The trial, conviction, and death sentence of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, passed quietly this year, far more quietly than most reporters and some political leaders wanted. The main reason for the calmness of the McVeigh proceedings was probably the utterly uninteresting mind, character, and personality of the defendant....
“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions … are the...
How well I remember, 40 years ago, prowling in the stacks of a college library and reading the books, observing museum pieces in the halls of that library, and attending concerts in the auditorium next door. Glenn Gould showed up to play the Goldberg Variations, Jerome Hines to sing, and Wolfgang Schneiderhan to play Vivaldi...
Just outside Tucson, Arizona, lies a foreign country. It is not Mexico, although that is close by, but Tohono O’odham Nation, an Indian reservation the size of Connecticut that is home to some 30,000 people. Larger than many countries, the Tohono O’odham Nation is a place of astonishing and austere beauty. Seldom visited, it harbors...
They call it Cascadia—a land of plunging waterfalls and snowcapped mountains, a mythical kingdom of towering trees and raging rivers. Here in Seattle, capital of this Arcadia, the sleekly modernistic Space Needle rises up against the backdrop of Mount Rainier, which dominates the horizon—a distinctly Cascadian juxtaposition of mountain and cityscape, forest and skyscraper, greenery...
Among the terms of endearment applied to Americans who worry about present immigration policy is “xenophobe.” This high-toned word normally precedes lower-toned ones—”racist,” “bigot,” “neo-Nazi,” etc.—which take over as the exasperation level rises. A “xenophobe” is someone who fears foreigners. Fears them why? No dictionary is competent to say. Every xenophobe doubtless has his own...
I know it will strike many people as odd to call the current foreign policy of the United States a form of “empire building” or “imperialism,” and of course none of our leaders would ever call it that. They would prefer some such term as “peacekeeping” or “spreading democracy” or “nation-building” or “exporting capitalism,” or...
Sometime during the last decade, the Philip K. Dick cult came out from underground. Those of us who spent the 1980’s trying to explain our affection for this pulp writer no one else had heard of, this author of surreal science fictions and bleak realistic novels, have watched both pop culture and the academy discover...
In June 1996, the funding of British politics came to front page prominence with a controversy over the funding of political opposition to greater integration within the European Union. This opposition, organized by Bill Cash, a backbench (i.e., non-office-holding) Tory MP, was offered funds by Sir James Goldsmith, a very wealthy Anglo-French entrepreneur mostly resident...
Interpreting elections is a national spectator sport, offering as many “meanings” as there arc board-certified spin doctors. Nevertheless, all of these disparate revelations, insights, and brilliant interpretations share a common, unthinking vision: elections, despite their divisive, contentious character, exist to facilitate citizen power over government. Whether ineptly or adeptly, honestly or dishonestly, government is supposed...
Gay issues are likely to remain central to social and political debate in this country for many years to come, whether in the form of gay rights referenda, gay service in the military, school curricula, or the adoption of children by homosexual couples. It should not be too long before one specific issue, the recognition...
During most of human history, religious explanations and rituals imparted meaning to people’s lives and justified controlling their conduct. Today, medical explanations and rituals often perform those functions. For example, masturbation and homosexuality were first forbidden on religious grounds, then on medical grounds. Being a male infant is, of course, not behavior. Accordingly, routine neonatal...
Morphine is said to be good for people subject to severe depressions, or even pessimism. Although the drug first surfaced in a laboratory at the end of the last century, its basis, opium, had been used earlier by many aristocratic and reactionary thinkers. A young and secretive German romantic, Novalis, enjoyed eating and smoking opium...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.” He was probably mistaken about “human history,” but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments...
Senator Eugene McCarthy is America’s senior statesman without a party. An Irish-German Minnesota Catholic who left the seminary for academe, McCarthy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 and the Senate in 1958. He was the link between the Old Progressives of the Upper Midwest and the postwar liberals; as time goes by,...
Conservatives and environmentalists generally have as much in common as the Hatfields and McCoys. Environmentalists like to point to the career of conservative James Watt and the comment of Ronald Reagan that once you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all. Most conservatives, on the other hand, view environmentalists as sentimental anti-modernists who want to...
In this 1996 essay, the late Congressman James Traficant illustrates the Washington establishment’s habitual subordination of America to foreign interests.
In accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1908, this century’s greatest populist warned: “How can the people hope to rule if they are not able to learn, until after the election, what the predatory interests are doing?” The man was, of course, William Jennings Bryan, and he offered a “complete and effective” solution...
Douglas Young was a tall man, six feet six inches; with his beard he looked like a Calvinist Jehovah. At St. Andrews, he acquired the nickname “God” by eavesdropping on a political discussion about the Balkans. (In the 1930’s, the Balkans were full of angry ethnic factions, fighting and killing one another.) The group was...
Sovereignty is a people’s ability to govern its internal affairs and protect its independence against outside interference. Military power has always been the most obvious pillar of sovereignty. Clausewitz’ dictum that the object of war is “to compel your opponent to do your will” means that the victor substitutes his sovereignty for that of the...
While visiting out-of-state friends in Jackson last summer, I was involved in a conversation with a just-married couple who had moved to Wyoming two months before from Los Angeles for the now-familiar purpose of escaping drive-by shootings, berserk retired football stars, and the multifarious Sons and Daughters of Emma Lazarus. In the course of our...
I am deeply honored to receive the Richard Weaver Award, to stand in the ranks of the distinguished men who have received it, and to have an award in the name of a man who has always been one of my heroes. As a lifelong libertarian, I have been moved by the occasion to reflect...
The true nature of the New Deal was revealed in one of those brilliant ironies that flash lightning-like in a midnight storm. It happened September 13, 1933, the Nativity of a new secular holiday: NRA Day. An interminable parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue celebrated the National Recovery Administration, which was to set prices, fix...
A few months after the outbreak of war, in January 1940, Nazi leaders held a merry meeting. They had plenty to be cheerful about. Poland had been crushed in a few weeks, and the new Soviet alliance had been “sealed in blood,” as Stalin put it. By a secret agreement in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of...
While violent criminals are given a pass to victimize and reoffend, the everyday American finds himself under the heel of an increasingly invasive and oppressive state.
Near the beginning of Federico Fellini’s Intervista (1988), a very large camera crane is about to rise, wreathed in smoke and artificial moonlight, high above the soundstages of Cinecitta. One of the camera operators calls down to his director (Fellini being played by Fellini), “Aren’t you coming up?” “No,” Fellini immediately replies, “I can imagine...
One of the most significant but little noted transitions from English to American society was in the Common Law of homicide and self-defense. As far back as the 13th century, English Common Law dealt harshly with the act of homicide. The “right to kill in self-defense was slowly established, and is a doctrine of modern...
Vanessa was the first American woman in my life. “You forced a superpower to her knees,” congratulated my friend Peter, when I told him what had happened the previous night. Things went considerably quicker in Paris in 1958; I had no reason to beat around the bush posing questions about bisexual lovers, blood transfusions, or...
The questions I ask myself from time to time are: What is the Ingersoll Milling Machine Company doing with its own philanthropic organization? What does Ingersoll have to do with philanthropy at all? We are engaged in a highly technical international machinery business, which is extremely demanding because of surging technology, because there are competitors...
One of the best things in life for a writer who sets out to be an artist is to be appreciated by people whose opinions are generally respected and valued. That is the happy condition in which I find myself this evening, and I thank the directors of the Ingersoll Foundation and the Rockford Institute....
This year the Ingersoll Foundation has decided to present the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters to a professor of classics. Amidst joy and gratitude, this will bring to the fore some of the uneasiness that has been associated with the word and concept of “classics” for a long time, an uneasiness that seems...
When we recall the great artists of the 19th century, perhaps the vibrant and theatrical images of Delacroix come to mind. Or do scenes of daring and struggle from Hugo flood our memory instead? Or the ebullient audacity of a Schumann song resonate in our ears? Perhaps all three, and more, for theirs was the...
Stereotypes to the right of them, stereotypes to the left of them, the politically correct volley and thunder at every image that might offend the sensitive soul of the approved victim. Dartmouth’s comic Indian mascot turned into an unsmiling noble savage, then was abolished altogether. First the Frito Bandito’s politically unacceptable gold tooth disappeared, then...
