When Popcorn Sutton died in mid-March at the age of 62, the national press ran obituaries. Though he was just an old moonshiner who’d plied his trade for half a century and done nothing else of consequence, a whole bunch of folks in Tennessee and North Carolina grieved more than they would have over the...
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Antifascists on the March
All over Britain and Ireland, including the unpleasing town where I live, which is run by a left-wing junta, there are memorials to those who fought in the International Brigades on the Red Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Even though there are but a few British and Irish survivors of the battles...
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Letter From Chile
While traveling by bus in Chile in January 2008, I drew the attention of two other English-speaking passengers to a graffito, which read: Viva Pinochet Libertad! As people whose sole knowledge of the world came from the left-wing press and broadcasters, they were both shocked and puzzled that Pinochet and liberty could be linked in...
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Life in the Borderland
Returning from a Slavic land on a Slavic airline after serving a mission aiding the Catholic Church in Slavic Eastern Europe, I craved a little freedom from Slavdom. So I eschewed the late Slavic pope’s tradition and refrained from kissing the earth after touching down at O’Hare. Instead, I enjoyed a quiet cigarette outside arrivals,...
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The Class of ’59: Intimations of Mortality and Posterity
Some good folks in my hometown are planning a reunion of my high-school class, which, come June, will have graduated 50 years ago. It was a class of about 500. Three hundred are known, of which 53 are already deceased. (Our average age is 67.) It is a strange and unsettling experience to contemplate the...
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Checkpoint Child Porn
In a small, dimly lit room at the Burmese immigration office, on the border of northern Thailand and Burma, there is a large, luminous portrait of Gen. Than Shwe, festooned with medals and ribbons. His steely gaze surveys the hundreds of foreign tourists who cross the Thai-Burma border bridge to visit the ramshackle, open-air market...
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Love it or Leave It?
As ululating headline after ululating headline blares forth Wall Street’s apocalypse; as Obamamaniacs promise race riots to break whitey’s collective spirit once and for all; as concepts like Peak Oil move from the fringes to the mainstream of media discourse; as America is forced to apprehend, in Fay Weldon’s droll aphorism, that “the fin has...
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Spy Kids and Labour Snoops
In Great Britain as in the United States, terrorism has provided the perfect pretext for assaulting liberties enjoyed for centuries. Torture, detention without charge, wiretapping, international databases of citizens’ private information—all have been enthusiastically pursued in the United Kingdom as in the United States. Yet even as the bloated Labour government has begun to flounder...
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More (Local) Government
A 1992 Wisconsin law limits the revenue a school district can raise through property taxes. When operating costs exceed that limit, districts have to ask voters to make up the difference. The idea behind the law was to control skyrocketing teacher salaries and benefits by holding annual increases to 3.8 percent per year. The state...
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The Greening of the Gold Rush
It began innocently enough, like any other workshop—a large university auditorium; speakers from the United Nations, foreign business consortia, and local government; and an obscure member of the Thai royal family ringing an auspicious gong. However, the hundreds of delegates seated in the auditorium were not savvy investors or scientists but raw-boned, palm-blistered Thai rice...
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Dispelling the Darkness of Secularism
Bolshevism evolved into religion, some kind of materialistic pagan religion, which worships Lenin and his like as demigods, while considering lies, deceit, violence, the oppression of the poor, the demoralizing of children, humiliation of women, destruction of the family . . . and the reduction of all the nation to extreme poverty as the principles...
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Letter From Australia: Don Bradman
You’re facing the veteran and famously accurate San Diego Padres pitcher Greg Maddux from a distance of 22 yards, armed only with a three-foot wooden club and your own nerve. To enliven the proceedings, Maddux interacts with you not from the traditional, essentially static crouch, but after a 20- or 30-yard headlong sprint from the...
