Vague and acrid as the ocherous smoke drifting in scarves and shoals from fires burning across the West, the specter of Range Reform pervaded the Rocky Mountain states last summer, the driest on record since 1932. In drought years ranchers must move their cattle rapidly off one pasture and onto the next in order to...
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Myths to Kill For
“I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list,” twitters the Lord High Executioner in a famous line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and indeed these days who doesn’t have one? Abortion protester Paul Hill seems to have had a little list of his own, and early in the morning on July 28 of...
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A Philanthropic Journalist
If representative government requires a free press, as the founders of this Republic believed, then it is small wonder that the citizens of the United States no longer enjoy the benefit of free elections. For elections to be free, there must be a choice from among well-defined positions and characters: John Quincy Adams or Andrew...
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Work Suspended
If compensation is possible for a summer so brief that the growing season is limited to 55 days at best, it is the most beautiful Indian summer on earth climaxed by elk season in the last two weeks of October. While friends of mine, here and elsewhere, seem politely convinced that writing is merely a...
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The Abortion Gambit
Trying to be the chief intellectual in the Republican Party is probably a little like trying to be an admiral in the Swiss navy, but in the last year or so, that is more or less what Bill Kristol has become. The son of neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, young Bill made his bones by billing...
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On Liberal Education
My definition of liberal education as the education of liberals no longer sounds provocative. Liberalism, having failed and failed disastrously in all its political experiments from church disestablishment to women’s suffrage to food stamps, still reigns triumphant, with hardly a rival, in the empty corridors of the Western mind. How failed? The church is disestablished,...
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View From a Campfire
“Been up the Hams Fork yet?” “I took a drive there last weekend.” “How far did you get?” “Almost to the guard station. There’s a hellacious mudhole just south of it.” “How about Fontenelle?” “I ain’t tried it myself, but they say it’s dry to the Forest boundary. There’s two foot of snow yet past...
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De-Americanization
Although the summer of 1994 produced no entertainments to rival the fun of last year’s Jurassic Park, let alone the previous summer’s Los Angeles riots, it did yield up the brief but amusing manhunt for O.J. Simpson and the edifying spectacle of the wanted killer of his ex-wife and her pretty young companion cruising up...
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Equality or Privilege
“Everything in American politics always comes down to the race question,” says one of our collaborators. School choice plans, for example, are either condemned for enabling the white middle classes to liberate their children from the hell of public schools or praised for giving black families the prospect of sending their children to the suburbs....
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Give Me Wilderness, Or Give Me . . .
Better than anyone before or since, Frederick Jackson Turner explained the peculiarly American fascination with wilderness that continues to perplex and, occasionally, to annoy European observers. In his instantly famous paper delivered before the American Historical Association’s annual meeting 101 years ago. Professor Turner declared, “American social development has been continually beginning over and over...
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Secessionist Fantasies
Throughout the first half of the present year, “secession” became the new watchword for a growing number of people on the American right. Economist Walter Williams has written at least two newspaper columns openly advocating secession. Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute describes secession as “the cutting-edge issue that defines today’s anti-statism,” and...
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In Praise of Sex and Violence
All the best authorities agree: there is too much sex and violence in America. Social critics say that pop culture is reinforcing a cult of violence, which they trace back to the savage days of the American frontier; preachers launch jeremiads at the explicit eroticism of MTV, and Planned Parenthood pretends to have the jumps...
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The Violent West
The matador who received top billing was not, as advertised, the most famous bullfighter in Spain but rather (we guessed) his son, or perhaps his nephew or second cousin; also, the promised dinner with this matador, to have been arranged by a (self-identified) associate of the Plaza Monumental in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the evening before...
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Mother Goose vs. Hell
To read the newspapers, one would think there was a health care debate going on in the United States. But the word “debate” implies two parties, and the spectrum of the current discussions is limited to the deeper shades of pink, since neither the white flag of reaction nor the black flag of anarchy is...
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Groundhog Days, Javelina Nights
How a people as addicted to novelty as the modern American public can remain indifferent to an experience restricted to the last three or four of the thousands of human generations, drawing their airplane window shades to watch a movie or study an organizational chart, is—or ought to be—a subject of major interest to the...
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The New Meaning of Conservatism
One of the most amazing and alarming features of the managerial system in the United States is its capacity to alter the meaning of things without changing their external appearance. This property is essentially what the Old Right political analyst Garet Garrett observed in his insight about “revolution within the form,” a concept he drew...
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Southern Men, American Persons
“Sweet home Alabama / Where the skies are so blue.” It has been many years since anyone made money from patriotic songs dedicated to Illinois or New Jersey. Chicago and New York have their anthems of course, to say nothing of San Francisco, but no one is going to get into a fight over “the...
