In 2008, Sheriff Paul Babeu became the first Republican elected to that office in the 136-year history of Pinal County, Arizona. At age 42, he is a 20-year veteran of the Army National Guard, retiring with the rank of major, having served in Iraq and as commander in the Yuma Sector of the U.S.-Mexican border. ...
On Monday, September 12, my friend and mentor died at the age of 82 from lung cancer after a decade of up-and-down health problems borne without complaint—a man whom I have loved more than any other man but my own father, starting from the time of our first meeting after I matriculated at Wabash College...
Very long ago, when I was at boarding school in England in the 1960’s, we had a Sunday-morning ritual following chapel. Mr. Gervis, our remote and forbidding headmaster, assembled everyone in the big hall and read to us from an improving book. Over the years, I can remember generous helpings of everything from The Pilgrim’s...
I have been spending my spring sabbatical in China. As I am a sinologist, specializing in traditional Chinese poetry, there is nothing surprising in that, except that I have not been here since 1981, when I led a tour group for less than three weeks. Most of my work has been that of the classicist,...
February 3, 1843 My Dearest Sabrina, Having momentarily sated what you once aptly termed my “Herculean appetite for lethargy,” I rouse myself dutifully to pen this somewhat belated missive, all too aware that you, my beloved sister, must be starved for news of your Charleston friends. Everyone inquires about you, of course, & I invariably...
The subway train clanked and screeched out of the darkness at last into stretched autumnal sunshine. I rattled northward in an emptying carriage gazing down on nameless, nondescript streets, and sometimes straight into ex-offices within which the same endeavors had probably been carried on from when the building had been erected in the early 20th...
The revisionist historians are at it again, this time taking on the Alamo—a perfect target because of its position in the hearts of those horrible Texans. Many historians are merely would-be journalists who choose as their playground past eras because, by the time honest historians can expose the new misconceptions and biases, the revisionists already...
The call came just before dinner on a Wednesday in April—a bright, windy day when spring was just taking hold and seemed so full of possibilities. Coach had died the previous Friday in his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio. I hoped that he had not been alone. I’m told that a close friend, a man who...
People call me up and say they want to beat me to a pulp. I am, they tell me, a lowlife muckraker, and obviously a racist to boot. Some of my closest friends express doubts about my sanity. An apparently well-subscribed website appears to be devoted to my downfall and calls for my books to...
“She’s such an inspiration. She’s class.” That’s how 17-year-old Bianca, in her gold-lamé miniskirt, summed up Kate Middleton, 90 minutes before the British royal wedding. Like many others, Bianca was positioned alongside the Mall in central London, but unlike most she had the advantage of a view. She was being carried on the shoulders of...
In Britain there have been 17 recent prosecutions of gangs of Muslim rapists and child molesters involved in the “on-street grooming” for sex of victims as young as 11 in several towns and cities in northern England. In the most recent case, members of a gang of Muslims from Derby were convicted of rape, false...
On March 10, 2010, a group of tourists, reputedly “students from Austria,” entered the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in Córdoba and started a Muslim prayer. Private guards and, later, police arrested them. One of the students apologized, saying they had “no intention to offend.” The students’ organization in Austria apologized as well,...
“I have lost all confidence in the veracity and honesty of the Northern people, and if I could honorably leave the country for a foreign land, I believe our condition would be bettered.” —Letter to Frances Mudd, by Samuel Mudd, September 5, 1865 an injured John Wilkes Booth fled southward out of Washington and headed...
The people of England, after very considerable provocation, have lately come to fear England’s Muslims. Britain’s leftists have shifted in the opposite direction. From an entrenched hostility to the mores of their own country and out of sheer perversity, the leftists have intensified their attacks on the Catholic Church, while making a point of defending...
That enormously talented and courageous woman, Yoani Sanchez, summarized the meaning of the forthcoming April 2011 Conference Guidelines for the Communist Party’s Sixth Congress in her biting blog called Generation Y (November 9, 2010): not a single line refers to the expansion of civil rights, including the restrictions suffered by Cubans in entering and leaving...
Ten years after his death, Auberon Waugh still makes me laugh out loud. Here, for example, from the Spectator of June 1985, are his thoughts on British prostitutes: British prostitutes have the reputation for being not only the ugliest and greediest but also the laziest in the world. Few even pretend to enjoy the job,...
