I love Sarah Palin. That’s not necessarily because of anything she believes or advocates, but because of the pleasure I derive from watching the apoplexy she causes in liberals, especially in a university setting. Not only is Palin a strong conservative, but she has a regular middle-class background and a passionate religious commitment. This combination...
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A Mortal Blivet
The Edge of Darkness Produced by GK Films, Icon Productions, and BBC Films Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell from the original television script by Troy Kennedy Martin Distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures In The Edge of Darkness, director Martin Campbell has tried to compress the six hour-long episodes...
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The Eclipse of the Normal
Nearly a century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote of “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.” Today the very word normal is almost taboo. Perish the thought that there is anything abnormal—let alone sinful, vicious, perverted, abominable, sick, unhealthy, or just plain wrong—about sodomy. (Unsanitary? Let’s not go there.) As...
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Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me
Deep, dark depression, excessive misery . . . That, according to Forbes.com, is what I should be feeling, but as a native Michigander, I find it hard to be miserable, let alone depressed, on a cloudless day in February. Even mere half-Poles are naturally pessimistic, but a blazing sun in a bright blue sky greatly...
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Tears of a Clown
Watching the finals of the Australian Open was a revelation. The worthy loser, Andy Murray, praised the winner, Roger Federer, by saying that he, Murray, could cry like Roger, but as yet could not play as well. He then broke down and wept in front of thousands. The crowd loved it and cheered Andy to...
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Too Good To Be Untrue
The amoeba. You remember it from biology class; it’s your long-lost relative. Don’t believe it? Well, you’re probably one of those pro-life Christian homeschooling losers. You don’t play nice with others. You are socially maladjusted. “Amoeba are essentially everywhere and have probably existed . . . long before the appearance of macroscopic animals,” says the...
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Divide and Conquer
I have seen a great deal of your government since I came to India. Your forts, your arsenals, your ships, all are admirable. I have been down to Calcutta, and have been astonished with your wealth, your palaces, your marts, and your mint; but to me the most wonderful thing of all is that so...
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Another Fake Rolexsky!
Of late I have been writing a good deal for Russian publications, including Snob, which has now given me a weekly column. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that my mother tongue would provide me with something like material comfort. A thorny path of spiritual improvement? Possibly. A way of finding better vodka,...
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A Cold and Distant Mirror
The White Ribbon Produced by Canal+ and Wega Film Written and directed by Michael Haneke Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics German director Michael Haneke loves to sneer at his middle-class patrons. In Funny Games (1997, remade in the United States in 2007) and Caché (2005), his affluent characters are shown to be at once...
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The White Man’s Burden
Take up the White Man’s burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought. The havoc wreaked by the Haitian earthquake reminded me of Rudyard...
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The Bubble Economy
“Why,” Sheila Ramus asked, “if there are so many pro-lifers here, does Rockford have an abortion clinic?” Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family Room (yes, that is its...
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Entangled
Thirty-nine years ago this spring I was in Vietnam, busy sending nonstop dispatches back home about how well the war was going for the good guys. When the North Vietnamese took Quang Tri in the north a year later and were about to attack Hue, Bill Buckley sent me a cable asking for 1,000 words...
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Print the Legend
It was about 3 p.m. on October 26, 1881, as Tombstone’s town marshal, Virgil Earp (also a deputy U.S. marshal), his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and the Earps’ eccentric friend Dr. John H. Holliday confronted Isaac and William Clanton and Thomas and Robert Findley McLaury near the O.K. Corral. After 30 seconds of firing, Morgan...
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Bonkers in Space
Tarkovsky’s Solaris came out in 1972, which was the year I’d left Russia. It was not until a quarter of a century later that I watched the long and quaint film, and was strangely affected by it. I had always thought that nothing on the screen, if it was any good at all, could not...
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An Inconvenient History
Over the past decade, climate change has been a permanent fixture in the headlines, and its implications are frightening. Depending on whom you believe, the earth might be on the verge of a warming trend that could devastate much of human civilization. If this is even partially true, we might need to consider radical solutions,...
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In Flight
Up in the Air Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Sheldon Turner, adapting Walter Kirn’s novel The Road Produced and distributed by Dimension Films Directed by John Hillcoat Screenplay by Joe Penhall, adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel George Clooney, well-groomed and exceedingly fit at 49, seems perfect as Ryan Bingham,...
