In late October, federal agents committed blasphemy against one third of the libertarian trinity of Microsoft, McDonald’s, and Wal-Mart. In a coordinated raid on Wal-Mart headquarters and 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states, the feds arrest 245 illegal aliens, 235 of whom were working for a subcontractor who provided janitorial services for the chain. (The...
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Moon-Man Religion
American Christians love to deceive themselves. They close their eyes and pretend that the government’s war against their religion is a temporary aberration; they insist—against all the evidence—that Abraham Lincoln was a Christian; and, when some federal judge dictates a decree stripping the town square of its cross and crèche or tearing down the Ten...
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Nothing Doing, Doing Nothing
Labor Day weekend honors those horny-handed men and brawny women who do the real work that gets done in America, hauling up to the pay office every two weeks in Cadillacs emblazoned with union decals to collect their fat two-week paychecks (five days’ work, another five on sick leave). A drone myself, I’m completely shameless...
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Putting the Law in Lawrence
Though America’s academics tend to the dyspeptic and hypercritical, on one day this past year, the campus mood was extraordinarily sunny. This past June, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, declaring unconstitutional a law prohibiting homosexual conduct. In the eyes of most academics, Lawrence represented an act...
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Out of Korea
Another futile round of the six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear program ended in Beijing last September. The communist authorities in Pyongyang subsequently declared that further negotiations involving both Koreas, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States were pointless, but China said it was working to arrange a second round of talks. For once, I...
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Quaint Honor
Thirteen Produced by Antidote Films and Michael London Productions Directed by Catherine Hardwicke Screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke and Nikki Reed Distributed by 20th Century Fox I am writing this review in my room at Hertford College in Oxford University, where I am attending the Evelyn Waugh centennial conference. Waugh studied at Hertford from 1921 to...
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Calling Bill Donohue
When cities trumpet the glories of their downtowns, they normally talk about such things as the number and variety of restaurants and stores, easy access from other parts of the city, even the availability of parking places. Here, however, we believe in “a different kind of greatness,” and I can see the ads now: “Come...
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The Christian Militant
“The trowel in hand and the gun rather easy in the holster” —Nehemiah, according to T.S. Eliot “Say you got two Gucci jackets, you hock one and you get yourself a gat.” —The “Bad” News Bible Jesus, contemplating His departure from this world, instructed His disciples to arm themselves, and, ever since, Christians enrolled in...
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A Girl of the Gilded West
Lynette Lyon Hollow liked money. Because she had never had any of her own before, though, having it around made her nervous, and so she spent it whenever she saw something she thought worth spending money on. When more money kept coming in anyway than went out, she spent faster and faster on bigger and...
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Reforming the Military
On August 25, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that he would look into ways to strengthen U.S. combat power without increasing the size of the military. While the “end-strength” of 1.4 million should stay the same, he intends to rebalance the active and reserve components, sending underutilized active-duty personnel to the reserves and moving...
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The Well-Holstered Gun
Open Range Screenplay by Craig Storper from a novel by Lauran Paine Produced and directed by Kevin Costner The Western film genre has often been criticized for celebrating gun violence. But mainstream oateaters often have more in common with the peace-loving Jane Austen than with the blood-besotted Sam Peckinpah. My Darling Clementine, Shane, The Fastest...
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Lies and More Lies
Having come across several references this spring to a French literary critic, Jean Sévillia, who is criticizing leftist historical reconstructions, I read his two most recent books, Le Terrorisme Intellectuel (2000) and Historiquement correct: Pour en finir avec le passé unique (2003). An associate editor of Le Figaro magazine, Sévillia makes clear that he is...
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The GOP’s Secret Weapon
If the war with Iraq was largely the work of the Likudnik faction that has commandeered the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, the liberation of Liberia on which the President suddenly embarked the nation last summer seems to have originated at least in part with yet another lobby of questionable loyalties. On July 7, as...
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A Nightmare on Elm Street
I have raised up a chosen man from my people, with my holy oil I have anointed him so that my hand is always with him and my arm strengthens him. A year ago, on the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Bishop Thomas G. Doran of the diocese of Rockford elevated...
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Back to Reality
The modern age has been a 500-year revolution against Aristotle. Bacon and Galileo assailed his authority in the natural sciences; neoplatonists rejected his metaphysics in favor of a false mysticism that was little better than black magic; Epicureans, thrilled with the insights of the rediscovered poem of Lucretius, preferred hedonism and materialism to Aristotle’s morality...
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Homecoming
I’d worked in the oil patch for several weeks already when I bought a T-shirt at the J.C. Penney Mother Store in Kemmerer. The shirt was fire-engine red with black lettering across the chest. The letters said, “IF YOU HAVE ONLY SIX MONTHS TO LIVE MOVE TO KEMMERER WYOMING. IT’LL SEEM LIKE A LIFETIME.” Since...
