It is a sign of the times that one of the most talked-about reality-TV shows of the season centers on a woman who desires to lose weight. Lots of weight. The show’s star, Ruby Gettinger, now tips the scales at around 500 pounds, having once climbed to 700. She has adult-onset diabetes, thyroid problems, and...
You can make a good argument that, by the late 20th century, the Seven Deadly Sins had become the Seven Lively Virtues. In the 1960’s, the media lauded the anger of students who bombed police stations and set dormitories on fire. Hollywood glorified lust the way it had once glorified chastity. Government at every level...
On November 4, 2008, voters decisively rejected the Republican Party, voting for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 52.8 percent to 45.9. Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, including every state in the Northeast and industrial Midwest; every state on the Pacific Coast; Florida, the state that ensured George W....
The poor United States of America: so far from God, so close to Mexico. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his First Inaugural Address, announced what became known as the Good Neighbor Policy. “In the field of world policy,” Roosevelt said, “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects...
From time to time I go to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the home of what Gladstone called “the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford.” For Catholics it is revered as the home of Cardinal Newman, that most human and subtle of converts, and for Protestants it is the place of the Martyrs Memorial...
“Woe to the Assyrian, he is the rod and the staff of my anger, and my indignation is in their hands. I will send him to a deceitful nation . . . ” —Isaiah 10:5-6, Douay-Rheims Confronted by the rise of insurgent Islam and the political reality of jihad, many Christians, eager to formulate a...
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
In the seven years since my first essay on the War Against Christmas appeared in Chronicles, I have had no trouble writing at least one such essay per year, because each year brings new and outrageous attempts to suppress the public celebration of Christmas. My favorite example was the 2002 winner of VDare.com’s invaluable War...
After eight years of George W. Bush’s “culture of life,” which included well over 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and an estimated 1.25 million Iraqi deaths, abortion is back on the front burner, thanks to the presence of Sarah Palin on national television. Few were “energized” about John McCain before she entered stage right...
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” —The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America As I write I am sitting in Pitt County, North...
For the last four years, change has been in the air in Spain, following the election of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. And thanks to his reelection in March of this year, we can look forward to more of the same. There have been abrupt changes to...
“Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread.” —President Jimmy Carter On a Sunday afternoon late in June, Tony Bologna was driving home with his sons, Michael and Matthew, from a family barbecue. In San Francisco’s Excelsior district Bologna got stuck in an intersection, temporarily blocking a car from making a left-hand turn. ...
George W. Bush is a stunningly and deservedly unpopular president. His approval ratings rival Nixon’s after Watergate, and the Republicans largely avoided any mention of him at their convention in St. Paul, a convention from which Bush was conspicuously absent. Under his leadership, we have become embroiled in a war that has cost thousands of...
The Democratic nominee for president has finally offered the details of his campaign theme—that he will radically change America if elected—by posting on his website “The Blueprint for Change: Barack Obama’s Plan for America.” Senator Obama’s call for “change” has mesmerized America’s youth and raised unprecedented grassroots donations. Every American longing for real change that...
It has been an awful two decades. Say what you will about Ronald Reagan, he did not leave people feeling depressed, even hopeless. Then came four years of George H.W. Bush—an honorable man, but hardly an inspiration. And his tax and regulatory policies were largely indistinguishable from those of the Democrats. Then we endured eight...
The central theme of Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency has been his call for “change”—albeit often with few details about the nature of that change. There is certainly a pressing need for change in U.S. foreign policy. During the Cold War, Washington’s strategy led to security free-riding by allies and clients, caused the...
Here it is 2008, and everything else is old news. The provisional and absentee ballots, recounts, scores, and statistics of 2000-2007 are all in the history books, along with Afghan and Iraqi elections and constitutions, insurgencies, hurricanes, disgraced mayors and governors, and Supreme Court, lobbying, earmark, wiretapping, and energy and cartoon ruckuses. Since Barack Obama...
The presidential campaign that began the day after the previous one ended nearly four years ago seems increasingly like a dream. I suppose it is part of the American Dream—this belief that, of all the allures and temptations the world has to offer, the greatest is the presidency of the United States; the highest calling,...