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29,000 Leaseholders
The war on the West is not going badly—from a Westerner’s point of view. As of mid-February, salient victories included the successful filibuster, by Western senators, of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s range reform bill; the routing of the obnoxious Representative Mike Synar (Democrat-OK), the congressional instigator of “reform”; the firing of the arrogant Jim Baca...
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Forty Years After
Americans have grown fond of celebrating anniversaries of one kind or another. I first noticed this new habit during the national thrombosis over the Statue of Liberty back in 1986, but more recently the habit has swollen into something like an epidemic. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we have endured the anniversaries of...
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Turn Out the Lights
It must have been Sigmund Freud who observed that whenever a new technology appears it is applied almost immediately to some sexual purpose. The dirty old man of Vienna was thinking of such inventions as the photograph and the moving picture, which gave a new impetus to the production and consumption of pornography, but he...
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Present for the Duration
Kemmerer, Wyoming: Population 3,500, more or less; throw in another thousand or so for Frontier and Diamondville, the three together making Greater Kemmerer. Five churches, two Mormon stake houses. The Lincoln County Courthouse and the Lincoln County Law Enforcement Facility (late 20th century term meaning Sheriff’s Office). Five motels, two supermarkets and an ALCO store,...
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Beam Us Out
On a morning in April 1990, practitioners of the journalistic craft received in their mail a communication from one Jack Lichtenstein, at that time the director of public affairs for the National Endowment for the Arts, an agency then embroiled in a desperate onslaught by an army of Philistines, voters, and taxpayers who imagined that...
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Don’t Tread on Us
In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...
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War on the West
Maybe because the Sage Brush Rebellion coincided with the energy boom of the late 70’s and early 80’s when Western industrialists and developers were firmly in the saddle, its rhetoric rarely, if ever, achieved the intensity that Rocky Mountain politicians and other public spokesmen have used in denouncing the Clinton administration’s efforts to redesign the...
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Global Retch
Nearly four years after George Bush, on the eve of the Persian Gulf War, first popularized the expression “New World Order,” is there anyone in the United States who does not greet that phrase with either a grin of sarcasm or a growl of hatred? The answer, in a nutshell, is yes. The expression may...
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Men Unlimited
The comic, as Flannery O’Connor said, is the reverse side of the terrible. I suppose the spectacle of 50 to 100 men from 20 to 70 years of age disguised in Wild Man and Coyote masks as they prance in a forest glade, beat drums, eat buffalo chili, and exorcise the demon spirits of their...
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A Banner With a Strange Device
As the House of Representatives slithered toward its vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement last November, the regiments of lobbyists who were peddling the pact set up their tents in what the New York Times described as “a stately conference room on the first floor of the Capitol, barely an elevator ride away...
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The Ruined Tenement
“Every child should be taught to respect the sanctity of his neighbor’s house, garden, fields, and all that is his.” When James Fenimore Cooper insisted upon the inviolability of property, his conviction was as much the fruit of personal experience as it was the expression of his old-fashioned reverence for law and order. Upon returning...
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Out Where the West Began
Flying home from the East, I usually honor crossing the Mississippi as the occasion for my first double dry martini, which means that passing the Hundredth Meridian, equidistant between the towns of Kearney and North Platte, Nebraska, is generally the cause for celebrating with the second. For at least a century and a half, the...
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The New Populism
In the 12 months since Bill Clinton stumbled into the White House, the most notable political events in the country have consisted neither of his own successes and failures nor of the triumphs and achievements of what purports to be the administration’s loyal opposition in the Republican Party. Mr. Clinton’s performance in his first year...
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Middle American Gothic
The bad weather of 1993 eliminated my usual fishing trips to northern Wisconsin, but the other day in Madison, where I go to use the library and relive the 60’s, I saw a sign for an instant oil change and lube: “Faster than an Illinois tourist.” Most people in Wisconsin are happy for the dollars...
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Italian Lessons
“Una Gaffe su Ciampi all’apertura del G-7“ ran the headline in Corriere della Sera. Italy’s pro-Clinton “newspaper of record” went on to describe how the American President greeted Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the Italian prime minister, when they met at the Tokyo economic summit: “Good morning President Skahlfahroh,” apparently confusing the prime minister (the president of...
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People of a Different Stripe
Precisely when it first occurred to Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun to lay her traps for the United Daughters of the Confederacy and its iniquitous insignia containing the Confederate “Stars and Bars” we are not given to know, but certainly it was well before the senator, invariably described in the press as the “Senate’s first black...