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Out of Africa
But for the death and suffering it has caused to thousands of innocents, the Liberian imbroglio would have an almost farcical quality—Graham Greene meets Lehar. On one side, there was the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), a ragtag army of heavily armed but poorly trained and undisciplined rebels. They nevertheless have the upper...
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They’re Back
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Jonathan Mostow Screenplay by John Brancato, Michael Ferris, and Tedi Sarafian The Hulk Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Ang Lee Screenplay by John Turman, Michael France, and James Schamus Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black...
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Unit 731
Every time I ask my college students if they are familiar with Nazi atrocities, the collective reply is “Of course.” Nearly all of them have also heard of Dr. Josef Mengele and his horrific medical experiments conducted at Auschwitz. The “Angel of Death” has been the subject of countless lectures, articles, books, movies, and documentaries. ...
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The Real Cabal
After nearly two decades of paleoconservative criticism, complaints, and general grousing about the ideological hegemony of the neoconservatives, the establishment press finally began to notice the existence of the latter. Between the time of President Bush’s factually flawed “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in 2002 and the “end” of the war with...
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The Perfect Storm
The chain saw screams as it hits the wood, then slides through the first few branches as if they were butter. I toss them aside, and Jacob and Stephen each grab hold of one, dragging it, struggling, over to the gate and out onto the driveway. It has been two weeks since the storm, but...
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Loyal Opposition
In the two years since Muslim terrorists murdered over 3,000 of our citizens on September 11, Americans have been taking one side or the other in the debate between the partisans of security and public order, led by Attorney General John Ash-croft, and the partisans of free speech, championed by the ACLU and other groups...
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How Erewhon Ended Ethnic Profiling
Let me apologize. A massive technical glitch, involving distortions of the fourth dimension, has prevented me from researching the column I intended to write about ethnic and racial profiling. The column would have pointed out that many people who complain about profiling fail to define just what the term means. They confuse blatant examples of...
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Exiting Iraq
It is sometimes necessary for a great power to keep a distant small country under military occupation—if need be, for a very long time. The Romans could not contemplate an “exit strategy” from Palestine in the first century A.D.—or from a few other hotspots around the empire’s outer perimeter—without compromising their status as the world’s...
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Waugh on Film
The High Green Wall (1954) Adapted for The General Electric Theater Columbia Broadcasting System Directed by Nicholas Ray Teleplay by Charles Jackson In 1929, Evelyn Waugh wrote that film was “the one vital art of the century,” an accolade he would later qualify. While he came to believe that cinema had “taught [novelists] a new...
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The Great Crackpot Crackdown
Within a few days of the American conquest of Iraq, it was obvious that the Bush administration’s “War on Terrorism” was a monumental flop that has probably endangered the United States and Americans abroad far more than it has protected them. Not only were American soldiers being slowly picked off by snipers inside Iraq but...
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WWMD?
I want to speak to you today about war and empire. Killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will continue to spill—theirs and ours—be prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as...
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It Was the Worst of Times
The French Revolution was a cancer that metastasized and spread through Western societies, weakening them to the point of collapse. Even the European and American right did not escape being contaminated by the forces they struggled against, and, certainly, by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly difficult to frame a conservative argument...
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Two Deserts
Nineteen ninety-one was Operation Desert Storm. In 2003, it is Operation Shock and Awe—or was it Awe and Terror, or Shlock and Glock? We make progress backward, as befits the new millennium. Twelve years ago, the Pentagon at least managed to get the desert into it. The Mesopotamian Desert, as the troops have discovered on...
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Fragile Empire
There have been strong empires with weak currencies, but not often and not for long. The Soviet Union, Spain after Philip II, the Ottoman Empire after Suleiman, and an impoverished Britain after Versailles all come to mind. That financially fragile states cannot support ambitious political and military ventures is obvious to common sense and confirmed...
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God’s in His Heaven
The Matrix Reloaded Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski Bruce Almighty Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Tom Shadyac Screenplay by Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe The Matrix Reloaded, the second film of a projected trilogy, could hardly be more disappointing. Four years ago, The...
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Le Monde, the Flesh, and the Devil
A livre à scandale in France this year is a heavily documented work by two veteran freelancers, writer-researcher Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen, editor of the French satirical publication Marianne. La face cachée du Monde, which runs over 600 pages, was put out by the very independent press Mille et Une Nuit, over threats of...
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The Old Right Failure
No sooner had at least a dozen or so counterattacks on David Frum’s silly rant against paleoconservatives in the April 7 issue of National Review appeared in print or on the internet than the sole defense of the Frum article of which I am aware popped up under the name of William Rusher. Some paleos...
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Giving the Devil His Due
Early in the morning factory whistle blows, Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes, Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light, It’s the working, the working, just the working life . . . One of the oddest ironies of our postindustrial age is that conservatives—true conservatives, not the various utopian...
