Many generations after Christian had made his way successfully to the Celestial City, one of his descendants decided to attempt the same journey. The young man came from the Modern branch of the Christians, a recent but powerful sect that had taken over all the Christian clans. Frank, for that was the young man’s name,...
Most of us in the United States are hyphenated Americans: Hispanic-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans. Even WASPs have taken refuge in the term “Anglo-American,” as if the British stock did not define the American identity. At this point in our history, we have trouble even imagining a people that takes its nationality neat without the addition of...
The War Crimes Tribunal going on at The Hague is the first test of one of the great principles of postwar politics—the Nuremberg Doctrine, which makes individuals liable to international prosecution for actions committed during a war. In the old days, military personnel and police officers were expected to do as they were told. In...
The future has been all the rage for the past two centuries. Modernism, as an ideology, might almost be defined as the cult of the future, whether in science fiction or in Utopian political creeds like Marxism. Even in its death throes modernism was able to spawn “futurology,” a pseudo-science as richly comic as phrenology....
Boerne, Texas, is an unlikely location for a contest over religious freedom, but in 1996 the local Catholic Archbishop decided to sue the city for refusing to allow him to expand a church situated in a zoned historic district. The Archbishop based his case on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which forbids religious persecution and...
A year and a half ago, Umberto Bossi delivered a brilliant speech in t:he Italian parliament. Describing Italy’s political system as organized corruption, the leader of the Lega Nord declared that left and right showed two faces but were joined into one body. A new Italian regime had to be born, but this two-headed monster,...
Desmond Dupre (for many years the lutanist of the Deller Consort) used to say that the lute was to the 17th century what the harpsichord was to the 18th century, the spinet to the 19th, and the gramophone to our own age. Americans listen to music (or the synthetic equivalent) all day long, but few...
Imperial Washington in the 90’s is the gaudiest political theater since the Emperor Elagabalus went to his reward, and Clinton’s second inauguration was as sophisticated as an Arkansas high school prom, complete with theme—”An American Journey”—and decorations: a mock-up of the President’s Bridge to the 21st Century. The celebration stretched out for a week, with...
“I ask myself: Wouldn’t I be better off, if we gave up speaking French? This is a question that my children, and everyone in Quebec should ask themselves every day.” The question was not entirely rhetorical. Like many French-Canadian intellectuals, Georges favors secession but broods over the price he and his people had to pay...
It is the worst kind of nightmare, to wake from a bad dream into a worse one, with the sickening realization that you are condemned to run, like the incredible shrinking man, through an infinite regression of worlds, each more terrifying than the last. My first dream last night was elegiac: a visit to my...
Umberto Bossi does not like journalists. His stock epithet for the gentlemen of the press—applied to them almost as regularly as “swift-footed” precedes Achilles—is vermi (worms), although he sometimes falls back on servi sciochi (idiot servants). Not too long ago, at a Lega Nord meeting, Bossi caught sight of the press corps covering the event...
“A Republican marriage,” said a French actress of the 18th century, “is the sacrament of adultery.” This bon mot is recorded by Sir Walter Scott in the description of the French Revolution with which he begins his Life of Napoleon. In passing the first no-fault divorce law in Christendom, he concludes, the Jacobins had reduced...
Readers first met Lee Pefley as an old man who returns to his hometown resolved to chastise public nuisances with a stick. Tito Perdue’s first novel, Lee (1991), took some reviewers by surprise: the elegantly crafted naiveté seemed to strike a balance between Borges and (to my mind) Kenneth Patchen. What some of them seemed...
“The banality of evil” is one of those vapid and misleading phrases that can churn up a tidal wave in a mud puddle. In a trivial sense, Nazi bureaucrats were banal enough, but there was a heroic dimension to the evil of Hitler and Goering, a delirious striving toward the superhuman that commands our attention,...
Saddam Hussein has proved, once again, how easy it is to make fools of the American leadership. Five years ago President Bush, after bombing much of Iraq into the Stone Age, decided that discretion was the better part of valor and pulled our troops out before they had accomplished the only objective that would have...
A sex tour of Italy was the last thing I had on my mind when I decided to take two children along with me on a recent lecture tour, but each trip I take seems to construct itself thematically like an overwritten modern novel in which every scene reeks of symbolic significance. This time the...
I have several times passed through Figline Valdarno without realizing it was the birth place of Marsilio Ficino, the head of the Platonic Academy of Florence. Ficino was a strange bird: part Platonist, humanist, and part Christian, he has sometimes been suspected of paganism or worse. Perhaps he was a pagan, somewhere in his mind,...
