Old Jules is more than the title of a book by Mari Sandoz it is the name of one of the monsters of American letters: the Simon Legree of the pioneer household who, married four times, drove one wife to the insane asylum and struck the fourth in the face with a handful of four...
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Shadow of Ecstasy
It’s starting again. Almost 20 years ago, the federal government launched what became known as the “war on drugs,” a radical experiment to suppress illegal drugs through harsh penal solutions. Among other things, this meant long prison sentences for the sale or possession of tiny quantities of controlled substances, sentences that are astonishingly severe by...
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Memorandum to President George W. Bush
In the aftermath of September 11, you have done a reasonably good job managing the crisis, symbolizing the nation’s unity, restraining the laptop bombardiers, and preparing a military response that was neither hasty nor disproportionate. Now that two months have passed, you have more time to reflect on the long-term significance of that event and...
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Something Both Brighter and Darker
Doing Hearts in Atlantis Produced by Castle Rock Entertainment Directed by Scott Hicks Screenplay by William Goldman from Stephen King’s novel Released by Warner Brothers I went to see director Scott Hicks’ Hearts in Atlantis not having read the Stephen King novel on which it is based. The little I knew of King’s other fiction...
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Enemies Within and Above
Within a few hours of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September, it had become commonplace for even high-ranking government officials and elected leaders to say publicly that Americans would just have to get used to fewer constitutional liberties and personal freedoms than they have traditionally enjoyed. Of course,...
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From Here to Eternity
“Weapons—guns, knives, brass knuckles, cigarette lighters . . . ” The young man’s voice trails off. If he were not waving his metal-detector wand at us, I might think that he was offering to sell us a gun or two, not asking us if we were carrying any. “No, they’re all in the trunk,” Chronicles‘...
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Redeeming the Time The Days are Evil
The human universe, we are told by optimists on the editorial pages, is contracting into a gray and insipid doughball, pasted over with brightly colored labels advertising the only ethnic rivalries that persist: the struggles between Nissan and Daimler, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Unfortunately, there are people around the world who do not read...
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A Voice in the Darkness
Apocalypse Now Redux Produced by Producer Zoetrope Studios Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Screenplay by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola Re-released by Miramax Films and United Artists I was finishing the original draft of this column early on the morning of September 11 when I received the news. My wife called me from the...
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Slavery’s Inconvenient Facts
I learned firsthand how disturbing facts could be when teaching a U.S. history course at UCLA in 1987. One of my teaching assistants, a politically correct young woman, became terribly upset after listening to my lecture on slavery. “He shouldn’t be saying such things!” she exclaimed to another teaching assistant. When asked by the other...
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Just Another Tequila Sunrise
It may be several years before the results of Census 2000 are available in anyy usable form, but certain trends have already begun to emerge from the raw data. Most significantly, as Chilton Williamson, Jr., and Roger McGrath have pointed out earlier in this issue, the Hispanic population in the United States continues to grow...
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It Ain’t Me?
George W. Bush comes as close as anyone to representing the current American aristocracy. It is not that the Bushes are old family or even old money. The family fortunes are usually traced back to great-grandfather Samuel Bush, a middleweight railroad magnate in Columbus, Ohio. Samuel’s son Prescott raised the family to national prominence by...
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Getting Somewhere
Jackson Hole is burning up. Gerry Spence had to evacuate his ranch ahead of the wildfires, and Dick Cheney could be next. Here above timberline in the Snowy Range of the Medicine Bow Mountains, 400 miles to the southeast, the breeze is cool, the grass is fresh and green, and the ponds of standing water...
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NATO Expansion: Harmful and Dangerous
After President Bush’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Italy in July, it is almost certain that a new round of NATO expansion will be announced at the forthcoming summit in Prague, regardless of Moscow’s misgivings. The alliance will include Slovenia, Slovakia, the three Baltic republics, and possibly Rumania and Bulgaria. The consequences of...
