The Punisher Produced by Marvel Enterprises Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh Screenplay by Michael France and Jonathan Hensleigh Distributed by Lions Gate Films Inc. Man on Fire Produced by Fox 2000 Pictures and Scott Free Productions Directed by Tony Scott Screenplay by Brian Helgeland from A.J. Quinnell’s novel Distributed by 20th Century Fox Film Corporation Mean...
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July 1, 2004June 21, 2022The Western Front
Whose Globe, Whose Europe?
A widely publicized essay, “The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism,” by John Ralston Saul, appeared in the March issue of Harper’s. It is an extended attack on the Enlightenment and its global effects, launched from the multicultural left, which dwells on the happy turn of events that has allowed “positive forms of...
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June 1, 2004June 21, 2022Perspective
Honest Journalist
Why are the phrases “honest journalist” and “free press” so often greeted with a snicker? Of course, everyone exempts his own columnist or talking head from the general condemnation, but most Americans also exempt their own congressman from the universal condemnation of Congress as a body made up of toadies and swindlers. To see the...
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June 1, 2004June 21, 2022European Diary
The Eudaemonic Serb
The Ritz Club, the casino arm of the venerable and resplendent hotel in Piccadilly, is, for the discriminating player with an 18th-century sense of what gambling is all about, “the other place.” Apart from the late John Aspinall’s hallowed sepulchre in Curzon Street, this subterranean alhambra is the only privately owned gambling club in London. ...
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June 1, 2004June 21, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
The Warming of the West
We know that nothing in this world stays the same. What we do not know is how or why it doesn’t. Probably, this is because we do not need to know. After five or six years in western Wyoming, in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, I recognized what seemed a stable weather pattern. Summers...
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June 1, 2004June 21, 2022The American Interest
Failing America
The Soviet Communist Party used to devote a lot of attention to the problem of inefficient agriculture. The party’s Agrarian Policy Commission debated endlessly, throughout the final quarter-century of the Soviet state’s existence, how to improve the system. Should the state farm (sovkhoz) be made self-financing? Should the collective farm (kolkhoz) have its own heavy...
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June 1, 2004June 21, 2022In the Dark
Caution: Allegory Ahead
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Directed by Michel Gondry Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman Distributed by Focus Features The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) Produced by Ren Film Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev Screenplay by Vladimir Moiseyenko and Aleksandr Novototsky Distributed by Kino International Allegory is a tricky undertaking. Its practitioners must conceal at first what they mean to...
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June 1, 2004June 21, 2022Sins of Omission
The Star Chamber
In 1975, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) launched a campaign for reparations for those Japanese who had been forced to evacuate the West Coast during World War II. A heavily financed lobbying effort came to fruition five years later when the House of Representatives passed a bill creating the Commission on Wartime Relocation and...
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June 1, 2004June 21, 2022The Rockford Files
Strictly Business
The other day, driving through North End Commons (a neighborhood a bit north of the Chronicles offices and to the west of our house), I noticed a florist, a friend of mine, out in front of another flower shop, chatting with the owner. The two businesses have coexisted now for over a year, though they...
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May 1, 2004June 22, 2022Perspective
Cultural Suicide
Tonight, dear friends, is the eve of the Feast of Albertus Magnus. “Who he?” would be the response of most people who have gone to school since the end of World War II. Names like Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, Cicero and Cato, Alfred the Great and the Venerable Bede, while they may echo distantly...
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May 1, 2004June 22, 2022European Diary
Playing With Beauty
If I seem to have become obsessed with the isomorphism of love and gambling, it is because, like an unexpected number in roulette on a particularly hazardous night, the subject just keeps coming up. Wherever I look, whether to a work of imaginative literature or to a story from real life, at once I note...
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May 1, 2004June 22, 2022Breaking Glass
As Cold as Charity
Did anybody notice when Catholic Christianity ceased to be a religion in the United States? Not when it stopped being a popular or even a permissible religion, but when it became simply a nonreligion? I ask this because a recent court decision in California threatens to launch a legal revolution, in a way that would...