The city of Leicester is about as far from the sea as one can get in England. But one sweltering August day, when everyone else was heading down to the beaches, we were driving in the opposite direction so that I could fill in a long-troubling gap on my mental map of England. I had...
For Johnny Johnson, it was always Saturday night. He was the stuff of fictional heroes who prevail over their circumstances. A British army doctor who later joined the Royal Navy, Johnny came from a broken home, never married, and eventually saw his only child given up for adoption. When he left school in the depths...
Declining prosperity is now a settled fact of American life. Prosperity is not measured by the day’s average of stock speculation, or the profits of bankers, or the munificence of government subsidies and salaries, or the consumption of luxury goods, or even by the Gross Domestic Product. It is amazing how in a few short...
I remember Granddad as an old man, sitting in his reading chair or working in his garden, but you could still see the younger man in him, the one who had ridden the rails during the Depression, seeking work in California and Oregon with his brother-in-law Vines. He jumped those trains and saw the West,...
In late June, a friend and I traveled into Central Georgia, looking for Flannery O’Connor. Mary Ann had never heard of Flannery O’Connor. She didn’t know Hazel Motes from a hole in the ground and assured me she had never encountered “A Good Man Is Hard To Find“ or “The Life You Save May Be...
About an hour into the papal vigil in Hyde Park, I turned to one of my companions, a musical genius with bipolar disorder, and said, “You know what I think? I think this is pagan.” No doubt my sour reaction to the singing and dancing and picnicking—to all that amplified noise, to the happiness on...
I arrived in Poland just as the television announced the tragic death of President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, Maria, and many of Poland’s military and political leaders in an airplane crash at Smolensk in Russia. A week of mourning followed throughout the entire country. The president had been traveling to Smolensk for a joint commemoration...
A seven-foot bronze statue of the late Beatle John Lennon greets travelers at the international airport in Liverpool that bears his name. It’s fitting that Lennon’s impish image—hands inserted in pants pockets—is displayed at the airport adjacent to the Mersey River. Lennon emigrated from blue-collar Liverpool, a one-time symbol of Great Britain’s manufacturing strength, to...
There seemed to be little interest among audience members [at a scholarly meeting] in whether the ideas I had presented were true, only in whether their application would bring about results they liked. —Jason Jewell I used to have a running argument with a colleague, a great scholar now gathered to his fathers, during...
I must thank you sincerely for your extremely thoughtful gift of Saturday by British novelist Ian McEwan. I have read the book with great interest and enjoyment. What is more, it has sent me back to “Dover Beach,” which it uses so creatively, and to Matthew Arnold in general, with a new perspective. You can...
We were driving back to Michigan after a conference on Herbert Hoover that I had organized for the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, in 1984. After you get past Hammond and Gary, Indiana is flat but quite nice. Our beautiful Buick 225 Ultra blew the head gasket on the Indiana Toll Road near...
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze” Some recent Australian cultural trends—massive Islamic immigration, for instance—are so...
The May 6 general election in England was one of the most eagerly contested in recent history. At stake were 649 parliamentary seats (one vote has been postponed because of the death of a candidate) for which there were almost 4,150 candidates. Also up for grabs were 4,222 local council seats in 164 English local...
In my 1950’s childhood, boys and men, hair slicked down with tonic, girls and ladies in mantillas and hats primly veiled with mesh worshiped at small country churches against which lapped the green and white fields of late-summer tobacco. On Easter Sundays, prissy and full of ourselves on such a special occasion, my sister and...
This is the second part of a two-part article written by a white male Catholic convert, 48 years old, who has no specialist theological training whatsoever, is of strictly average intelligence, and represents no interest group or political movement. It derives solely from a recent visit to London, in which nothing spectacularly horrible occurred, and...
It was another episode in a series of shocking crimes against children. Little Sasha, just three years old, was pulled from the frigid waters of the Pekhorka River in January 2009. He was bound to a car battery with adhesive tape, his body battered and bearing the marks of cigarette burns. It was the second...
The following is written by a white male Catholic convert, 48 years old, who has no specialist theological training whatever, is of strictly average intelligence, and represents no interest group or political movement. It derives solely from a recent visit to London, in which nothing spectacularly horrible occurred, and which was spent mostly among people...