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What Civilization Remains
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
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Christmas in Abbeville
Last winter, I traveled to Abbeville, South Carolina, for its Fifth Annual Olde South Christmas. To the casual observer, this event might appear to be merely an instance of savvy small-town marketing—an attempt to capitalize on the trade in nostalgic simulacra of a simpler time. It had been suggested to me that, despite the superficial...
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Letter From Castelnau de Montmiral: Out-Twee the Foreigner
An Englishwoman’s home is her castle, so they say, and mine have stood up to various attacks. From the neighbor who jumped my parents’ fence one day, brandishing a chainsaw, to cut down an inoffensive birch tree that had been upsetting his dog—itself a vicious Alsatian trained to draw blood first and ask questions later—to...
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Something Big
We passed the hand warmer around on a cold day in December. Matthew, my 11-year-old son, got creative and stuck the thing in his shoe. Rachel, who was spotting for us, didn’t like it much, but she used the hand warmer anyway. It was that cold; our fingers and toes burned. I look through the...
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The British Empire and the Muslims
Last year in England, we marked the 60th anniversary of the voluntary granting of independence to India and Pakistan; it was also the year in which our military began to leave Iraq. Soon, the last of the British troops will march out of Basra with their band dolefully playing “The World Turned Upside Down.” Iraq...
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The Media’s Triumph Won’t Last Forever
After the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2005, Poland finally appeared to have recovered from her postcommunist malaise, having brought a coalition of center-right and patriotic parties to power. These included the Law and Justice Party (PiS), led by the twin Kaczynski brothers, Lech and Jaroslaw; the ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families (LPR), led by...
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Governor Berry and the Mad Farmers’ Liberation Front
Wendell Berry’s voice is rich and mellow, carrying a slight grit that comes from weathering, age, and experience. His accent is strong enough to flavor his words but mild enough to soothe his listeners. It is a surprisingly gentle voice for one so radical. I sit listening to the Kentucky gentleman. With me are a...
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The Greek Conservative Revival
Last fall, in mid-September, a series of unprecedented fires raged across a large part of Peloponnese (including the area surrounding ancient Olympia), killing 68 people. Then, on September 16, something else happened that caused widespread panic—at least among liberals: For the first time in 30 years, a national conservative party (the People’s Orthodox Rally) won...
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The “Smart” Port
In saner times, countries had borders, and along these borders were ports for the inspection and tagging of goods coming into or leaving the country. The border, after all, would be the logical place to conduct such business, since it is the terminus ad quem cargo would be outside or inside a country. Globalization, however,...
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Mr. Bush and the Mexican Murderer
When he was governor of Texas, President George W. Bush presided over the execution of 152 murderers. Yet today, as if to turn the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” on its head, El Presidente wants to stop the Lone Star State from giving the hot shot to a Mexican murderer and rapist. As disturbing as...
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Two Cheers for Howard
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” said Yogi Berra at his most Chestertonian. Charles de Gaulle, in more meditative style, observed: “Les fins des régimes sont toujours tristes.” Both maxims are relevant in the context of Australia’s general election on November 24, 2007, which saw John Howard—prime minister since 1996—crushed by an untried but personally...
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Bridge of Hope
In 1958, when the first barbed-wire barricades were rolled out by the British colonial government across Ledra Street in the capital of Cyprus, it seemed inevitable that the seeds of division would yield a bitter harvest of intercommunal conflicts, regional tensions, and, finally, the partition of the whole island. Where minarets and churches once jostled...
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Bible-Belt Baroque
For some time, my friends Jeff and Rebecca Calcutt (a pair of Southern patriots sans pareil), had urged me to pay a visit to Bob Jones University in Greenville. I have no interest in driving to Greenville, I told them. I don’t like mountains, not even little ones. I don’t like Clemson fans, with those...
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Globalization Transforms Kansas City
After a decade of living in Europe and various locales in the United States, I returned four years ago to the place where my family has long resided. My great-great-great grandfather, John Maget, along with his brother Rufus, bought in to the Platte County Purchase in 1847, which included lands north of Kansas City. They...