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May 1, 2004June 22, 2022The American Interest
The Victory of Fear in Spain
If, as appears certain, Islamic terrorists planted the bombs that killed over 200 commuters and wounded 1,400 others on Madrid’s trains on March 11, the operation was singularly successful in achieving its political objectives. Until that morning, the Popular Party (PP) government of the former prime minister José Maria Aznar looked poised to win the...
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May 1, 2004June 22, 2022In the Dark
The Crux of the Matter
The Passion of the Christ Produced by Icon Productions Directed by Mel Gibson Screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson Distributed by Newmarket Film Group I recently posted a review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in my In the Dark section of our website (Chronicles-Magazine.org). I expressed my admiration for the film...
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May 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Rockford Files
Last Ride
Every city needs cemeteries, and not just for the obvious reason. Like public buildings and monuments, they are a visible—and spiritual—link to the city’s past, a reminder that others have traveled the path that we trod, and still others will follow in our footsteps. Placed prominently on the edge of residential or commercial areas or...
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April 1, 2004June 22, 2022Perspective
Tax Slavery
The American Revolution, as all Americans are taught, began as a rebellion against unfair taxation; in the United States today, however, some 230 years after James Otis protested the Stamp Act, unimaginably higher taxes are imposed on the American people and collected by means that would have seemed tyrannical to George III. Britain had no...
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April 1, 2004June 22, 2022European Diary
Genetic Roulette
Once, a long time ago, when, as a result of one of those complex misunderstandings that cast long shadows over the course of my life, I was getting married in a small town in Connecticut, my father showed up at the church stuffed with promotional literature. This consisted of leaflets describing his new organization, donation...
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April 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
Never the Twain Shall Meet
Maps show Wyoming beginning in the western Black Hills at its northeastern corner and east of the Laramie Mountains at the southeastern one. Yet the beginning of a thing (or, for that matter, its end) is rarely so simple. To me, it is obvious that Wyoming begins on the western slope of the Snowy Range...
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April 1, 2004June 22, 2022The American Interest
Pakistan’s Nuclear Proliferation
In a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., on February 11, President Bush warned against the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and suggested measures to dismantle a growing black market in nuclear fuel and technology. He called the possibility of a sudden attack by weapons of mass destruction “the greatest...
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April 1, 2004June 22, 2022In the Dark
Monsters
Monster Produced by Zodiac Productions Inc. Written and directed by Patty Jenkins Distributed by Newmarket Film Group The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara Produced by @radical.media and Senart Films Directed by Errol Morris Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics In Monster, director Patty Jenkins rehearses yet again the pitiful...
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April 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Western Front
Inhuman Rights
Since the father of the French (and, by now, European) New Right, Alain de Benoist, sent me an inscribed copy of his most recent book, Au-Delà des Droits De L’Homme (Krisis, 2004), I read the text attentively. Like him, I have wondered why natural rights (now called human rights) have become, in the words of...
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April 1, 2004June 22, 2022Principalities & Powers
Amnesty
Conservatives who saw through the fraud of the “temporary worker visa” program that President Bush unveiled in January and recognized it for the mass amnesty of illegal aliens it is might want to consider muting their fulminations against the concept of amnesty. If current demographic trends continue, they may find that they are in need...
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April 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Rockford Files
This Is the Time to Remember
Every city is made up of innumerable stories, some overlapping, most not. And, thus, every city needs many storytellers to provide a full account of its life, because—humans being finite—no one is likely to be able to encompass all of those stories in his work. Few cities, however, are so lucky. The best most cities...
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March 1, 2004June 22, 2022Perspective
“Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man”
My father believed in progress almost to the end of his life, when changing his mind would scarcely have made any difference. Like most liberals, he regarded traditional institutions as so many barriers to man’s continued improvement, and yet, like most good men who are liberals, his head was contradicted by his heart: He despised...
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March 1, 2004June 22, 2022European Diary
Rotten to the Core
“Let us gamble with reason in the name of life,” urges Pascal in his celebrated statistical proof for the existence of God. “Let us risk it, for the sake of a win that is infinitely great and just as probable as the loss, which is to say nonexistence.” With the cynicism of an inveterate gambler,...
