The Hundredth Meridian is now a decade old in conception, though a year short of that in reality. It had its origin in a biweekly column I was hired by James Hill to write in the winter and spring of 1993 for the Sunday Perspective section of the Arizona Republic, which James was editing at...
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Europe Skeptical About NATO Enlargement
On November 21, 2002, NATO leaders meeting in Prague invited seven ex-communist nations to join their ranks in an expansion termed “historic.” The three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (the alliance will, for the first time, include former Soviet territory), as well as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Rumania are expected to become full...
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Be Afraid of Virginia Woolf
The Hours Produced by Scott Rudin and Miramax Films Directed by Stephen Daldry Screenplay by David Hare from Michael Cunningham’s novel Distributed by Paramount Pictures Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Produced by Andrew Lazar and Miramax Films Directed by George Clooney Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman from the book by Chuck Barris Distributed by Artisan Entertainment...
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The Myth of Red Brotherhood
Second only to the myth of Indian as ecologist is that of red brotherhood. Although physically similar, the Indian peoples of what is today the United States were a diverse lot. There was no common language, culture, or identity. A few groups of Indians evolved political organizations—the Iroquois League of the Five Nations was the...
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The Empire’s New Clothes
Not the least of the several noticeable ironies that attend the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st is that, when the logically appropriate moment for the declaration of a formal American Empire arrived during the half-century of conflict with the Soviet Union, the empire failed to emerge. Today, well after...
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This Is Your Hometown
About two years ago, I wrote a “Letter From Rockford” entitled “A Month in the Life of the Industrial Midwest” (April 2001), in which I used excerpts from news reports to illustrate the rather dramatic economic changes that were taking place in the Rockford area—plant closings, layoffs, declining wages. At the time, I had no...
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Imperialism From the Cradle to the Grave
In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be builded, the place they offered sacrifices, and let the foundations thereof be strongly laid. Mesopotamia was the cradle of empires, but it was also their grave, as the...
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FDR: The Moral Reckoning
Dear Editor: Attached please find the proposal for my latest book, Franklin Roosevelt: The Anti-christ Unmasked. While I know some people will dismiss my thesis as foolish (or even “crazy”), the wave of recent books published by major presses like yours gives me reason to hope that the truth can at last be told. I...
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Pakistan, Our Untrustworthy Partner
As the first contingent of U.N. weapons inspectors arrived in Iraq last November, U.S. government sources leaked a disturbing story about one of our key “allies” in the War on Terror. Pakistan apparently has been helping North Korea with her nuclear-weapons program for years, in return for missile technology that would strengthen her own hand...
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The Sorrows of Solipsism
Solaris Produced by James Cameron and 20th Century Fox Directed by Steven Soderbergh Screenplay by Steven Soderbergh from Stanislaw Lem’s novel Distributed by 20th Century Fox Adaptation Produced by Propaganda Films Directed by Spike Jonze Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman from The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean Distributed by Columbia Pictures Steven Soderbergh’s...
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The Strange Death of the Yellow Dog
Perusing the conservative press in the days after the Republican victories in the November 2002 elections was like watching the triumph scenes in various sword-and-sandal movies of the 1950’s and 60’s, with the reader almost expecting to see outgoing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle dragged in chains through the streets of Washington. The Stupid Party...
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A Road to Nowhere
“That’s my toll booth,” Tom Ditzler says, laughing when his wife, Jan, mentions the portable toilet that the county has left stationed on an island in the road. “Every car has to drop a quarter in as they pass by.” This November day is bitter, in more ways than one. After almost three years of...
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Singing the Internationale
As the U.S. government prepared to go to war with Iraq, the Bush administration worked simultaneously on two strategies to justify its position. Making its case to the U.N. Security Council, American representatives stressed the need for a multinational front against terrorism and called for a new, more vigorous resolution against Iraq’s “weapons of mass...
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Elk Hunting in High Heels
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Having slept on the hard ground in single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, tramped all day through a snowstorm at 11,000 feet of elevation against a 40-mile-an-hour wind with a 20-pound survival pack and a seven-pound...
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Turkey Goes Islamic
On November 3, Islam triumphed politically in Turkey, rendering the entire U.S. strategy in the Middle East tenuous and causing dismay in Europe. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barred from public office for Islamic agitation, led his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to a landslide victory over his secularist opponents in NATO’s only Muslim nation. Muslims will...
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Plymouth Rocked
Far From Heaven Produced by Clear Blue Sky Productions Written and Directed by Todd Haynes Distributed by Focus Features and USA Films Auto Focus Produced by Propaganda Films Directed by Paul Schrader Screenplay by Michael Gerbosi from Robert Graysmith’s book Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven and Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus...
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A Welcome Anniversary
On July 13, the German weekly Junge Freiheit celebrated its 15th anniversary. This is astonishing, considering the outrages committed against the publication, including the burning of its printing facilities in 1994 and the five-year-long public warning against the paper issued by the provincial government of Nord-rhein-Westfalen for “intimations of a disposition sympathetic to the far...