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The Lady Vanishes
In September 2000, I went to Burma to see the places where George Orwell had worked as a policeman in the 1920’s. As I planned my trip, I fantasized about meeting the brave and beautiful Suu Kyi, daughter of the national hero, Aung San, who was assassinated by a rival political faction in 1947. Her...
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Iran, Russia, and Debt
Historians are quick to recognize struggles among national powers, but they usually neglect the power of organized international finance, which has aims above and beyond those of its host countries. In fact, during the Belle Époque, great powers such as Britain and France were simply the workhorses of the financial elite. The same can be...
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The Slavic League
For as long as young Villem could remember, hunkeys had occupied the lowest rung in Punxsutawney’s social pecking order. The Italians had their various business enterprises; the Irish had their legions of bishops, monsignors, and priests; and the Slavs were miners known by the pejorative hunkey. Vil’s father, Juraj Oddany, dug coal, as did two...
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Imagination Deficit
Dear Mr. Romney: In spite of the Herculean labors of their spin doctors, politicians on the stump often say stupid things in the heat of the moment, and you are probably right to resent the unfairness of journalists who exaggerate the importance of such mundane stupidities. But rarely are politicians’ unconsidered remarks so remarkably unconsidered...
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Living Communally
At first, our taxi driver asserts that the United States will surely triumph overseas—thanks to the teams of dedicated, patriotic geniuses who diligently work in the field of American foreign policy. On second thought, he wryly reflects, the Soviet Union employed teams of geniuses, too. At least, that’s what my wife tells me he said;...
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The Year of Teaching Dangerously
Somewhere in the Arabian Desert, a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit rockets along the highway under a smuggler’s moon. The driver is a Saville Row bespoke-suited expatriate. By day, he teaches English. By night, he transports illegal consignments of alcohol from Bahrain to Riyadh through sandstorms of biblical dimensions and past curious Bedouin tribesmen. Above, a...
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Left Implosion
A debate I attended at the Oxford Literary Festival highlighted growing tensions between classical Enlightenment thought and postmodernism—tensions that threaten to cause a fissure on the British left. Hosted each year by the Sunday Times, the festival affords authors the opportunity to discuss and tout their recently published works. This year’s lineup included Richard Dawkins,...
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Diversity Through Sport
Because spectator sports play a dominant role in American culture, many have tried to use them to change our society. Such social engineering happens in America’s inner cities, which would come as no surprise to most people. But it also happens in such unlikely places as the Arrowhead Region of northeastern Minnesota and, specifically, in...
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Letter From Texas: Gott Mit Uns
As modern imperialism grows, even the regions within those countries under its rule become homogenized. Within the subnational regions, smaller ethnic enclaves, with their diverse cultures, tend to take one of two paths. They become tourist traps where the natives are totally ignorant of their own histories, differences, and contributions to the larger groups, until,...
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Letter From a Monastery: Engulfed in Solitude
“There is a new loneliness in the modern world . . . the solitude of speed.” —Stephen Vizinczey Br. Anthony Weber is a Trappist monk at the Abbey of the Genesee in Piffard, New York, near Geneseo, where I serve as the Catholic Campus Minister at a SUNY liberal-arts college. He was the monk dispatched...
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Letter From Serbia: Serbia in Our Own Image
One week before last Christmas, the U.S. State Department fast-tracked four European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) projects in Serbia, which consisted of a loan to HVB Banka Serbia; an equity investment in Syntaxis Mezzanine Fund I; an equity investment in South Eastern Energy Capital; and a loan to Danube Group Holding of Serbia,...
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Letter From Quebec: Talking About Culture
The Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ) is a conservative party—at least by Quebec standards. It is led by 35-year-old political wunderkind Mario Dumont. In the recent elections for the National Assembly, the ADQ shattered Quebec’s two-party system (the federalist and centrist Liberals and left-wing sovereigntist Parti Québécois), winning 31 percent of the vote (up from...