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Imitation of Life
“You shall have life and that abundantly.” What did Jesus’ followers make of this bold promise? He had shown them that he could cure the diseases that afflict both body and mind, and, in bringing Lazarus back from the dead, He lifted the veil to reveal a part of the mystery of His own being. ...
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A Good Day to Live
The hoof falls sounded measured as time, sixty beats to a minute, 3,600 to the hour, stretching out behind and ahead of them, inexorable like the past, like the future unforeseen, perhaps inevitable. Time neither slowed nor accelerated in approaching the good or the bad, though sometimes you could swear it did one or the...
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A Road Map to Nowhere?
In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, its most determined advocates predictably claimed that the United States should proceed with her alleged mission of bringing democracy to the Middle East. The advocates of this approach seek to push the Israeli-Palestinian issue into the background, to subordinate it to whatever their agenda may be in...
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A Good Hitman Is Not So Hard to Find
Assassination Tango Produced by American Zoetrope and Butchers’ Run Films Written and directed by Robert Duvall Distributed by MGM and United Artists Phone Booth Produced by Fox 2000 Pictures Directed by Joel Schumacher Screenplay by Larry Cohen Distributed by 20th Century Fox Are good hitmen really hard to find? Not if you go to the...
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Bury the Facts at Wounded Knee
At Wounded Knee Creek, on December 29, 1890, the last fight of any size or significance between the U.S. Army and American Indians occurred. Although a terrible tragedy involving the loss of Indian women and children, the battle has been wildly mischaracterized, especially by those bent on making the Indian an innocent victim of the...
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Infamies
Exactly 60 years before the terrorist attacks of 2001, September 11 became a day of infamy for many Americans because of what Col. Charles A. Lindbergh said to an audience in Des Moines, Iowa, that day. Speaking as a member of the America First Committee, Lindbergh warned his listeners, in words that immediately became world-famous,...
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Where the Blacktop Ends
It’s springtime once again in Rockford, when a young man’s fancy turns to bailing out his basement. The old downtown and the residential neighborhoods built up through the 1940’s sit on clay soil, on top of rock. The effect, when the spring rains come and the dry clay cannot absorb the water quickly enough, is...
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Men in Black
The U.S. Supreme Court is like one of those dinosaur reconstructions at which children gape when they are taken to a museum. Not only is the Court today an imaginative reconstruction of something that no longer actually exists, it is so huge an institution that few Americans are able to take it in all at...
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How the West Was Won—Again
Richard M. Weaver, in his discussion of forms and the concept of the formal in Ideas Have Consequences, has this to say about the custom and culture of the American frontier: The American frontiersman was a type who emancipated himself from culture by abandoning the settled institutions of the seaboard and the European motherland. Reveling...
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Goodbye, Senator McCarthy
Hold on, let me make sure my word processor is in full Cliché Mode: “The specter of Senator McCarthy walks again in contemporary America.” Yes, that seems to be working properly. Particularly over the past couple of years, we’ve heard a great deal about McCarthy and McCarthyism. The name surfaces whenever a government agency identifies...
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Turkish Delights
Four weeks before the latest war against Iraq, President George W. Bush declared that it would be motivated by a “vision” of democracy and liberation for the entire Middle East. A U.S.-sponsored regime change in Baghdad, he proclaimed, would “serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.” Only...
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Justice Blinded
Dark Blue Produced by Alphaville Films and Cosmic Pictures Directed by Ron Shelton Screenplay by David Ayer and James Ellroy Distributed by United Artists Daredevil Produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox Written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson Ron Shelton’s Dark Blue opens with the infamous video of Rodney King taking a beating at...
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Treason Prospers
As I (along with just about every other armchair strategist in the Western world) correctly predicted last year, the United States launched her war against Iraq in the early spring of 2003, but by the time she did so, the path of treason along which this country had been dragged to war was plain to...
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War Is Hell on the Homefront, Too
Depending on whether you like them thin and greasy or thick and meaty, the two best purveyors of french fries in Rockford are Uncle Nick’s Gyros on East State Street and Altamore’s Ristorante on North Main. Neither the mythical Uncle Nick nor the very real Alberto Altamore, I’m happy to report, has fallen prey to...
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Plus ça Change . . .
In the December 27, 2002, issue of the English edition of Forward, self-described Orthodox Jew David Klinghoffer attacks Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for his recent book Two Hundred Years Together. In this historical work, Solzhenitsyn deals with Jews and Russians living side by side from 1775, when Russia came to occupy the heavily Jewish regions of Eastern...
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Living the Jacobin Dream
In 1793, the Jacobins, surfing the wave of Parisian mob violence, intimidated their less resolute colleagues into eliminating both the principle of monarchy and the existence of its politically superfluous incarnation, Louis XVI. Not content with killing a living king and pronouncing a death sentence in absentia on all the princes of the blood who...