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Comrade King?
Twenty years have come and gone since Congress passed, and President Reagan signed into law, a bill creating a federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and, in those years, the holiday has become little more than yet another session in the perennial ritual of mass production and consumption that American public festivals generally celebrate. ...
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We Are All Socialists Now
Rockford has long been a Republican city, which is not surprising considering that industry—at least through the 1980’s and, to a lesser extent, even now—has formed the basis of her economy. Today, however, Rockford is becoming increasingly Democratic. I do not necessarily mean that Democrats have begun to dominate city politics. Even though the mayorship...
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Boethius and/or Cassiodorus
American conservatives used to be fond of saying that the United States have entered a decadent period something like that of the Roman Empire. Since American conservatives do not read history, they were never very clear on the period they had in mind, but let us assume they mean the third century, when the empire...
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Trench Warfare
War talk was running high when they threw the loaded packs in back of the Gold Pony and left Flagstaff, headed north across the Navajo Reservation. Television and the newspapers had nothing to say about anything except the towering evil of Hubbub Ihnssain, while National Public Radio had suspended All Things Considered to concentrate on...
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Baghdad or Pyongyang?
Last October, North Korea announced that it has a nuclear-weapons program. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed that North Korea already has a “small number” of nuclear weapons, and a Pentagon official later added that the United States thought Pyongyang had two nuclear bombs. The stunning revelations sent shockwaves around the world, but the White House...
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Cinematic Imagination Under Siege
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Produced and Distributed by Allied Artists Pictures Corporation and Walter Wanger Productions Directed by Don Siegel Screenplay by Jack Finney and Daniel Mainwaring I recently proposed Don Siegel’s 1956 science-fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers as required viewing for directors who have lost their way. I was thinking...
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The Modern Myth of the Black Cowboy
“Nigger Charley” Tyler rode the range of the Owens Valley in the trans-Sierra country of California during the early 1860’s. He was one of the hired hands of the ranching McGee family, who grazed their beeves in the valley and then drove them north to market at the booming mining camp of Aurora. Paiute Indians,...
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World War IV
Be not deluded, just because the United States goes to war with Iraq, that our leaders will not also extend to the entire Middle East the jihad on which President Bush and his court of neoconservative gurus and Zionist Weltpolitikers have embarked us. Well before any public announcement of whether we would actually make war...
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I’m Not a Number
I stepped through the metal detector and walked down the long hallway to the old entrance to the Winnebago County Court-house, a monument to less security-conscious days. In Room 502, I joined about 200 other citizens, waiting to do our civic duty. Signing in, I received my badge: no name, just a number—Juror 11593. I...
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In Praise of the Clan
A new Dark Age is already upon us, and perhaps we might learn a few lessons from the last one. It was a time when the arts of civilization were dimly recalled in fairy tales, when Krum the Bulgar khan gilded a Roman emperor’s skull and used it as a drinking goblet, when the careful...
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Western Swing
The Hollows, Hasty and Happy, were hardly ever sure where they were. At times, they weren’t sure who they were, either, but it never mattered for them because they were very, very rich. Hasty was from Chicago originally, and Happy from Mississippi, where she had earned half a degree from Ole Miss. In the days...
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Of Priests and Peducators
Over the past decade, I have been involved in public debate over the problem of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and that experience has taught me a great deal about the way people come to understand—or, rather, misunderstand—social problems. My point is simple enough. While some priests have undoubtedly been abusive, and a few have...
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Serbia’s Presidential Election
The current president of the soon-to-be-defunct Yugoslav Federation, Vojislav Kostunica, has won the initial stage of Serbia’s presidential elections, the first held since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic almost exactly two years ago. Kostunica garnered 31 percent of the vote, with Miroljub Labus—the “pro-Western, reformist” candidate supported by the “international community”—coming in second at 28...
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Unutterable Visions, Perishable Breath
S1m0ne Produced and Distributed by New Line Cinema Written and directed by Andrew Niccol One Hour Photo Produced by Catch 23 Entertainment, Laughlin Park Pictures, and Madjak Films Written and directed by Mark Romanek Distributed by 20th Century Fox Why do we expect perfection, especially when it comes to romance, that most mercurial department of...
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Prophesying War
As the summer before the first anniversary of the September 11 attack drew to a sweltering end, the Bush administration desperately sought some plausible reason for the war against Iraq that its chieftains so desperately wanted to wage. The appeal to the “weapons of mass destruction” that Saddam Hussein supposedly harbors and which he was...
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The Cohn Zone
I suppose it was appropriate that I first heard the commercial just as we crossed into Winnebago County, returning from a whirlwind weekend trip to Michigan. At first, the words didn’t register; it was only when I heard the voice of Kris Cohnor rather, Kristine O’Rourke Cohn, since it is an election year, after all—in...