Any fool can write history, and many do. Please do not assume that I mean by this statement to vaunt the “expert” and slight the amateur. In writing history the amateur is sometimes gifted, and there is no more pestiferous fool than the smug, pretentious “expert” who thinks of his own mind as the repository...
Intellectual historians commonly group Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, William Robertson, and David Hume as the four greatest 18th-century historians. If limited to only one of these authors, we would do well to begin with Hume. For one thing, Hume is the only thinker in history who has achieved world-class status as a philosopher and as an...
It is usually difficult to choose only one author who is essential to the study of a particular subject. When it comes to the history of the frontier West, however, the choice is easy. Ray Allen Billington stands alone above all. He is the sine qua non of any course on frontier history. When reading...
Even before being devastated by a killer cyclone on May 2, Burma was one of the world’s poorest countries. Renamed Myanmar by a military junta, Burma is also one of the most oppressed countries. In terms of brutality, cruelty, and venality, her government is in a league with North Korea. It comes as no surprise,...
In 1939, a short, fat Englishman named Alfred Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of David Selznick. Impressed by Hitchcock’s work in British film, Selznick thought he would be perfect to direct Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Things did not go well. Selznick was among the most overbearing of Hollywood producers. He...
Sixty years ago an incident lodged in my memory forever as it seems, as I walked with the beautiful redheaded young lady who paused to ask me a question. There above an old outbuilding—I hesitate to call it a barn—there was a weathervane appearing as the silhouette of a rooster. But this image was perforated...
You may have riches and wealth untold; / Caskets of jewels and baskets of gold. But richer than I you will never be— / For I had a mother who read to me. —Strickland Gillilan Perhaps more than most I wax nostalgic for the 50’s, which was not a decade but an era that began...
It is difficult to imagine, but there was a time when pundits in Washington were tagging John McCain as the ultimate unneoconservative Republican figure whose nationalist yet pragmatic approach to foreign policy was being viewed with suspicion by your average global democratic crusader—not to mention the members of what Pat Buchanan described as Israel’s Amen...
Over the years, John McCain has acquired a reputation as a maverick Republican. Independents and even some Democrats who loathe George W. Bush’s foreign-policy record seem to believe that McCain would be a significant improvement. In several GOP primaries earlier this year, most notably those in New Hampshire and Michigan, nearly one third of voters...
John McCain does not like the Russians. Nearly 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Soviet-style communism safely tossed into the dustbin of history, Senator McCain loves to scare us with the Russkie boogeyman. Take, for example, this excerpt from his “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom,” published in the November/December 2007...
[McCain and Soros: The Most Dangerous Man in America, Bankrolled By the Most Evil Man in the World] “While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it...
A great many economists and politicians contend that the absence of trade inevitably leads to armed conflict. Thus, in the interests of national security, they insist on virtually unlimited trade and castigate those who favor its restriction as proponents of autarky—a term that few understand yet most agree to be negative, isolationist, and perhaps even extremist....
It may be hard for us in the United States to imagine that food could ever be scarce here. We may worry about avian flu and mad cow disease, and about the general safety of our increasingly mass-produced food supply, as from time to time some Americans sicken or die from tainted meat or spinach. ...
The United States has three large economic problems. The overarching one is that the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency is wearing out from continuous and large trade deficits and from government budget deficits that have to be financed by foreigners because the U.S. savings rate is approximately zero. Judging by the dollar’s loss...
Thursday, June 1—My final American Interest was published today in Chronicles. In the aftermath of the Second Revolution, the column has outlived its purpose. Pontificating on the evils of one-worldism, empire, global hegemony, propositional nationhood, jihadist infiltration, foreign interventionism, and “nation-building” was a necessary and often frustrating task, back in the awful days of George...
Modern liberalism, so apt to see every social pathology as a form of mental or emotional illness, invites the application of a similar perspective on itself. Whether the issue in question has to do with teenage promiscuity, adultery, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, kleptomania, school shootings, child abuse, gang warfare, or corruption in government (though...
Jack Bauer is an American hero—of sorts. He tortures suspects. And executes them. And decapitates them. “I’m gonna need a hacksaw,” he famously declared after dispatching a pervert who knew the men behind a planned nuclear attack on Los Angeles. If you have never watched the television program 24, you should try it for two...