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The School of Savagery
Planet of the Apes Produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox Directed by Tim Burton Screenplay by William Broyles, Jr., from Pierre Boulle’s novel Ghost World Produced by Capitol Films, United Artists, and John Malkovich Directed by Terry Zwigoff Screenplay by Daniel Clowes with Terry Zwigoff Released by MGM-UA The 1968 film Planet of the...
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Abe-Worship
At the end of the recent remake of Planet of the Apes—turn the page now if you still plan to see it—the hero escapes from said planet and its monstrous chimp-tyrant, General Thade. Returning to Earth at night, his spacecraft crashes in, of all places, the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Mall, and he solemnly...
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The Tower of Babble
The first call comes late on a Friday night. “Welcome back,” says Mark Dahlgren, the organist at St. Mary’s Shrine, who is nine months through the one year of probation he received for hugging a tree at Tom and Jan Ditzler’s farm (see “For Keeps! A Christian Defense of Property,” Views, April). “You probably haven’t...
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Friday Breakfast
Robinson Crusoe, as the lit boys would say, is an “iconic” character, whose mastery over nature—and over the savage Friday—expresses the West’s sometimes contemptuous sense of superiority over other cultures. In the 500-year-long iconoclastic age that is just now coming to an end, icons are made only to be broken, and in such films as...
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Sunday Summer
In June, the sun gets up about the time the pollen release ends. Keeping the bedroom window down in the early morning hours is a simple preventive for hay fever that requires only getting up around 2:00 A.M. to drop the window. It’s easier to take a pill the night before and forget about it....
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Obligatory Holocausts
I feel sorry for Afrocentrists—those weird and wonderful folk who claim that civilization, philosophy, and science were discovered in ancient Africa, before being stolen by the white man. True, members of the movement are cranks, with nothing worthwhile to support their positions, but they are no more ridiculous than many other historians who dominate the...
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So What’s a Metaphor?
A.I. Artificial Intelligence Produced by DreamWorks and Warner Bros. Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Ian Watson, based on a story by Brian Aldiss Released by Warner Bros. Sexy Beast Produced by Channel Four Films and Recorded Pictures Company Directed by Jonathan Glazer Screenplay by Louis Mellis and David Scinto Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures...
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Breakin’ Up Is Hard To Do
After the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals officially declared that the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit would come to an end on June 30, 2002 (see Letter From Rockford, June), many Rockfordians simply assumed that a return to local control would solve all of our problems. But even when court-ordered spending has ended, the Rockford school...
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“Wasted Away Again in Margaritaville”
The arrest of the 19-year-old Bush twins for drinking liquor in an Austin restaurant gave the news-starved (and starved brained) press something to cackle over. The girls, clearly in a state of arrested adolescent rebellion, checked their Secret Service agents at the door and, even after the restaurant rejected Jenna’s fake ID, succeeded in getting...
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Resistance
On my knees in the bright pebbly waters of Hermit Creek, I looked up from the cotton shirt I was wringing out to the buff-colored rim of the Kaibab Plateau, over 4,000 vertical feet overhead. “Its a long way down from up there,” I told Tom Sheeley, who had just arrived along the trail from...
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Averting War With China
No foreign-policy issue facing the United States is more important than our longterm relationship with China, the most populous nation and the fourth-largest country on Earth. If we think in terms of uninterrupted statehood, China is the oldest nation-state, accustomed to taking the long view in foreign affairs. More significantly, if its present rate of...
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History Lite
Pearl Harbor Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Films and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Michael Bay Screenplay by Randall Wallace Released by Buena Vista Pictures A Knight’s Tale Produced by Columbia Pictures Corporation and Escape Artists Written and Directed by Brian Helgeland Released by Columbia and Sony Pictures Most films have a signature moment, a scene that...
