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November Elections

The November elections were hailed as a great GOP victory long before the votes were cast, much less counted. For Mr. Clinton, the Republicans’ victory came as a shock. The economy seems in good shape, employment figures are up, and even the Haitian fiasco turned out better than could have been expected. So what is...

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The Balkans War

The Balkans war seemed to be coming to an end in mid-December as we went to press. Trying to sort through the lies, misinformation, and distortions for the fragments of truth in the international press requires the patience of an archeologist and the imagination of a poet, but some things seem fairly certain. For several...

Crime and Welfare
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Crime and Welfare

Every few months the gentlemen of the press discover a new threat to humanity that requires decisive government action. Not so long ago the United States Senate, alarmed by reports of a comet striking the planet Jupiter, actually took up the question of protecting the earth against a similar calamity. Conservatives smile, but in the...

The Lesson of the Roaring Parrot
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The Lesson of the Roaring Parrot

There is an old cliche that no man is a hero to his valet. Some have been tempted to reply that it depends on the man, but I think it depends, rather, on the valet. To an observant eye, the world is peopled by ordinary men making strenuous, even heroic efforts to get through the...

Why Monkeys Get Fat in Banana Republics
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Why Monkeys Get Fat in Banana Republics

Much to no one’s surprise, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon was elected President of Mexico this past August. There were the usual cries of foul both from the opposition parties and from citizens’ groups monitoring the election: insufficient ballots were provided to certain polling places where the opposition was strong, so it was said, and...

A Philanthropic Journalist
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A Philanthropic Journalist

If representative government requires a free press, as the founders of this Republic believed, then it is small wonder that the citizens of the United States no longer enjoy the benefit of free elections. For elections to be free, there must be a choice from among well-defined positions and characters: John Quincy Adams or Andrew...

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Dishonesty of the Media Establishment

O.J. Simpson is now the most famous human being upon the planet. The details of the case can be of no interest to anyone intellectual enough to enjoy a game of “Co Fish,” but the debates, private as well as public, it has spawned will haunt us for some time. From fairly early on most...

On Liberal Education
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On Liberal Education

My definition of liberal education as the education of liberals no longer sounds provocative. Liberalism, having failed and failed disastrously in all its political experiments from church disestablishment to women’s suffrage to food stamps, still reigns triumphant, with hardly a rival, in the empty corridors of the Western mind. How failed? The church is disestablished,...

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The Italian Revolution

The more I learn of Italy, the less I know. Several years ago I thought I understood the essentials of the Italian political scene, that I was a Tocqueville in reverse. But ignorance was Tocqueville’s great advantage, too, and it is always easier to make out the forest when you are willing to ignore the...

Equality or Privilege
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Equality or Privilege

“Everything in American politics always comes down to the race question,” says one of our collaborators. School choice plans, for example, are either condemned for enabling the white middle classes to liberate their children from the hell of public schools or praised for giving black families the prospect of sending their children to the suburbs....

In Praise of Sex and Violence
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In Praise of Sex and Violence

All the best authorities agree: there is too much sex and violence in America. Social critics say that pop culture is reinforcing a cult of violence, which they trace back to the savage days of the American frontier; preachers launch jeremiads at the explicit eroticism of MTV, and Planned Parenthood pretends to have the jumps...

Mother Goose vs. Hell
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Mother Goose vs. Hell

To read the newspapers, one would think there was a health care debate going on in the United States. But the word “debate” implies two parties, and the spectrum of the current discussions is limited to the deeper shades of pink, since neither the white flag of reaction nor the black flag of anarchy is...

Southern Men, American Persons
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Southern Men, American Persons

“Sweet home Alabama / Where the skies are so blue.” It has been many years since anyone made money from patriotic songs dedicated to Illinois or New Jersey. Chicago and New York have their anthems of course, to say nothing of San Francisco, but no one is going to get into a fight over “the...

Turn Out the Lights
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Turn Out the Lights

It must have been Sigmund Freud who observed that whenever a new technology appears it is applied almost immediately to some sexual purpose. The dirty old man of Vienna was thinking of such inventions as the photograph and the moving picture, which gave a new impetus to the production and consumption of pornography, but he...

Don’t Tread on Us
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Don’t Tread on Us

In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...

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Out of the Rubble, A Christian State?

As the Air Croatia plane began its descent into Zagreb, it came to me that I had no idea where I was going. The Chesterton Society conference was to be held downtown at Europski Dom, but the participants were being put up at a Jesuit seminary. In a city of nearly a million, the Jesuits...

My Old Man
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My Old Man

“Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” God knows, Tammy Wynette had hard times to complain of, but if being a woman is difficult at the end of the millennium, becoming a man has always been hard. Increasingly, as I look at males of my own age, to say nothing of “guys” in their teens...