The Church of England is made up of three parts: evangelical Protestants, Anglo-Catholics, and liberals. They have long been at war, and soon this war will lead to the final rending of that Church. The Anglo-Catholics will break away when women are ordained bishops, as some already did when the Church of England first ordained...
You ain’t a pimp and you ain’t a hustler. A pimp’s got a Caddy and a lady got a Chrysler. —“Young American,” by David Bowie Each year, on the third Saturday of August, people line the sidewalks along Woodward Avenue in Detroit for the annual Dream Cruise. In the ambiance of the affluent northern suburbs...
Tammy Ormson gave much of herself to Catholic education, both as a student and as a teacher. And yet so much was taken from her. Ormson lost her alma mater, Mount Scenario College, when the Ladysmith, Wisconsin, school closed a few years back because of financial trouble. She then lost the school at which she...
Gordon Brown’s media handlers have taken to ensuring that he frequently appears in front of the country’s journalists while in the company of children. This is presumably intended to soften his public image. However, when a 50-year-old man with a tendency to overdo the stage makeup, who suffers a series of bizarre facial tics and...
We had known it was a “white road” when we had found it on the map, but when my wife and I got to the start of it, we hesitated. There was a sign at the junction, and it made us stop and think: RD 103 EN LACUNE CIRCULATION DANGEREUSE ET DÉCONSEILLÉE. En lacune wasn’t...
My charming, patient Post-War British Fiction-studying undergraduates are currently becalmed in the brackish waters of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the first novel of his Alexandria Quartet. I say “brackish” because Mr. Durrell can scarce forbear to use the adjective when Alexandria’s salt-sea breezes blow off the torpid waters of the port. Torpid—there’s another word to conjure...
Minnesota celebrated its 150th birthday in 2008. This occasion drove news reporter Boyd Huppert from KARE–TV in Minneapolis to travel to the corners of the state for a four-part feature series. In the far northwest corner sits Kittson County, bordered by North Dakota and Manitoba. (Winnipeg is about an hour-and-a-half drive.) The landscape is flat...
The decision to release the Libyan terrorist Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi from a Scottish prison has caused much anger in the United States. (Megrahi was convicted for his part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, which killed a total of 270 people.) Indeed, many Americans...
In June 2005, the National Assembly of Quebec adopted Bill 95, which changed the nature of religious and moral teaching in all schools across Quebec. Before 2008, parents could choose between Catholic, Protestant, and nonreligious options. Now all students in both public and private schools are required by law to take a course on religious...
Several weeks ago I was watching a program on the BBC called Would You Risk Your Own Life to Save a Complete Stranger? In Britain, few people apparently would. Far more common is the story of a young girl who was beaten severely in a London subway by several “youths.” The attack took place on...
Greece is under the influence of an aggressive (and violent) left, which has made common cause with liberals in an attempt to eliminate every vestige of the Hellenism that is so deeply rooted in the psyche of the indigenous population. Of course, they call it political correctness and modernization. Following the familiar pattern of the...
The private-school league’s middle-school basketball playoffs were home games for Prep. Prep is the town’s most expensive private school, and their gym is beautiful: spacious, air conditioned, the wall by the entrance made of plastic so the new, impressive weight room is visible on the other side of a hall. We met them in the...
For some years I have lived in Québec as a friendly alien from the United States, traveling from time to time back to my native Minnesota and other states to practice law in my fields of interest. I am married to a French-Canadian wife who is a member of the bar and mairesse of our...
Thanks for your response. I enjoyed it immensely, and I believe you will understand that this is debate as it should be, not the invective that often substitutes for intellectual vibrancy these sad days. One of the pitfalls of this point in history is that everything ends up reduced to discussions of “slavery.” One single...
The Canadian province of Québec is the only French-speaking region in North America where the official language is still French. It is spoken by more than 80 percent of the population. Québec is the last living bastion of the French North American Empire founded in the 17th century. It was the realization of Catholic and...
Here, you can see almost forever. It is a great green plain bounded by low wolds to the west and the North Sea to the east, by the River Humber to the north and the shining mudflats of the Wash to the south. It is a landscape for seven-league boots and ten-league thoughts, as the...
It is a small town in Bavaria, and it is at least 32 degrees C. The camera weighs heavy in my hands, and I can feel speckles of sweat accumulating beneath my black rucksack, as it soaks up the sun like a square and sinister sponge. All around us are people similarly suffering, but good-tempered...