Lehi, Utah, is somewhat familiar to those who have seen the movie Footloose. The small Mormon community provided Hollywood with the perfect setting for a tale of adolescent rebellion against parental and religious authority. Yet shortly after the movie’s release Lehi’s pious image was ruptured by a child abuse scandal. One morning in the summer...
“In a state of civilization,” opined Thomas Jefferson, it is not possible to be both ignorant and free. In Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson laid out his plan for public education. Every free man would learn “the most useful facts” from ancient and modern history. The “best geniuses” would go...
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA Edward Gibson tells us that, about 250 A.D., the Goths came down from the Ukraine and took the city of Marcianopolis. To save their lives and property, the people of the city gave the Gothic warriors “a large sum of money.” This bribe worked to restore order and peace in the city...
How are we-the campus conservatives-to think of ourselves in the sea of political correctness? Perhaps we adopt the attitude of the left, and view ourselves as the real but unacknowledged victims of oppression, casualties in the war for diversity and sensitivity. It is our turn to be denied tenure, refused job interviews, not invited to speak...
Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats as Vice-President Henry Wallace and President John...
Visits in the space of ten days to Toronto, Ontario, and then Tifton, Georgia, demand reflective analysis for stronger reasons than the compelling force of alliteration. The city and the town are so different that the visitor to both is driven to look for the faintest similarities. Once that effort is made, however, sweeping conclusions...
When mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths who attempted to rob him in a New York subway in 1984, news reporters inevitably called him the “subway vigilante.” But Goetz was not a vigilante; he was not a member of a vigilant group of concerned citizens patrolling the subways as keepers of the peace. On...
Texas Here too. Here, as on the other unfurling Frontier of the continent, the great Prairie where a solitary cry fades out; Here too the lariat, the Indian, the yearling. Here too the secretive and unseen bird That over the clamorous strains of history Sings for one evening and its memory; Here too the mystic...
I am so deathly afraid of those women. Strawberry pie again, Eleanor, how nice. Pity it didn’t set. Every Fourth of July I vow not to, but sooner or later I sit down and cry. I used to cry the minute Philo came in the kitchen with the strawberries; he would start to hull them,...
It was April and beginning to warm up in the mountains. Snow melted from the deep basins, especially from the exposures facing south and, in shrinking, formed pictures on the slopes—a snow hawk, a pack of running coyotes, an antelope. Alejandra Ruiz knew these animals would disappear as the sun slid into its higher arc,...
Last September, in a speech about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President Bush used for the first time a phrase that has come to signify his foreign policy objectives and his vision of the post-Cold War age: “New World Order.” Here and in subsequent speeches the President would hint that, with the liberation of Eastern Europe,...
Adventure fiction is vigorously alive. Although virtually ignored by critics outside specialist newsletters, the genre has long been a dominant force both in bookstores and in Hollywood. Such adventure films as Die Hard, Jaws, and the Indiana Jones epics draw millions of viewers. Tom Clancy’s technological thrillers and Robert Ludlum’s volumes of struggle and terror...
The modern temper shows a fatal tendency to break large moral and historical questions into smaller technocratic ones and to tinker with each of these as a separated “policy problem.” Unfortunately for advocates of this approach, the immigration debate presents us with what is essentially a moral problem, requiring the use of the moral—even of...
WICK ALLISON When one is asked about the future in the context Chronicles has set, the obvious response is to talk in political terms. But conservatism is not a political phenomenon. I have always been uncomfortable with references to the “conservative movement” when I read the political press or some of my favorite columnists. It...
Perhaps since the War Between the States itself, and certainly since the literary Southern Renascence became conscious of itself in the 30’s and 40’s, educated Southerners, and Southern writers especially, have taken their sense of history as a point of pride. Now, as the end of the century approaches, one may be tempted to wonder...
Jessie and Kirk Dawson were in their late 20’s when they I moved into Grove Glen, and Fred Glover’s wife Eva saw at once that they needed work. This was a tight community, not the kind two kids could walk into cold, so Eva took it as her responsibility. She was, after all, the boss’s...
The U.S. Forest Service has custody over 192 million acres of national forest and rangeland—an area nearly equal to Texas and Louisiana combined. Like the National Park Service, the Forest Service is commonly viewed as a stellar example of Progressive Era legislation. However, the Forest Service clearly and recurrently violates the spirit of its stewardship...