The Ruined Tenement
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The Ruined Tenement

“Every child should be taught to respect the sanctity of his neighbor’s house, garden, fields, and all that is his.” When James Fenimore Cooper insisted upon the inviolability of property, his conviction was as much the fruit of personal experience as it was the expression of his old-fashioned reverence for law and order. Upon returning...

Middle American Gothic
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Middle American Gothic

The bad weather of 1993 eliminated my usual fishing trips to northern Wisconsin, but the other day in Madison, where I go to use the library and relive the 60’s, I saw a sign for an instant oil change and lube: “Faster than an Illinois tourist.” Most people in Wisconsin are happy for the dollars...

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American Policy in Somalia

The answer is: Mohammed Farrah Aidid, The question is; Who is the latest Hitler? Yes, American policy in Somalia is a kind of jeopardy game, a lose-lose situation in which either the U.N. policy of coloring the globe blue will succeed or American lives will have been sacrificed for the sole purpose of revealing Bill...

Italian Lessons
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Italian Lessons

“Una Gaffe su Ciampi all’apertura del G-7“ ran the headline in Corriere della Sera. Italy’s pro-Clinton “newspaper of record” went on to describe how the American President greeted Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the Italian prime minister, when they met at the Tokyo economic summit: “Good morning President Skahlfahroh,” apparently confusing the prime minister (the president of...

Puppets and Their Masters
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Puppets and Their Masters

A naked boy runs down a crowded Italian street, chased by an angry old man. Grabbing the boy by the back of the neck, the old man shouts: “Just wait till I get you back home.” The crowd quickly takes sides against the old man, and when the carabinieri arrive, they take him off to...

Jesting With Pilate
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Jesting With Pilate

Americans pretend to be shocked whenever one of their national celebrities gets caught out in a lie. Is it really so surprising that Michael Jordan should attempt to conceal his gambling or that Bill Clinton should hide his cochonnerie? My European friends—some of them highly moral and religious men—never tire of ridiculing us for our...

Ghosts in the Graveyard
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Ghosts in the Graveyard

The bus from Budapest to Belgrade is full, and I am lucky to get a seat. We are a cosmopolitan lot. In addition to the two Americans (I am traveling with Bill Mills, or “Brat [brother] Bill” as he will come to be known), there are two Norwegian businessmen sitting across the aisle reading the...

Mind Your Own Business
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Mind Your Own Business

The murder of abortionist David Gunn in March of this year ought to sharpen the focus of the national debate on abortion, although partisans on both sides may be slow in getting the point. The New York Times, in a ponderous exercise of soft journalism, portrayed the event as a study in character contrasts. Michael...

Middle American Helots
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Middle American Helots

Rodney King is back, and his trial is center stage in the freak show of American television. The fact that these legal burlesques are called “the Rodney King trial” is worth pondering, because, the truth is, Rodney King now has immunity from prosecution for his reckless driving, for his violent attack on the officers who...

This Land for Hire
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This Land for Hire

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens); the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.” —George Washington The day after Bill Clinton’s election, the new leader...

Trollopes in the Stacks
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Trollopes in the Stacks

Nineteen ninety-two, if not quite an annus mirabilis, was a year “crowded with incident,” as Lady Bracknell would say. The repercussions of Gorbachev’s fall, the hot war in Bosnia that took the self-congratulatory edge out of the end of the Cold War, and the rise to power of Flem Snopes’ grandson illuminated American television sets...

More Than a Statue
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More Than a Statue

“Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swoln, and drowns things weighty and solid.” —Francis Bacon At the height of his career, William Gilmore Simms was ranked with the best writers produced by the United States. In the Northeast, his novels were considered inferior only to Cooper’s, and there were many...

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Buying Up American Symbols

The Japanese have been zealous in buying up American symbols: golf courses, movie studios. Rockefeller Center, the Mariners. Recently, however, they are beginning to learn that cosmopolitanism can be a two-way street. In January, American sumo wrestler Chad Rowan became the first foreigner to be awarded the rank of “Exalted Grand Champion.” Six feet five...

Rag and Bone Shops of the Mind
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Rag and Bone Shops of the Mind

I dislike museums, even good ones, and I positively detest the culture warehouses of Paris, London, and New York—the so-called encyclopedic museums, in which I have spent some of the least edifying moments of adult life. I have waited in line, more than once, to get into the Uffizi. I manage to avoid the swarms...

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The Honeymoon is Over

The Carter, er, Clinton, honeymoon is over, so far as Fm concerned. Even before his inauguration, Bill Clinton had exhausted our patience with his reckless comments on throwing the doors open to AIDS-carrying Haitians and admitting sodomites into the military. The sociopaths of the American press were in ecstasy, now that they had the chance...

A League of Our Own
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A League of Our Own

Nineteen ninety-two was an opportunity for Americans to reflect on both their past and their future. In less than a month, we celebrated the birthday of Columbus and the transfer of power from the New Deal to the Big Chill, from the civics-class pieties of George Bush to the Penthouse improprieties of Bill Clinton. I...

