Most of the 50 states having been designed as political units rather than the geographical ones John Wesley Powell vainly urged Congress to consider in the case of the Western territories, there’s no particular reason why southeastern Wyoming should be much more than the place where Nebraska, Colorado, and the Cowboy State fit together. And...
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Return of the Alien
“The whole world, without a native home Is nothing but a prison of larger room.” —Abraham Cowley His father used to say that the country was good; it was only the people that made it intolerable. Now his father’s son was headed up to that north country, where he had not...
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Waiting Nights, Beastly Days
The high Colorado Rockies are like a type of beautiful woman, eye-catching without being especially interesting. Spectacularly well-endowed, they are also obvious, unsubtle, lacking in individuality and complexity, bland in their stunning perfection, with a hint of vulgarity. Or perhaps it’s the sort of people who are drawn in glittering swarms to these towering fourteeners,...
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John-John Is My Co-Pilot
Aside from the non-resignation and non-ruin of President Clinton and the non-campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the biggest non-event of 1999 was undoubtedly the non-survival last summer of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who, true to the traditions of his family, managed to seize international headlines when his own recklessness and incompetence led to disaster—this...
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None More Terrible Than Man
The past half-millennium that began with the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent discovery of the New World has gone by so many titles that its name might be legion: It has been the age of “progress” and “discovery,” a period of “enlightenment,” the era of “democracy.” However, all these glorious nicknames that stud the...
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Backtracking for Home
I was gone from Wyoming less than two years, not so long as to forget, just enough for the shock of recognition to be poignant. The cold northern skies, the tilted mesas tinged green with sagebrush and purple with lupin, and how they smell after rain; the dark, distant mountains whose mottling snows above timberline...
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What a Swell Party This Is
The final presidential election of the millennium is still more than a year away, but by last summer rumblings of discontent with the plastic dashboard figurines who are the leading candidates of the two major plastic dashboard political parties were already audible. The rumblings first attracted national notice when Pat Buchanan, in the course of...
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Grow Old Along With Me
“I grow old learning many things,” said Simonides, a poet X well known for his wisdom and for his longevity: He lived to be almost 90. Although, as my old teacher Douglas Young pointed out, Simonides’ statement might be interpreted to mean “too much education makes one prematurely old,” the point is clear enough and...
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Every Man for Himself
El Paso del Norte . . . the Jornada del Muerto . . . Tiguex . . . Santa Fe: The trip that for Don Juan de Oñate was a weeks-long ordeal up the Rio Grande on the Camino Real in 1598 for me is an hour-and-20-minute flight, including 20 minutes on the ground at...
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Appealing to Prurient Interests
In 1857, the House of Lords engaged in a heated debate over a bill sponsored by an organization calling itself by the frank, but nonetheless quaint, name of the “Society for the Suppression of Vice.” The intent of the bill was to control, through legal penalties, the production and sale of “obscene publications,” and despite...
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Remember the Maine
Henry Luce coined the phrase “The American Century” as an expression of the militant economic globalism that has characterized American policy from the days of William McKinley. Luce, the publisher of Time and Fortune, was the child of missionaries in China—a product, in other words, of American religious and cultural globalism. It is no small...
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I Was a Teenage Werewolf
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school . . . ,” Paul Simon mused in a popular song some years ago. Simon, of course, was in high school long before multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, Outcome-Based Education, bilingual education. Heather Has 17 Mommies, Holocaust Studies, and assorted therapeutic group gropes and mass...
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Land Without Justice
Every month, some corner of the United States becomes the scene of a brutal and bizarre murder: in Jasper, Texas, where rednecks dragged a man to death behind their truck; in Las Vegas, where a high-school student assaulted and killed a little girl as his friend and fellow student looked on without lifting a finger...
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Home and Abroad
The stock market is over 10,000, Michael Kinsley exhorted Pat Buchanan recently, and so America can do as it likes internationally in the exercise of the U.S. mega-military machine that Madeleine Albright has been slavering, throughout her Foggy Bottom years, to activate. America, according to journalistic convention, is fat, happy, and content, having arrived finally...
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The Only Game in Town
My father often told me the story of how he, as a small boy, had sat on the knee of Wyatt Earp. The former marshal] of Dodge and Tombstone, as an old man, came to Chicago to give a lecture. He had heard of my Great-Uncle Garret’s heroism in rescuing a lady from an armed...
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Politics Without a Right
It took only a few days after the rout of the Republicans in their battle to drive Bill Clinton from office for the leaders of the Beltway Right to decide that the war was over and the only thing left to do was announce surrender. Four days after the Senate “acquitted” the President of the...
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Defending the Family From Its Defenders
The phrase “family values,” as it is used by politicians, marks one of the official borders between left and right in the United States. The fact is infuriating to Republican moderates who want to turn their party in the direction of opportunity and choice, which—translated into moral terms—mean adultery, divorce, and infanticide, the apparent credo...