Old-fashioned English professors like to speak of “the Canon” in reverential tones, as if there were a list of great books as ancient as the Spartan king list and as hallowed as the kyrie. In fact, what they usually have in mind is a rummage sale assortment of a few really essential works jumbled together...
Boris Yeltsin’s recent electoral triumph over his Communist riyal was hailed throughout the West as a victory for democracy and reassuring evidence that Russia will continue on the path of progress and peace. In Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, the leaders of the United Nations of the Free World breathed a sigh of relief. Absent from...
I was doing my best to mind my own business on a very busy Saturday. My wife was in England, and after nearly two weeks of playing mother, I was catching up on the laundry, shopping for the dinner I would have to prepare, and, in between trips to the store, I had to take...
Lock up your daughters, draw the blinds, and check your house for bugs and hidden cameras. George Garrett has put on his cap and bells again, and every page of his new book constitutes a thought crime against the stupid hypocrisies on which the current American regime is built. Part mystery novel, part social satire....
The Anti-Gang statute of Harvard, Illinois, which has served as a model for similar statutes in many Chicago suburbs, was recently struck down by an Illinois appellate court. The Harvard law made it a crime to display gang colors and symbols—such displays lead to frequent clashes, violence, and murder. The challenge came from an admitted...
Dittoheads were depressed at the end of April, when Rush Limbaugh announced his “trial separation from the Republican Party.” As in so many divorce cases, the charge was infidelity: the GOP had caved in on the minimum wage. Even though a good moral case might be made for the concept of a living wage, there...
“Poets who lasting marble seek Should carve in Latin or in Greek.” When I last quoted those lines of Edmund Waller, I was put down as a hopeless reactionary trying to restore Latin as the language of literature. In the case of the conservative journalist who missed the point, it would have been enough to...
“Qualis aitifex pereo” -Nero I cannot remember a time when I was not what would be called an environmentalist. I spent much of my childhood on an earth unconstricted by concrete streets and unburdened by the weight of buildings. I was never happier than when I was out fishing with my father or picking berries...
“There is always something new from Africa.” —Pliny the Elder By the early 1970’s, I had come to the conclusion that American higher education could not get any worse. Most of the young and not-so-young Ph.D.’s in the humanities were intellectually anemic. What few brains they possessed had been starved on a diet of bogus...
Hate crimes—what are they? In Newport, Rhode Island, a mixed-race couple complained that threats from their white neighbors had driven them from their home. Generous contributions from strangers helped the family to find a new place and to pay the rent. Local police, however, were suspicious from the first and eventually charged Tisha Anderson with...
It was eight o’clock Moscow time when the overcrowded British Airways Jet landed at Sheremetevo Airport. Liberated from our Iron Maiden seats—BA seems to have squeezed in an additional seat per row—we made our way into the arrival hall, happily anticipating if not a good Russian dinner, then at least something to eat. The barely...
The holiday season is responsible for some of modern America’s most deeply felt traditions: cheap airline tickets on Christmas day, seasonal hymns like “Jinglebell Rock” and “Blue Christmas,” ACLU suits against the school Christmas pageant, and the Andy Williams Christmas special, for which the divorced Mr. Williams (one of whose wives killed her lover, Olympic...
It is an unwritten law of American politics that the politicians who devote themselves to the single-minded pursuit of power and wealth must pretend to be men of the people. The 1996 presidential campaign might have been scripted by Frank Capra, since virtually every candidate is a would-be John Doe or Jefferson Smith, taking on...
The “Imperial Presidency” was a charge the Republicans used to make against FDR, JFK, and LBJ, and a few of them have begun to use similar language against Mr. Clinton’s personal crusade against Bosnian Christians. Asked by Dan Rather if there was a problem of “perception” in a draft-dodger sending men into a combat zone,...
“Black History Month, sometimes called February . . . ” Sam Francis’s witticism has been repeated ad infinitum, by friend and foe alike, usually with little appreciation of the broader implications. Ever since the French Revolution, Jacobin reformers conceived it their duty to redesign the calendar. If they cannot always get away with dating the...
Alabama’s reintroduction of chain gangs has provoked the predictable cries of outrage. Howell Raines (formerly of Alabama and now of the New York Times) described Governor Fob James as “Alabama’s current genius of bumpkin publicity.” The politest expressions used to describe Governor James’ decision usually include words like “barbaric,” “reactionary,” and “racist.” Reactionary they may...