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Well Into Spring, Even With Snow
Old now is earth, and none may count her days. Earth may be fair, and all men glad and wise. Age after age, their tragic empires rise, Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep . . . —Old Hundred Twenty-Fourth A white-haired pastor, a white church, a white field. The snow is falling,...
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Letter From England: It’s Chavtastic, Baby!
The British tabloids couldn’t get enough of it. Photos of Prince William wearing multiple large gold chains, a baggy track suit, a baseball cap, and a menacing sneer on his face were splashed across their front pages. To the British, it was immediately clear that the prince was dressed up as a “chav.” Like most...
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Letter From England: A Time to Stand
A non-Christian friend of mine recently announced that she is thinking of getting married. I would usually greet such news with joy, but, in this case, I was aware that my friend had married before. As I had no reason to doubt the validity of her previously contracted “natural” (i.e., nonsacramental) marriage, and, as there...
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On Correctness and Collegiality
It all began in February, when one disgruntled Vermonter started a blog to attack the Second Vermont Republic, the four-year-old secessionist organization in our state. He was apparently prompted by hearing Rob Williams, then cochair of the SVR, attacking Abraham Lincoln on the radio for the illegal suppression of Southern secession, and his political-correctness genes...
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No Country for Honorable Men: The Prosecution of the “Border Patrol Two”
The prosecution of, and harsh sentences meted out to, two Border Patrol agents involved in a shooting incident at the Texas-Mexico border tell us all we really need to know about the Bush administration’s plans to erase U.S. borders once and for all. On February 17, 2005, Border Patrol agent Ignacio Ramos responded to a...
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Feeding the Beast
When Angela Merkel became chancellor of Germany in late 2005, the conservative German newspaper Die Welt admitted that “Nobody knows in what direction she will take the country.” The liberal Berliner Zeitung was equally ignorant, wondering, “What will she be demanding from us citizens?” (In Europe, we have “democracies” of the kind in which politicians...
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Letter From Cork: The Polonization of Ireland
Recently, I returned to dear old Cork after exactly ten years’ absence. What 50 years ago had been a poor town on the periphery of Ireland is now a big, thriving, growing, wealthy city. As I was conveyed from the airport to the city center, I asked the driver, “Anything changed round here recently?” “Immigrants,”...
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A Wilderness of Mirrors: Litvinenko, Putin, and the West
The death of exiled former FSB (the domestic-security successor to the KGB) officer Aleksandr Litvinenko in London last November momentarily relegated Britney and K-Fed, Oprah, and Madonna to the second pages of Western tabloids. It also sparked a frenzy of speculation about who stands behind the apparent murder—or “murders,” since talk of political assassination was...
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A No-Longer-Broken City
It is a strange experience, after an absence of 25 years, to revisit a city with which one was once linked by ties of solidarity. Stranger still was it to discover that Berlin, while it has been extraordinarily transformed in many respects, has remained extraordinarily unchanged in others. Probably in no other European capital today...
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The Company Town
The city of Arcadia, Wisconsin, population 2,400, recently became the town that roared in the immigration debate. Its new mayor, John Kimmel, barely four months on the job, made several proposals in a letter to the editor of the Arcadia News-Leader. The letter brought so much notoriety to this place, nestled in the Trempea-leau River...
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Finland, Democracy, and Those Cartoons
The Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten’s publication of the satirical cartoons depicting Muhammad prompted a crisis that touched the whole of Scandinavia. The drawings were greeted with outrage and violence from Muslims and their liberal defenders throughout the world. Danish flags were burned in Arab cities; Danish embassies were firebombed in Syria and attacked in London;...
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Sinkin’ Down in Youngstown
If you really want to know what’s going on in a city, consult the motel clerk working the graveyard shift—not the clerk at the chain motel, but his counterpart at the inn that advertises the cheapest rates at the interstate exit with the truck stop. The kind of inn where you find cars patched with...