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The View From Out Here
There is a story about the man who surprised another man in bed with his wife. “What did you do about it?” his friend demanded. “Hell,” replied the fellow in disgust, “the sonofabitch lied his way out of it!” My inclination, on this 15th day of February 1999, is to take the anecdote as a...
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The Un-Magnificent Obsession
Almost precisely a year after the name of Monica Lewinsky began to displace those of Princess Diana and Jackie Onassis from the headlines of supermarket tabloids, the one-time object of Miss Lewinsky’s more tender affections emerged triumphant over his foes in what are still laughingly called the “conservative movement” and the “Republican Party.” The conservative...
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The Great American Purge
“States’ rights? You can’t be serious! What do you want to do—restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether a David Corn leftist at the Nation,...
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Citizen Ed
It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary terms of decades, centuries, and millennia; what is certain is, the dead don’t. Edward Abbey had been deceased just two months short of ten years and I was defunct about four months, entombed that long in the overpopulated, electronicized, ideologized megasprawl...
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Gleichschaltung
When a new religion displaces an old one, the gods of the old faith become the demons of the new. So it is with the demigods and heroes as well, and as new cultures, races, and nations begin to blossom where once the fruits of European and American civilization flourished, it is not surprising to...
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Diary of a Peripheral Male
Midatlantic It has been a long day for this straight European male. O’Hare Airport is a decompression chamber between Middle America and the rest of the world: rude United clerks who act as if they own the airline; the gauntlet of guards at the X-ray machines, none of whom is able to speak English; and...
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Wildness in Waiting
Dick McIlhenny awoke with a cold foot in the blackness that could be an hour after he fell asleep or ten minutes before the alarm clock went off. He attended to the foot inside the sleeping bag and checked the luminous dial on the clock beside his pillow. The clock said 30 minutes past one....
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East Is East and West Is Wuss
If a civilized man, as it is sometimes said, can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time, post-civilized man goes one step farther and sees nothing wrong with maintaining contradictory opinions on any subject that comes up: We say simultaneously that the Russians are animalistic drunkards with no aptitude for the free-market...
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Neoenvironmentalism
The environmentalist movement, as usual, is one theoretical jump ahead of the practical results produced by its previous level of ideological development-results it now deplores and blames on the enemy. After arson destroyed three buildings and damaged four ski lifts on Vail Mountain in Colorado last October, Earth Liberation Front took the credit for destroying...
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Turn to the Dark Side
As members of the House of Representatives were moving toward impeachment hearings that should make Bill Clinton—whatever the outcome—one of the most infamous politicians in American history, Republicans in both houses of Congress decided to give the President everything he was asking for—more federally funded teachers to corrupt the children and $18 billion of boodle...
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Twenty Years and Counting
I have lived now in the West 20 years, two years past the age of liability for military service (if there were a Western States of America, and if they had a draft) and one year short of my political majority and the suffrage. Although you can have spent half a century living in a...
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One World, One Leader, One god
The unity of Christendom and the restoration of the American republic are themes that have intertwined their way through the numbers of this magazine, like the twin strands of the DNA double helix. The message does not always meet with approval. Recently, a man of wealth and influence told us that he was no longer...
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Writing the West
The Northwest strikes me as a better place than the Southwest to live in—fewer people, better hunting, plenty of invigorating Arctic air and the cold dry snow—but the Southwest, probably, offers greater advantages for the Western writer. The presence of the Spanish and Mexicans, the more developed Indian populations, and the clashes between these and...
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Paleo-Malthusianism
“Parson,” wrote the Tory radical William Cobbett in an open letter to Thomas Malthus in 1819, “1 have, during my life, detested many men; but never any one so much as you.” Cobbett’s hatred of Malthus, the founder of modern population science, is comparable to the dislike that most conservatives feel toward him today, though...
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Jefferson or Mussolini?
The right side of the World Wide Web has been aquiver with reports on Executive Order 13083, otherwise known as Bill Clinton’s attempted coup d’etat. How seriously should we take the Clinton plot to abolish the last vestiges of states’ rights? Setting aside the equivocations and dissimulations that mark all of Mr. Clinton’s official utterances,...
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Something in Colorado
“Hear that,” Dick McIlhenny said. He removed the headset and handed it to me, while holding the Bionic Ear cupped toward the woods. “I hear it.” “What does it sound like to you?” “Footfalls, coming this way. Look at that horse.” The gelding stood at attention behind the trailer, his body rigid and his ears...
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Inside History’s Dustbin
Ever since I committed the blunder, nearly 30 years ago, of signing up with the “conservative movement” during my first year in graduate school, a certain pattern of behavior has enforced itself on my decreasingly callow mind. The pattern, as a colleague of mine once remarked to me, is that there seems to be no...