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A Hard Habit to Break
On Friday, December 18, 2009, some lucky person became the first motorist in over 35 years to travel a two-block stretch of Main Street in Rockford, Illinois. The ride must have lasted all of 60 seconds—perhaps 90, if he slowed down to view the handful of restaurants and storefronts that had, until a few months...
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Sachs of Gold
The story thus far: Not content with plunging the world’s economy into the worst crisis since the 30’s, the avaricious and reckless bankers have been saved from ruin—momentarily—by our taxes, yet they continue to treat us with breathtaking contempt. Far from feeling any remorse or humility, they pay themselves annual bonuses larger than what most...
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When the Going Gets Tough. . .
Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them . ....
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A Chat With a Cabdriver
Britain was tense last October when the BBC announced that Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party, would be interviewed on one of its programs. They’s fightin’ again at the BBC, said a London cabdriver. It was front-page news for two weeks before the interview, and what began on the morning after could only...
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Got Your Goat
The Men Who Stare at Goats Produced by Smoke House and BBC Films Directed by Grant Heslov Screenplay by Peter Straughan from the book by Jon Ronson Distributed by Overture Films I’ll say this for The Men Who Stare at Goats, the delightful new film from first-time director Grant Heslov and his producing partner, George Clooney:...
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Pancho Villa
There are hundreds of Mexican restaurants in the United States named for the revolutionary Pancho Villa. Photos of the Durango native line the walls, and his raid on the small American hamlet of Columbus, New Mexico, is celebrated. Nowhere is mentioned the many atrocities Villa and his forces regularly committed. Torture, rape, and murder were...
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Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton adopted Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinkin’ About Tomorrow)” as his unofficial theme song. Its bouncy, optimistic strains would be reflected in Clinton’s line, four years later, that “We do not need to build a bridge to the past, we need to build a bridge to the future.”...
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Coming to America
A recent article in a glossy magazine about the rich and famous mentioned a $35 million house in Malibu, California, whose neighbors include Mel Gibson and Britney Spears. The owner of this mega-structure is one Teodoro Nguema Obiang, son of a man who goes by the same name. Obiang Junior is 38 years old and...
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Christmas With the Devil
“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes. “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.” The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter. Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of...
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Going Through the Motions
I did not expect to like the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, which is why I had never bothered to go up to Montmartre. The basilica was commissioned by Catholics who had survived the Paris Commune of 1870-71, when churches were destroyed and the faithful were persecuted. Even as the revolution was sputtering out, the communists...
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Heisenberg’s Curious Principle
A Serious Man Produced by Studio Canal and Working Title Films Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen Distributed by Focus Features Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is hardly cinematic, yet Ethan and Joel Coen have made it a linchpin in the plots of two of their films, The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)...
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An Arresting Moment
Five years ago, I wrote of the horror that Aaron Wolf and I experienced as we spent a morning photographing the old Turner School here in Rockford. Built in 1898, the massive brick-and-stone structure was closed 80 years later by a school board attempting in vain to avoid a lawsuit over busing. Today, little effort...
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The Limits of Compassion
Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterand pedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on...
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Something to Remember
Francis Parkman concluded his monumental account of France and England in North America with the Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France ceded Quebec, once and for all, to the British Empire. In an uncharacteristically smug observation on the aftermath, Parkman described the French Canadians as “a people bereft of every vestige of civil...
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Crazy Russian No More
A quarter of a century ago, when I started writing for this magazine, I was the Russian. Along with the sense of exclusivity it afforded, that simple tag gave its owner a clear run through the 1980’s and 90’s on both sides of the Atlantic. I was the only Russian in any crowd, whether as...
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Once There Was a War
“Sut mae? Sut rydych chi?” I’m going to assume that most readers did not understand those phrases, which translate roughly to “How are you? How are things going?” And that lack of comprehension is a critical historical fact, because, if a generation of British historians and archaeologists is correct, then you should have no problem...
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Cupidity
The Informant! Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Steven Soderbergh Screenplay by Scott Z. Burns based on Kurt Eichenwald’s book “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas,” Chaucer’s pardoner warned his guilt-ridden audiences: The root of all evil is greed. Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! serves as a latter-day illustration of this admonition. In The...
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The Flying Tigers
The first “paper & stick” model airplane I ever made was a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. I painted it in the color scheme of the famed Flying Tigers, including the shark’s mouth on the cowl and air scoop. Mine was powered not by a 1040 horsepower V-12 Allison but by a rubber band that I wound...
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A Cautionary Tale
When pro-life activist James Pouillon was murdered in Owosso, Michigan, on September 11, I read a few dozen accounts from both national and Michigan news sources and quickly decided I had a handle on the story. Harlan Drake, the man who has admitted to murdering Pouillon, seems deeply disturbed, and he had murdered another man...
