimes said, can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time, post-civilized man goes one step farther and sees nothing wrong with maintaining contradictory opinions on any subject that comes up: We say simultaneously that the Russians are animalistic drunkards with no aptitude for the free-market...
Few patriotic odes are written to the water commissioners of great cities, but civilization rests in part upon a regular supply of water for drinking and agriculture. The rise of Rome can, in fact, be charted by the development of its system of water distribution. Down to the late fourth century B.C., Romans relied upon...
As members of the House of Representatives were moving toward impeachment hearings that should make Bill Clinton—whatever the outcome—one of the most infamous politicians in American history, Republicans in both houses of Congress decided to give the President everything he was asking for—more federally funded teachers to corrupt the children and $18 billion of boodle...
Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A...
The unity of Christendom and the restoration of the American republic are themes that have intertwined their way through the numbers of this magazine, like the twin strands of the DNA double helix. The message does not always meet with approval. Recently, a man of wealth and influence told us that he was no longer...
A noted Southern literary historian once took me to task for wasting time on polemics. The scholar’s task, he said, is to search out the facts and make coherent sense of them. In the long run, the truth of history would inevitably correct the fictions of ideology. At the time I was skeptical, and in...
William Jefferson Clinton and his supporters have stepped up their efforts to restore republican government to the United States. Responding to the Starr report—and the accompanying boxes of documentation sent to Congress—the President’s liberal champions took up the chant that “It’s all about sex” and argued that the real debate in the House Judiciary Committee...
The right side of the World Wide Web has been aquiver with reports on Executive Order 13083, otherwise known as Bill Clinton’s attempted coup d’etat. How seriously should we take the Clinton plot to abolish the last vestiges of states’ rights? Setting aside the equivocations and dissimulations that mark all of Mr. Clinton’s official utterances,...
The great debate over the humanities curriculum is the one that never took place. What some disgruntled academics call “the traditional curriculum” is really the hopeless hodgepodge that was cobbled together in the period that stretches, roughly speaking, from the end of the Great War to the Vietnam era. The true traditional curriculum (that is,...
Zbigniew Herbert died on July 28. I first became familiar with Herbert’s work in 1984, when Leopold Tyrmand invited me to become managing editor of Chronicles. In discussing future candidates for The Ingersoll Prizes, Tyrmand repeatedly brought up Mr. Herbert as a future winner. Although I could not read Polish, Herbert’s verse made a deep...
William Jefferson Clinton may some day be hailed as the second father of his country, or rather as the abusive stepfather. His seemingly deliberate efforts to disgrace his administration and disgust the people have convinced a significant number of clear-headed citizens of the truth of Acton’s maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Perhaps as much...
“La Preference Nationale“ has reentered the French political vocabulary. In June, former Prime Minister Edouard Bahadur shocked the French establishment by calling for an open national debate on the tabooed questions of immigration and the French identity. The dialogue would inevitably include Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front (FN), which continues to grow in...
One of the most popular fads in public education is the reintroduction of school uniforms. In some American burgs, the proposal is greeted with general approval. In many, however, school boards, administrators, parents, and pupils are put through the usual paces of reform, going from unfounded optimism through a stage of unreasoning resistance, and finally...
“Nor will this Earth serve him; he sinkes the deepe where harmless fish monastique silence keepe, who (were death dead) by roes of living sand might spunge that element and make it land.” —John Donne, “Elegie on Mistris Bulstrode” John Donne reminds us of a natural fact that most of us would rather forget: the...
Free trade, according to the usual pundits, is an issue that divides the right. The usual pundits are, as usual, wrong. Free trade, which has never been more than an undocumented alien on the right, is an ideal that does unite much of the left. It is a point on which socialism converges with both...
Sanctions are a favorite instrument of U.S. foreign policy, but the Clinton administration seems to be having second thoughts. Recently, at a White House meeting with evangelical leaders, the President told the group that well intentioned sanctions were getting in the way of U.S. interests. His statement echoes a report issued last July by the...
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Illyria Americana Walt Whitman was a bad poet, but he might have made an excellent American statesman, something like an effeminate Madeleine Albright, who can switch from one basic principle to the next with a duplicity that even the...