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Flies Trapped in Honey
Nineteen ninety-one was the year of revolutions, the greatest, perhaps, since 1848. Many who observed the events from safe seats on this side of the Atlantic must have recalled Churchill’s great Fulton speech, in which he described the “Iron Curtain” that had “descended across the continent,” cutting off “all the capitals of the ancient states...
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Dust Thou Art
Sheep Mountain like a fallen tombstone lay on the horizon under a sky thickening with gray cloud ribbons and white lenticulars. It was too cold for snow yet, and rain had not fallen for weeks in the mountains. The wind raised small storms of dust on the pale surface of the clay road and whirled...
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Resurrecting the Third Man
The Third Man Produced by Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick Directed by Carol Reed Screenplay by Graham Greene Released by London Films Re-released by Rialto Pictures Forget the Dark Side. Darth Sidious? No more convincing than Bela Lugosi flitting about an Abbott and Costello travesty. For the real thing, you’ll have to visit your...
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Being Bill O’Reilly
Some celebrities seem born with a natural star power that radiates from them like an angelic halo. Alcibiades had this kind of “charisma” that made him adored even by people who disliked him. To be a celebrity, as Willy Loman would say, it is not enough to be liked: You must be well liked. Musicians...
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Getting Out of Dodge
The Founding Fathers intended the “Enumeration” (Article I, Section 2) not only as a means of assuring representational equality among the states but as a graph displaying the growth of the American nation in size and prosperity. For almost 200 years, the decennial census could plausibly be accepted as doing that. The last three censuses...
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Fearful Symmetry
The Tailor of Panama Produced by John le Carré, John Boorman, and Kevan Barker with Columbia Pictures Directed by John Boorman Screenplay by John le Carré, John Boorman, and Andrew Davies Released by Columbia Pictures One of my favorite films is Carol Reed’s 1960 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana, which tells...
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The New Meaning of “Racism”
The tedium that descended upon the nation’s politics last winter when Bush II ascended the presidential throne was relieved briefly in the waning days of the Clinton era by the bitter breezes that wafted around some of the new President’s Cabinet appointments. After repeatedly muttering his meaningless campaign slogan, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,”...
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Free at Last
The Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit is finally over—or at least it will be, on Sunday, June 30, 2002. Yesterday—Wednesday, April 18—the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit overruled federal Magistrate P. Michael Mahoney and granted the school district “unitary status” (the legal term for being, in the court’s words, “sufficiently desegregated to require...
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Two Rooms With a View
It has been the usual 56-hour day spent in airports under siege from CNN and microwave-burned pizza, cramped into buses, taxis, and the midget seats of American Airlines steerage with two varieties of undrinkable wine-product to wash down the “looks-like-chicken” alternative to the inevitable “pasta” they serve on flights to Italy, but now we are...
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Now Hear This!!!
You could say it isn’t easy being a liberal in the most conservative state in the Union if it weren’t for the fact that in the most conservative state in the Union, the liberals occupy all the best bully pulpits. This means that, in Wyoming as in the rest of the 5O states, Democratic liberalism...
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Robert Hanssen and the New Meaning of Treason
A year ago, Robert Philip Hanssen apparently felt the need to explain to the Russians his motives for supplying them with thousands of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents over the preceding decade and a half. The veteran FBI agent wrote them a letter, confessing that he is neither insanely brave, nor merely insane, but “insanely loyal”...
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Dinner Is Served
Hannibal Produced and Distributed by Dino De Laurentiis and MGM Studios Directed by Ridley Scott Screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian from the novel by Thomas Harris Last Resort Produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation Directed by Paul Pavlikovsky Screenplay by Rowan Joffe and Paul Pavlikovsky Released by The Shooting Gallery The original newspaper...
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The Proletarian Weapon
No sooner had George W. Bush entered the White House and its previous occupants padded off to Harlem—with as much public swag as they could pack into the helicopters—than the news media suddenly began to discover “layoffs,” “downturns,” and a looming economic crisis that threatened to strip the flesh from the eight fat years that...