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Puppets and Their Masters
A naked boy runs down a crowded Italian street, chased by an angry old man. Grabbing the boy by the back of the neck, the old man shouts: “Just wait till I get you back home.” The crowd quickly takes sides against the old man, and when the carabinieri arrive, they take him off to...
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Jesting With Pilate
Americans pretend to be shocked whenever one of their national celebrities gets caught out in a lie. Is it really so surprising that Michael Jordan should attempt to conceal his gambling or that Bill Clinton should hide his cochonnerie? My European friends—some of them highly moral and religious men—never tire of ridiculing us for our...
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Stupid and Proud
When the editors of the New Republic told writer Stephen Rodrick to get his cute little fanny down to Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel and cover the first conference of Pat Buchanan’s American Cause Foundation last May, Mr. Rodrick must have felt something like a character in Sartre’s “No Exit.” The prospect of idling for an...
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Ghosts in the Graveyard
The bus from Budapest to Belgrade is full, and I am lucky to get a seat. We are a cosmopolitan lot. In addition to the two Americans (I am traveling with Bill Mills, or “Brat [brother] Bill” as he will come to be known), there are two Norwegian businessmen sitting across the aisle reading the...
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Crossing the Line
On April 29, 1993, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs held a confirmation hearing for Roberta Achtenberg, President Clinton’s nominee for the position of Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Like most nominees, Miss Achtenberg brought along members of her family to lend her support...
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Mind Your Own Business
The murder of abortionist David Gunn in March of this year ought to sharpen the focus of the national debate on abortion, although partisans on both sides may be slow in getting the point. The New York Times, in a ponderous exercise of soft journalism, portrayed the event as a study in character contrasts. Michael...
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A Perpetual Censor
When Supreme Court Justice Byron White announced his retirement from public life in March of this year, a shudder rippled down the spines of Washington conservatives. Previously, when one or another of the Court’s Nameless Nine had declared his intention to quit the pleasures of wrecking the laws and customs of local communities he had...
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Middle American Helots
Rodney King is back, and his trial is center stage in the freak show of American television. The fact that these legal burlesques are called “the Rodney King trial” is worth pondering, because, the truth is, Rodney King now has immunity from prosecution for his reckless driving, for his violent attack on the officers who...
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A Story of the Days to Come
Early in December of last year, while President-elect Clinton was trying to come up with a Cabinet that would “look more like America,” the U.S. Census Bureau published a report that told us what America really looks like and what it will probably look like 60 years from now. Presumably, Mr. Clinton will have departed...
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This Land for Hire
“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens); the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.” —George Washington The day after Bill Clinton’s election, the new leader...
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Gangbusters
In The Killer Angels, Michael Saara’s novel about the battle of Gettysburg, there is a character named Colonel Arthur Fremantle, a British military observer attached to the Confederate forces. In part a comic figure, Fremantle is perpetually perplexed by Americans in general and Southerners in particular, and he painfully worries himself and others with his...
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Trollopes in the Stacks
Nineteen ninety-two, if not quite an annus mirabilis, was a year “crowded with incident,” as Lady Bracknell would say. The repercussions of Gorbachev’s fall, the hot war in Bosnia that took the self-congratulatory edge out of the end of the Cold War, and the rise to power of Flem Snopes’ grandson illuminated American television sets...
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Paths of Glory
As I write this column (in late January), the United States has deployed 30,000 troops in Somalia, has just launched new bombing strikes against Iraq, has announced a naval blockade of Haiti, and is debating whether it should send combat forces into the Balkans. By the time you read this column (in late March), there...
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Rag and Bone Shops of the Mind
I dislike museums, even good ones, and I positively detest the culture warehouses of Paris, London, and New York—the so-called encyclopedic museums, in which I have spent some of the least edifying moments of adult life. I have waited in line, more than once, to get into the Uffizi. I manage to avoid the swarms...
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A League of Our Own
Nineteen ninety-two was an opportunity for Americans to reflect on both their past and their future. In less than a month, we celebrated the birthday of Columbus and the transfer of power from the New Deal to the Big Chill, from the civics-class pieties of George Bush to the Penthouse improprieties of Bill Clinton. I...
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The Survival Issue
Long ago in March 1989, in the first column I wrote for this space, I noted that President George Bush shared with only one other American chief executive (namely, Martin Van Buren) the distinction of having been elected to the White House from the office of the Vice-President. I also commented that “the lackluster record...
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Uncle Sam’s Child
The recent election season opened with hopes high for an intelligent debate of family issues. The 1991 Final Report of the National Commission on Children (on which I served) seemed to have broken the moral and political logjams that had long prevented this dialogue. The commissioners had decided, after extensive argument, to avoid the mistake...