Bill Clinton’s triumphant return from Africa is a bad omen for the next two years. Temporarily liberated from the shackles of Paula Jones’s allegations, the President will now be free to rim the country exactly as the First Lady sees fit. During the President’s tour of Africa, we got a glimpse of what lies in...
Publishers and writers are inveterate enemies. It is a combat decreed by nature, like the eternal war between dogs and cats, oil and vinegar, teenage girls and their mothers. Any real writer, no matter how mercenary or corrupt, cares something for the craft that publishers regard as at best a pretext for marketing (much as...
I took out the atlas the other day to figure out the routes of the voyagers retraced by Jean Raspail on his first trip to the United States. In the event, it proved impossible to plot a French expedition on a modern map of the United States. Maps are political abstractions. They encourage us to...
Everyone over the age of thirty has seen the movie Casablanca several times. It is a classic love story, in which beautiful women turn out to count for less than politics and killing Germans takes precedence over both love and marriage. In actuality, Casablanca has very little to do with love: the love affair, told...
Billwatch became the prime-time soap of early 1998, eclipsing even the Pope’s visit to Cuba. Why should we care this time? Anyone with a mental age of 12 already knows that the President is an uncontrollable sexual predator. If a single straw could break the camel’s back of our patience, why not the bale after...
Regarding Saddam Hussein, “What in the world is wrong with him?” someone asked me the other day. “Doesn’t he realize the bad impression he is making with all his twists and turns? One day he lets the weapons inspectors in and gives them unlimited access, the next day he comes up with some lame excuse...
Rockford is becoming for me what the Rouen Cathedral was for Monet or the village of Selbourne for Gilbert White: a place intrinsically no more interesting than any other but as worthy of close attention as any human community. Rouen Cathedral is beautiful, but Europe has hundreds, even thousands, of beautiful churches. Monet, by depicting...
In the American TV nightmare, the police are the protagonists. Or the antagonists. It depends on the program and the point of view. We love the idea of the tough cop—Clint Eastwood, Dennis Farina, Dennis Franz—who breaks the rules and busts a few heads in a good cause. But change channels, and when the hero...
The Vice President was in Russia in September, trying to persuade Boris Yeltsin to amend legislation giving the Russian Orthodox Church a privileged position. Al Gore was just the man to explain religious toleration to the Russians. In the 1996 campaign, he revealed himself as an affirmative action fundraiser, willing to solicit donations from anyone,...
Race is the American religion, which is why no one can talk about it truthfully. I do not mean that no one speaks his mind on the subject. Well-indoctrinated liberals can talk all day on why race does not matter, why the whole concept means nothing; and racialists can talk even longer on why it...
Bounty hunters with a license to kill are glorified on television every week. The reality is uglier and more terrifying than most of us imagine. In Phoenix, a group of heavily armed bounty hunters, wearing ski-masks and body armor, sledgehammered their way through the front door of a private residence, tied up a mother, and...
Pol Pot, who presided over the murder of more than a million of his fellow Cambodians, has been condemned to life imprisonment after a jungle show trial by the Khmer Rouge—or what is left of it. Many of Pol Pot’s accusers were, in happier days, his accomplices, and the trial had about as much credibility...
Bill Clinton is the American icon, whose face is rapidly eclipsing both the profile of the heroic young Kennedy and the simpering grin of Jimmy Carter—the presidential images that until recently symbolized victory and despair for Democrats and something else for Republicans. It was understandable if, in the early 60’s, Republicans could not appreciate the...
The rich ye shall always have with you is a truth our Savior in his mercy never declared to us. That the poor should be a permanent fact of human society is discouraging enough, especially for modern Americans convinced there is no problem that cannot be fixed, no sin that is without a cure. Even...
The Lega Nord has not been cowed by its mediocre showing in the spring elections. Virtually alone among Italian political leaders, Umberto Bossi has condemned both the “humanitarian” mission of the Italian army in Albania and the continued refusal of the government to keep out the so-called refugees, most of whom have spent the past...
Father’s Day has always seemed to me a silly kind of holiday. It’s a time to give Dad something he doesn’t need, like another splashy necktie, or, what’s worse, something he does need—like an electric staple gun that takes away his last excuse for not rescreening the porch. Until recently, at least, fathers did not...