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Made in USA
September 11, 2001, has joined the short list of dates—December 7, 1941; November 22, 1963—that every American is supposed to remember what he was doing when he heard the news. I learned of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center as I was sitting on my screened porch, listening to the newsless propaganda...
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The Geology of Time
Atop the final ridge rising to the south rim, Tom Hart stopped the truck and sat behind the wheel, gazing over into the meandering trench stretching from west to east and across it to the line of blue mountains over 40 miles away. It had been his first sight of the canyon when his family...
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The Coming War in Iraq: Dangerous and Unnecessary
In the final years of the Soviet Union, as glasnost broadened the scope of permissible public debate, it was still deemed advisable to precede any expression of controversial views with a little disclaimer. For example, “While I hold no brief for the Islamic dushmans terrorizing the people of Afghanistan, I think we should withdraw from...
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Signs and Wonders
Signs Produced by Blinding Edge and Touchstone Pictures Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan Distributed by Buena Vista Pictures In his third commercial feature, Signs, M. Night Shyamalan seems to be delivering a belated riposte to those who lorded over his Indian ancestors. His movie concerns an invasion by extraterrestrials who have imperial designs...
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American MAGIC and Japanese-American Spies
The competition for victim status is fierce in today’s America. Considering their disproportionate degree of success here in the United States, it is ironic that, for the last several decades, Japanese-Americans have been engaged in that competition. The relocation camps of World War II are now called “concentration camps,” relocation itself is referred to as...
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Hate, Inc.
No sooner had victory in Afghanistan by the forces of Truth, Beauty, and Global Democracy been announced and the still uncaptured and undeceased Osama bin Laden declared by President Bush to be “unimportant” (no doubt the reason the administration put a $25-million reward on his head last fall) than the top-ranking officials of the U.S....
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The Bells of St. Mary’s
P. Introibo ad altare Dei. R. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. From the outside, St. Mary’s Oratory in Rockford resembles scores of other Catholic churches built in the Midwest in the late 19th century, with its red-brick exterior, steep roof, stained-glass windows, and a bell tower that reaches for the sky. When you first...
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Against the Obscurantists
It was a muggy day in late July, and I had gone to the back of the church to rest on crutches and take some pressure off my sprained ankle. Taking advantage of my condition to stand in the way of one of the church’s too-few fans, I noticed a woman feeding candy to her...
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Fire On the Earth
The old man had understood since the summer of ’88 that pigs are afraid of fire. He’d been in the pig business only three years, following his retirement from the Union Pacific Railroad, when the uncured hay in the hayloft combusted spontaneously, the barn exploded like something on a movie set, and burned to the...
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The Butler Didn’t Do It
I would like to try my hand at detective stories, but I’m having some problems coming up with plausible conclusions. Let me give you an example: I’m currently writing a book in which it’s obvious from the first page that the butler did it, and, as the book goes on, this conclusion is steadily reinforced...
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Corporate America in Crisis
The ongoing turmoil in America’s stock markets and a series of corporate scandals have attracted considerable attention from commentators and editorialists all over the developed world, who fear that economic instability in the United States may plunge the world’s top businesses into a vicious cycle of doubt and deferred capital investment. With the world’s stock...
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Fateful Choices
Minority Report Produced by 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks and Cruise-Wagner Productions Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Scott Frank from a short story by Philip K. Dick Distributed by DreamWorks Men in Black II Produced by Amblin Entertainment and Columbia Pictures Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld Screenplay by Robert Gordon VII from Lowell Cunningham’s comic-book series...
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One More Such Victory . . .
June 30, 2002, arrived with little fanfare, an odd ending to 13 years of judicial tyranny here in Rockford. Perhaps that’s because the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit officially ended on a Sunday; more likely, it’s because most Rockfordians didn’t realize the significance of that day (just as they never quite understood what has happened over the...
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Eating With Sinners
And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. —Luke 22:19-20 These familiar...
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Comments Anyway
Edward Paul Abbey 1927-1989 NO COMMENT —Inscription on Edward Abbey’s grave marker, Cabeza Prieta wilderness, Arizona My friend Edward Abbey, dead these 13 years, is finally the subject of a formal biography, published last year by the University of Arizona Press and written by a man who never even met him. Most biographers, of course,...
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Bush’s Middle East Policy: Mendacity, Folly, or Both?
On June 24, President George W. Bush delivered his long-awaited speech on the Middle East. Most of his 15-minute statement was devoted to harsh criticism of the Palestinians, including the assertion that “peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership . . . not compromised by terrorism.” In addition to ditching Yasser Arafat and ending...
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Artless Imitations
The Importance of Being Earnest Produced and distributed by Miramax Films Directed by Oliver Parker Screenplay by Oliver Parker from Oscar Wilde’s play The Sum of All Fears Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Phil Alden Robinson Screenplay by Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne from Tom Clancy’s novel Oscar Wilde believed one’s first...