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March 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
In Praise of Firearms
Apparently from the conviction that one lie is as good (or as bad) as another, the left has never been known to let a lying cause die, if it could help it. I have read that Michael A. Bellesiles’ Arming America: The Story of a National Gun Culture (published by Knopf and awarded the 2001...
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March 1, 2004June 22, 2022The American Interest
The Balkan Terror Threat
A chain is as strong as its weakest link. In President Bush’s “War on Terror,” that weak link is not in the Middle East or North Africa or the Subcontinent but in Europe. For years, Chronicles has been warning that flawed pro-Muslim Western policies would turn the Balkans from a “protectorate of the New World...
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March 1, 2004June 22, 2022In the Dark
Character Is Fate
House of Sand and Fog Produced and distributed by DreamWorks Directed by Vadim Perelman Screenplay by Vadim Perelman and Shawn Lawrence Otto from the novel by Andre Dubus III As Heraclitus concluded so has Andre Dubus III: Character is fate. By way of illustration, in 1999, Dubus gave us his hypnotic novel House of Sand and Fog,...
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March 1, 2004June 22, 2022Sins of Omission
Whose Atrocities?
The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children. Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed. He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan. Many movie reviewers have...
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March 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Rockford Files
One City, No Leaders
Regionalism has been the chief buzzword of the Rockford Register Star for several years now, and, for once, on a rather limited level, I actually agree with the local Gannett paper. There are certain problems facing Rockford that require coordination with surrounding communities and with county government, especially questions of land use. This section of...
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February 1, 2004June 22, 2022Perspective
Charity Begins at Church
December can be a difficult month for American Christians, forced to look on passively as their sacred holy days are turned into a generic “holiday season.” The First Sunday in Advent has been replaced by “Black Friday,” the day on which retailers begin to turn a profit on holiday sales; and the end of the...
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February 1, 2004June 22, 2022European Diary
A Sad Denouement
The greatness of man, writes Pascal in his Pensees, is great so long as man is conscious of his own insignificance. “A tree, by contrast, is not conscious of its own insignificance.” In other words, man feels his insignificance; he is aware of it; and he is made great by his awareness of it. “But...
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February 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
Blood of Deer and Patriots
The desert smelled like September, acrid and dry. It was the familiar high-desert smell, the smell of harvesttime without a harvest, unless you called the last thin cutting taken from among the willows along the creek a harvest. In the dead season, all deserts smell alike. Nothing was missing from the Mesopotamian variety but the...
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February 1, 2004June 22, 2022Breaking Glass
The Triumph of the Secular
Having failed to establish much of a numerical presence in American society, the Episcopal Church, USA, succeeds in attracting attention by the continuing antics of a long parade of outrageous ecclesiastics. In 2003, attention focused on the ordination of openly homosexual Vicky Imogene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. While I am reluctant to add...
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February 1, 2004June 22, 2022The American Interest
The Battle for Bush’s Ear and Soul
It is reasonable to assume that a country’s foreign policy is conducted in the interest of that country’s security and well-being and that those entrusted with its formulation and conduct will act in a coherent and rational manner. At the end of 2003, the foreign policy of the United States was neither coherent nor rational. ...
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February 1, 2004June 22, 2022In the Dark
Secret Sharers
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox Directed by Peter Weir Screenplay by Peter Weir and John Collee from Patrick O’Brian’s novels The Last Samurai Produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Cruise-Wagner Productions Directed by Edward Zwick Screenplay by John Logan Magisterial sea yarner Patrick...
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February 1, 2004June 22, 2022Principalities & Powers
Enthusiastic Democracy
Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough. The Grand...
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February 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Rockford Files
Fiddling While Rockford Burns
There’s a big brown cloud in the city, And the countryside’s a sin. The price of life is too high to give up, It’s gotta come down again. When worldwide war is over and done, And the dream of peace comes true. We’ll all be drinking that free Bubble Up, And eating that rainbow stew....