We live by our opinions. While other people’s opinions are called illusions, if they pose no threat to our interests, and prejudices if they do, we call our own opinions “truth” or principles, if we are fools: “the most positive men are the most credulous,” as Pope observed, probably having scientists in mind. If we...
One hot evening at the end of August I was walking up South Michigan Avenue with an Irish-American linguist on the way to eat in a German-American restaurant. The news was filled with reports on the NATO bombing raids against the Bosnian Serbs, but no one on the street seemed to care that an American...
Ross Perot has thrown his hat into the ring, or at least halfway into the ring, since the billionaire has only promised to use his wealth and fundraising abilities to start a party which may or may not put him at the head of the ticket. The week before, another billionaire, Steve Forbes, announced that...
“The miller’s daughter walking by With frozen fingers soldered to her basket Seems to be knocking Upon a hundred leagues of floor With her light heels, and mocking Percy and Douglas dead. And Bruce on his burial bed, Where he lies white as may With wars and leprosy, And all the kings before This land...
A national poetry in three languages is hard to describe, much less anthologize, and, in fact, the situation is even more complex since so much good Scottish poetry was written in Latin, a point made emphatically by Tom Scott in the introduction to his Penguin anthology. Roderick Watson, in editing this wonderful and exasperating volume,...
Since the 1940’s, Americans have been slowly introduced to the idea that national sovereignty is a dangerously outmoded concept that must give place to a broader and more generous understanding of our place in the world: national defense became bound up with the principle of collective security; national welfare tied to foreign markets (and foreign...
What do black Americans think of whites? What do they want from them? The questions are almost as baffling as “What do women want?”—the question we raised a few months ago. After years of living with the men and women we used to call colored people, working with them and calling some of them friends,...
I do not know about the rest of you, but I can say where I was in the days leading up to April 19, I had been in Scotland in the preceding week, and on April 17, I was in a hotel in Dumbarton, not 20 miles from the Glasgow airport. Exhausted from a day...
Why should “a magazine of American culture” take so keen an interest in the question of immigration? That question has been posed all too frequently by journalists who can only think of one answer: bigotry. Sometimes the word is xenophobia or nativism or even anti-Semitism (apparently on the grounds that the bottom-line of all discriminations...
“Mon cher, c’est notre métier, le vrai métier de chien . . . Vous écrivez et vous écrivez . . . et personne, personne au monde ne comprendra.” Joseph Conrad’s complaint to his young collaborator, Ford Madox Hueffer, might have been put on Ford’s tombstone, when he died in 1939. You write, and you write,...
Gordon Kahl was a simple farmer who became famous for not filing income tax returns. Imprisoned and hounded by IRS agents who never did prove he owed any amount of money, Kahl and his son were involved in a shootout with police. The son is still serving a prison sentence, but the father was surrounded...
Was wollen die Frauen? Freud’s questions are always better than his answers, and even his questions usually betray the diseased mind which poisoned this century with its sexual obsessions. In a healthier age, the question of what women wanted would not have been asked, but as we look out across the wreckage of human social...
What does it mean to be a citizen? The answer we give will depend on the nation we live in and on the age of the world in which we find ourselves. The French used to define citizenship not, as the English and Americans do, by the accident of birthplace, but by descent. Citizens were...
Under ordinary circumstances an American might safely ignore the tragic history of the Serbs, but as the conflict in the Balkans threatens, increasingly, to set off an international war, access to sound information becomes crucial. Alex Dragnich’s many careful studies of the region should be near the top of anyone’s list. His Serbs and Croats:...
If a man could be judged only by the friends he has kept and the enemies he has made, Murray Rothbard was one of the best men produced by the American right. Some of Murray’s friendships go back, without interruption, to the 1950’s, and his collection of personal enemies constitutes a rogues’ gallery of conservative...
How Democracies Perish was the subject, as well as the title, of an important book by Jean-Francois Revel. M. Revel is a hardheaded journalist who takes little interest in political theory, but he is a keen observer of the corruption into which the states of the West have fallen. When I had drinks with him...
I first met Erwin Knoll in a Turkish restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, where he had been editing the Progressive since 1979. One of Erwin’s younger colleagues asked me several times in the course of lunch what could possibly interest a right-winger in such a magazine. As leftist as the Nation in many respects, the Progressive...