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Not in Your Back Yard
“Why is the traffic stopped?” “Is that a cop car?” “Yeah, there must’ve been an accident.” “No, he’s directing traffic. They’re all waiting to get in the parking lot! The gym’s going to be packed!” “He’s not letting anyone else in,” Mary says, deftly turning the minivan around in the freezing rain. She pulls off...
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The Conservative War on Property
Perhaps it is a delusion, like snow blindness, caused by the tons of dirty snow shoved into my driveway by the city plows and the sun’s annual disappearing act that drives even non-Scandinavians into melancholy and occasional fits of berserking frenzy, but I am beginning to be persuaded by our Chicago friend Tom Roeser that...
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Sharon’s Victory and U.S. Policy in the Middle East
With the landslide victory of Ariel Sharon in the Israel general election on February 6, it is obvious that America needs to reevaluate its policy in the Middle East. A revised policy should be based on three key premises. First, Israel is a small foreign country. It is a friendly and democratic country, but by...
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Moments, Redeeming and Otherwise
Snatch Produced by Columbia Pictures Directed and Written by Guy Ritchie Released by Sony Pictures Shadow of the Vampire Produced by Saturn Films Directed by E. Elias Merhige Screenplay by Steven Katz Released by Lion Gate Films Thirteen Days Produced by Kevin Costner and Beacon Communications Directed by Roger Donaldson Screenplay by Ernest R. May...
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A Month in the Life of the Industrial Midwest
News Item: “Motorola Inc. will close its only U.S. cellular-phone manufacturing operation, putting 2,S00 of 5,000 people out of work to ease sagging profits amid increased global competition. Employees who will remain at the 1.3 million square-foot plant that opened in 1996 will focus on research, marketing and other activities for the cellular market…” (“Motorola...
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The Conspiracy of Conspiracies
The scene is Rome, about A.D. 300. The Augustus Maximian has returned to the ancient capital to oversee the construction of the lavish baths that will bear the name of the senior Augustus, Diocletian. Although Maximian is a rough customer from the Balkans and speaks a tough-guy Latin that sounds more like Rumanian than the...
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Will President Bush Resist the Global Interventionists?
In the second presidential debate last October, George W. Bush warned Vice President Gore that it is not America’s role to patrol the planet and to arrange other peoples’ lives in its own image. The United States must be proud and confident of our values, he said, “but humble in how we treat nations that...
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Odysseys
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Produced by Buena Vista Pictures and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Joel Coen Screenplay by Ethan Coen with help from Homer Released by Buena Vista Pictures All the Pretty Horses Produced by Columbia Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Billy Bob Thornton Screenplay by Ted Tally from a novel by Cormac...
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I’ve Got a Secret
Back in November and December, while Republicans across the country were writing letters, calling in to talk radio, and even taking to the streets to protest Al Gore’s attempt to steal the election in Florida, their fellow party members in Rockford remained strangely silent. They must have found it disquieting when the Bush campaign kept...
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Free Greeks, Servile Americans
Conservatives are fond of saying that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and in their appeals to the national conscience, they invoke the sacred language of republican tradition, citing scriptures from Aristotle and Cicero, from Edmund Burke and George Washington: the ride of law, a virtuous citizenry, and ordered liberty. Like most...
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Democracy and the Art of Handloading
Swish . . . creak—chunk. Swish . . . creak—chunk. At the top of the press stroke the lubricated brass shell rises into the top of the press frame where it is engaged by the sizing die, screwed down and secured by the locking nut. On the downstroke it catches momentarily in the die before...
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A Balkans Policy for the New Administration
American policies in the Balkans over the past decade have come to embody all that is wrong with the fundamental assumptions of the decisionmakers in Washington. A thorough revision of those policies would be an important step toward a more pragmatic American strategy in world affairs based on the national interest. This is no longer...