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January 1, 2004June 22, 2022Perspective
The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...
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January 1, 2004June 22, 2022European Diary
Seduced and Abandoned
I was reared in a cultural microcosm that undervalued experience. More than that, it treated experience as a kind of monstrous blemish upon the face of thought, a defect that was deemed the more unfortunate for being the more noteworthy, unexpected, or rare. It was as though the threadbare commonness of climbing the Himalayas, or...
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January 1, 2004June 22, 2022The American Interest
Mr. Bush and Democracy in the Middle East
In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini told Oriana Fallaci that Western music dulls the mind. “It involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs,” he explained; it does not exalt the spirit but puts it to sleep, and “it distracts our youth who become poisoned by it.” “Even the music of Bach, Beethoven, Verdi?” Fallaci asked. “I do...
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January 1, 2004June 22, 2022In the Dark
Exhibitionists
In the Cut Produced by Pathe and Red Turtle Productions Directed by Jane Campion Screenplay by Jane Campion and Susanna Moore Distributed by Screen Gems Shattered Glass Directed by Billy Ray Screenplay by Billy Ray from an article by Buzz Bissinger Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions Distributed by Lions Gate Films Actors are exhibitionists. They feel...
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January 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Western Front
Evildoing Nations
On October 3, in an address celebrating the anniversary of German reunification, a Hessian deputy to the German Bundestag and a member of the CDU/CSU steering council, Martin Hohmann, committed a gaffe that led to his removal from his party position five weeks later. The party leader who justified this sacking, Angela Merkel, complained that...
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January 1, 2004June 22, 2022The Rockford Files
The Road to Hell
It’s been a rough three months for St. Mary’s Oratory here in Rockford. First, over Labor Day weekend, some Republican members of the Winnebago County Board, in collusion with certain Republican county officials, hatched a plan to try to include St. Mary’s in the land-acquisition area for a new, $130-million county jail. When the plan...
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December 1, 2003June 22, 2022Perspective
Rockford and Gomorrah
American cities rot from the center like an old oak tree: Empty and desolate within, they are kept from dying only by the life that surges just beneath the surface of the peripheral bark. Here in Rockford, the flight to the suburbs is commonly blamed on the aging buildings and the unpleasantness of life in...
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December 1, 2003June 22, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
A Dripping Spring
The parallel trails of brown smoke tracking west to east 50 or so miles ahead above the place where the Grand Canyon ought to be had a sinister aspect, suggesting another greasy invasion by the encroaching metropoli of the desert Southwest. “Is that L.A.?” I asked Tom Sheeley. “Or is it only Vegas?” Tom shook...
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December 1, 2003June 22, 2022The American Interest
Lord Ashdown’s Balkan Fiefdom
For 200 years, the Balkan states have been manipulated by the powers of “Old Europe” to slow and control the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They were created, enlarged, and shrunk as the need arose. During the two world wars, the territories inhabited by southern Slavs were used as bargaining chips in constructing alliances, while...
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December 1, 2003June 22, 2022In the Dark
The Human Element
Intolerable Cruelty Produced by Alphaville Films and Imagine Entertainment Written and Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Distributed by Universal Pictures Lost in Translation Produced by American Zoetrope and Elemental Films Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola Distributed by Focus Features Intolerable Cruelty should by prosecuted for intolerable smugness, the besetting sin of...
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December 1, 2003June 22, 2022Sins of Omission
California’s Mythologized Bandido
On the wintry morning of February 20, 1853, more than a hundred Chinese miners were working their claims near Rich Gulch. Without warning, five mounted and gun-brandishing bandidos swept down upon the Chinese. Taken by surprise and without arms themselves, the Chinese could do little but comply when ordered to hand over their gold. An...
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December 1, 2003June 22, 2022Principalities & Powers
Turning Away
By the end of last summer, it had become transparently obvious, even to the graying stallions of the “conservative movement,” that organized conservatism in the United States since the 1950’s has been a colossal failure. The failure has been clear enough to most percipient Americans for perhaps a decade or more (an essay I published...