For most of American history, federal law enforcement consisted only of U.S. marshals serving in the territories of the West. Their legacy is decidedly mixed. Many were appointed purely for their political connections, and graft and corruption were not unusual. The first U.S. marshal for Colorado Territory was accused of embezzling federal funds. The third...
In recent months, supporters of the mission in Iraq have been in high spirits. They insist that the “Surge”—the strategy of deploying an additional 30,000 U.S. troops, which President Bush announced in December 2007—has turned around the dire security situation. The Bush administration, they believe, has finally adopted the right approach to Iraq. War proponents...
Probably the last thing that would have occurred to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on his way to meet “Kristen” in Room 870 of D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel was that both he and the Emperor’s Club VIP were under FBI surveillance for federal crimes—prostitution and a financial crime called “structuring.” Traditionally, the enforcement of criminal law...
At the close of 2007, the bloated inventories and declining prices of residential housing confirmed that the real-estate bubble had burst. This was triggered by losses on collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), which are based on pools of “subprime” mortgage collateral. Residential prices have not yet fallen below the levels of 2001 (when the bubble began)...
I cannot remember the occasion, but I will not forget the voice—female, authoritative, and poised—that intoned a dismissal of the so-called yuppies as follows: “They oversee the distribution of toilet paper!” I was a bit thrilled by the superior attitude, being even then no young upwardly mobile professional myself. I thought about the matter and concluded...
We have now entered a new age which will not have a name or a designation until, I think, at least one or two centuries from now: But then, such is the evolution of historical terminology. Yet we should be able to recognize at least some of its apparent characteristics. One (to my old-fashioned mind,...
Twenty-eight years ago, in the summer of 1980, I moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, to take a job teaching English and journalism at a university there. The job ended just as soon as it began: On the first day of classes, the university, a private institution with connections to the country’s thriving neofascist movement and, thence,...
I have never been able to get it through my thick skull that one’s identity, culture, and national sovereignty should not stand in the way of making money. For whatever reasons, I have always had a real attachment to my name, my family, my people, my place, my way of life. I have never felt particularly...
In 2006, lawmakers in the Lone Star State were horrified that a large percentage of Texas high-school graduates required remedial courses to gain the skills needed to succeed in college. So they directed the commissioner of higher education and the commissioner of education to assemble teams of college and high-school faculty to recommend changes to...
Although the American frontier was officially closed 118 years ago, Americans remain in thrall to its mythic spell and the romance of the American West. Europeans have always viewed our cultural obsession with condescension, though they themselves—the Germans and the Italians especially—are hardly immune to its allure. (On my first visit to the Grand Canyon...
For most of the 19th century, the American West was a fairly tranquil place. The myths of Hollywood and the wishful thinking of certain revisionist historians notwithstanding, throughout the region, for every gunfighter there were a hundred stockbrokers, and for every outlaw, ten-thousand farmers. The West was urban as much as rural, settled as a...
Westerns have never enjoyed much of a highbrow audience or much literary distinction. Many people tend to sneer at the traditional form, because it seems to represent something obvious and a little dumb. As one of my students responded to my discussion of western historical fiction as a viable and valuable category of popular culture,...
Some time around 800 b.c., Homer put the heroic tales of the Achaeans into lyric form: battles, expeditions, adventures, conquests. The tales were inspiring, heroic, tragic, triumphal. Greeks recited Homer’s iambic pentameter for centuries; so, too, did we as schoolchildren—as inheritors of Western civilization. We Americans, however, also have our own Homeric Era. While the...
For as long as democracy has existed in the modern world, universal education and rapid mass communication have been highly regarded in democratic societies. An educated people, democrats have assumed, is a people capable of informing and governing itself. And a society in close and regular communication with its own citizens, and with foreign societies,...
There is a popular superstition that defines America as a “Proposition Nation,” created and proclaimed by the obiter dicta about “all men” in the second sentence of the 1776 Declaration that the 13 colonies “are and of right ought to be free and independent States.” Is America a Proposition Nation? No, for the very simple...