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Uncommon Properties

Pick up any newspaper at random, and you will come upon story after story of children being murdered, beaten, and molested. I begin this chapter on Monday, October 19, 1992, and looking over the Chicago Tribune I discover: a frontpage story on Chicago schoolchildren venting their grief over the murder of their friends, a headline...

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A ‘Given’ of American Life

Homosexual rights are more and more taken for granted as a given of American life. In October, for example, CNN raised the question of whether homosexual activists were correct in condemning Hollywood’s refusal to advance their agenda. Whether filmmakers ought to advance a homosexual agenda is, apparently, not worth discussing. In the world of magazines,...

Voting Behind the Veil of Ignorance
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Voting Behind the Veil of Ignorance

Every four years our political intellectuals kick off the presidential campaign season by putting forward proposals to reform the system by which Americans choose their leaders. The will of the people has been frustrated by all this elaborate machinery of voter registration, party primaries, and media hype, so they say, and those few who have...

Go East, Young Man
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Go East, Young Man

We shall soon be celebrating the cardinal date of the second Christian millennium, the fall of New Rome, otherwise known as Constantinople in 1453. For a thousand years after the collapse of the Western empire. New Rome had stood, a living museum of Greek culture and Roman law, the last organic link with the origins...

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War Fever

A war fever is breaking out among the leaders of the free world. Congressional Democrats are egging on President Bush to do something about the situation in Bosnia, and their concerns are echoed by Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the conservative leadership of Mr. Bush’s own party. As we head into the last...

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Come and Gone

Ross Perot had come and gone before a monthly magazine had time to take him seriously-another victory for long deadlines and broad views. Many of our friends and colleagues nearly sprained their ankles hopping onto the Perot bandwagon, but I could never work up any enthusiasm for someone whose stock answer to the big questions...

Literature and the Curriculum
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Literature and the Curriculum

The controversy over the humanities curricula is a struggle over definition, and what is at issue is not so much the nature or purposes of the American university as the identity of the American people. There have been many such definitional combats in the past; the greatest of them led to the War Between the States....

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I Love to Tell the Story

My old teacher, the classicist (and Scots Nationalist) Douglas Young, once interrupted a boring conversation about television by declaring loudly, “Speaking of Aeschylus . . . ” When one of his naive colleagues insisted, “But Douglas, no one was speaking about Aeschylus,” Young responded, “Yes, but I want to be speaking of Aeschylus.” This month,...

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New American Holiday

Rodney King Day will be the official designation of April 29th on the new American calendar, and the holiday will be marked by an annual spree of rioting and looting, all in a good cause. The jury’s verdict in the LAPD officers’ trial came as a shock to the commentators who could only repeat, over...

New World Disorder
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New World Disorder

The Berlin wall may not be the only casualty of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Recent elections in several European states have given evidence that nationalism is reemerging as the dominant political force in the West. Of course, “nationalism,” which in the broadest sense includes any assertion of tribal or national identity, is already the spark...

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Leveraged Buyout

“Every nation has the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre’s hard saying can give small comfort to Americans. Oh, it is true, we have a paper Constitution that promises a republican form of government, but all three branches of that government have for several generations conspired to evacuate the republican content from the system, leaving...

The Cultural Middleman
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The Cultural Middleman

To start with, the process of Americanization began at birth. Within the space of one week at the Metropolitan Hospital, I started life as a Hebrew child, with the name Yitzhak-Isaac. This apparently was too cumbersome for record-keeping purposes, so I was entered on the birth certificate as Isadore. But my sister, or at least...

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A Note of Reality

Tammy Wynette injected the only note of reality into the race for the Democratic nomination, when she lashed out at Governor Clinton’s wife for saying she was not “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” Knowing nothing of country music—or of the country itself—the established press was quick to ridicule Wynette and...

Law and/or Order
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Law and/or Order

All civilization rests upon the executioner. Despite our feelings of revulsion, “He is the horror and bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment, order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears.” Joseph de Maistre’s insight has alarmed most readers—among them not a few Catholic...

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Getting More Interesting Every Day

Italian politics get more “interesting” every day. Francesco Cossiga, the head of state, is continuing efforts to convert his largely ceremonial position into something like the benign dictatorship of Charles de Gaulle. His most risky stunt so far was to order the junior officers at a carabinieri station to go on alert last November. Actually,...

Marriage—the Real Right to Privacy
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Marriage—the Real Right to Privacy

The 150-year-old crusade for women’s rights in America has, in the different phases of its history, devoted its energies to diverse causes. In the decades before and after the War Between the States, the principal cause was the right of married women to control their own property. In the early 20th century, the cause was...

Unholy Dying
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Unholy Dying

“In the midst of life we are in death.” The old Prayer X Book’s admonition has never been more true or less understood than it is today. Modern man, despite his refusal to consider his own mortality, is busily politicizing all the little decisions and circumstances that attend his departure. Death penalty statutes, abortion regulations,...