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Breakfast With Bin Laden
I sat down to write this column in the Big Bagel, as I call New York City, and it was to be about the latest hagiography of Winston Churchill, a man I not only dislike but consider to be a war criminal par excellence. Then I heard the sirens outside my house and was deafened...
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Remembering Who We Were
We were in Athens, near the end of July, having dinner with some Greek friends at Attikos, a popular rooftop restaurant with a view of the Parthenon. Like most conservatives, our friends are somewhat pessimistic about what the future holds for their country, and from their description it seems to me that as the left...
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The Salami Fallacy
A few months ago in this space I described the Pecorino Effect, referring not so much to the Italian cheese as to the shopper’s inability to refuse any merchandise he has sampled, irrespective of what he thinks of the quality. I diagnosed this modern malady, with myself as a specimen of social tissue in the...
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Aliens and Knaves
District 9 Produced by Key Creatives and WingNut Films Directed and written by Neill Blomkamp Distributed by Sony Pictures Forty-five years ago, radio humorist Jean Shepherd wondered why filmmakers invariably portrayed alien invaders as intellectually light years ahead of human beings. Wasn’t it possible, he mused, that extraterrestrials might be a tad slow on...
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Coming Home
“The people who go to St. Stan’s aren’t Polish; they’re Polish-American.” Those words, blurted without thinking, have haunted me for almost a decade and a half. Anna Mycek-Wodecki, then art director of Chronicles, was a true Pole. Like Leopold Tyrmand, the founder of Chronicles, she was a refugee from communism. Unlike Tyrmand, she was ethnically...
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Oiling Up the Wheels of Justice
He is the clown prince in a continent whose rulers boast of more clowns among them than all the circuses of the world combined. He uses more black shoe polish on his hair than a company of Rumanian hussars use on their thigh-high boots, and plasters more makeup on his face than Norma Desmond. He...
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Christian No More
C.S. Lewis wrote about the “death of words.” In essence, he suggested that, whenever we feel compelled to append a noun with the adjectives true or real, it is safe to say that the noun has lost its meaning, or died. “No, no, we’re true conservatives.” There’s my example. So what do you do, then? ...
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Stepping Backward
When Jefferson Davis was a boy, he told his father that he did not wish to go to school. The Yankee schoolmaster, although a kindly man, demanded a great deal of memory work and threatened to punish young Jeff for his failure. His father took the declaration in stride and calmly explained to his son,...
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The Brazilian Cow
In the middle of the 19th century, Sydney Dobell wrote a poem that contained the following line: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” This excursion into the absurd c. 1850 is readily recognized by readers of American poems or novels c. 1950 as a cry of the soul in torment. The...
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Reporting and Deciding
The Hurt Locker Produced by First Light Production and Kingsgate Films Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Screenplay by Mark Boal Distributed by Summit Entertainment At last we have a movie that makes us feel the full obscenity of the Iraq war. Other films have been well intentioned but have either given in to the temptation...
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The Noble Savage
A sequel to Dances With Wolves is reportedly scheduled for release in 2011. Not only did Dances create a romantic American Indian who never existed, it reversed the roles of the Sioux and the Pawnee. This kind of thing has been going on for hundreds of years, beginning with various European writers who, far removed...
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Manufacturing Our Future
Last month, I discussed what the future of manufacturing in the United States will have to be, if manufacturing in the United States is to have a future; this month, I can say with some certainty that I have seen the future of manufacturing, and it is here in Rockford. Before you laugh and turn...
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Of Gentlemen Sportsmen
By the time you read this the U.S. Open will be in full cry. Tough, unsmiling professionals will be hitting balls back and forth with machine-like regularity, and Cyclops, the mechanical eye that overrides human decisions, will be resolving close matches. It is Aldous Huxley come true, with a little Orwell thrown in for good...
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Johnny Rocco’s World
Conservative political strategists are like the military strategists they would like to emulate: They are always fighting the last war. For how many years, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, did conservatives continue to rail against the communist menace? Marxism, and not only the virulent Leninist strain adopted by the Bolsheviks, had once posed a...
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Looking Backwards
Hard cases make bad law, and since 2002 the exposure of some ugly criminal cases has stirred legislators in several states to contemplate dreadful legal innovations. However far removed these crimes may appear from regular mainstream American life, the legal principles involved threaten to wreak havoc in the coming decades. As all the world knows,...