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Mob Rules
William Jefferson Clinton may some day be hailed as the second father of his country, or rather as the abusive stepfather. His seemingly deliberate efforts to disgrace his administration and disgust the people have convinced a significant number of clear-headed citizens of the truth of Acton’s maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Perhaps as much...
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It Takes a Village
One of the most popular fads in public education is the reintroduction of school uniforms. In some American burgs, the proposal is greeted with general approval. In many, however, school boards, administrators, parents, and pupils are put through the usual paces of reform, going from unfounded optimism through a stage of unreasoning resistance, and finally...
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The Horror!
At four-thirty in the afternoon Papa’s on North Mesa Street in El Paso was preparing to open for business. Although the place looks like a student hangout and is located near the university, the clientele is largely well-to-do professional men who can easily afford the nine, twelve, and twenty-dollar cigars displayed in a wide tall...
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After the Cold War
(This column was originally delivered as the keynote speech at a Chronicles’ conference, “Overcoming the Schism: European Divisions and U.S. Policy,” held in Chicago on May 8.) You would never guess that the Cold War is over. Almost all commentators on foreign policy start off their speeches or articles by performing an obligatory knee bend...
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How Thomas Rent the Seamless Garment
“Nor will this Earth serve him; he sinkes the deepe where harmless fish monastique silence keepe, who (were death dead) by roes of living sand might spunge that element and make it land.” —John Donne, “Elegie on Mistris Bulstrode” John Donne reminds us of a natural fact that most of us would rather forget: the...
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Selling the Golden Cord
Free trade, according to the usual pundits, is an issue that divides the right. The usual pundits are, as usual, wrong. Free trade, which has never been more than an undocumented alien on the right, is an ideal that does unite much of the left. It is a point on which socialism converges with both...
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The Wind Listeth
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Speaking from experience, rather than poetic frenzy, I say both. The spring winds blowing white at home in Wyoming blow red down here in New Mexico, a howling gale that seems to be returning to the Dustbowl the errant Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas...
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Whose Modernity?
When Pat Buchanan’s new book, The Great Betrayal, appeared in April, the hysteria that greeted it was entirely predictable. Not only does Mr, Buchanan challenge the free trade orthodoxy that is dominant among economists and policymakers in both political parties, but he also makes clear that the economic nationalism he champions is only a part...
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Prophesying War
Back in 1994, the Atlantic Monthly published a notable article by Robert Kaplan entitled “The Coming Anarchy.” The article dealt with what Kaplan took to be global indications of impending chaos as resources dwindle, infrastructures decay, weapons are peddled, gangs and armed bands replace states, and ethnic, racial, and tribal loyalties prevail over less ferocious...
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Dial M for Murdoch
Publishers and writers are inveterate enemies. It is a combat decreed by nature, like the eternal war between dogs and cats, oil and vinegar, teenage girls and their mothers. Any real writer, no matter how mercenary or corrupt, cares something for the craft that publishers regard as at best a pretext for marketing (much as...
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What Do Environmentalists Want?
In a world filled with perplexity, inscrutability, and conundrum, two major mysteries at least are not unfathomable. What do women want? The answer has had human beings stumped from the time of the origin of species, yet the answer is perfectly plain: they don’t know. The question of what environmentalists want is of more recent...
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Abraham the Unready
(This column is based in part on an address delivered at a “Colloquium on Lincoln, Reagan, and National Greatness” sponsored by the Claremont Institute in Washington, D.C., on February 12, 1998.) L’affaire Lewinsky was the obsession of the headlines and conversations of Washington throughout February, obscuring even the jolliness promised by another airborne stomping of...
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The Heart’s Geography
I took out the atlas the other day to figure out the routes of the voyagers retraced by Jean Raspail on his first trip to the United States. In the event, it proved impossible to plot a French expedition on a modern map of the United States. Maps are political abstractions. They encourage us to...
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Christmas in July
The crickets which stopped singing at Thanksgiving have come inside at last, along with the spiders and an occasional skink. The leaves dropped from the pecan trees around the beginning of December, and crews are at work in the orchards beside the Rio Grande gathering the nuts. The bermuda grass is brown in the backyard,...
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The Other Face of Multiculturalism
“The values of the weak prevail,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership.” This brief and rather cryptic remark contains virtually all we need to know about why contemporary movements like multiculturalism, feminism, homosexualism, and anti-white racism are such powerful trends in modern American and other Western societies....
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Restless Natives
Everyone over the age of thirty has seen the movie Casablanca several times. It is a classic love story, in which beautiful women turn out to count for less than politics and killing Germans takes precedence over both love and marriage. In actuality, Casablanca has very little to do with love: the love affair, told...