“You are a sports hero. Why not spruce the place up with publicity stills of you in the old days, signed pictures from great fighters? You could install satellite TV with boxing matches, rassling, hockey, even football. Everyone else has gambling machines. You could make a thousand or two a month.”
“Sure, I’d increase business and make some money. Would you wanna come?”
When the armies of the Prophet stormed forth from historic obscurity in Arabia and burst upon the enfeebled imperial boundaries, they knew nothing of the ecclesiastical rivalry between the thrones of Elder and New Rome.
Whether Cicero’s statement [that the family is the seed-bed of the commonwealth] is true or not, political dreamers and social revolutionaries bent on destroying or transforming society have written and acted as if it were. With only a few exceptions, every revolutionary political theory and social experiment of the past three hundred years has predicated itself on either the elimination of the family or on a drastic reduction of its traditional autonomy.
The family was born free, everywhere it is in chains. This bogus quotation is a slight twist on the revolutionary declaration that Rousseau used to introduce The Social Contract: “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” Rousseau was an original thinker who expressed himself in a brilliant prose style, but he was entirely wrong about many things and blind to the facts of human nature. To a parent, or nurse, or anyone who has ever seen an infant up close, nothing seems clearer than the fact that man is born entirely dependent upon his mother without whom (or...
‘You would be amazed at how seriously some successful people take themselves, especially on subjects they have never taken the trouble to study. A prominent surgeon or a wealthy industrialist will read a magazine article or see a television program on ancient Greece or the American Revolution and take the notion that not only do they actually know something, but they think the ideas they are parroting are really their own.”
I wish the controversy over confirming Judge Brett Kavanaugh had been about his court decisions on executive power, which I believe grant the chief executive too much authority. Instead, Democrats emphasized their prevailing issue, abortion. Of course, they say it’s about the unsubstantiated allegations against what he did when he was 17, or a bar fight in college. But if you listen to them, it’s really about abortion.
This essay on the Lega Nord was published in February of 1993, after I spend considerable time with members of the Lega and had secured a long interview (followed by subsequent briefer meetings) with Umberto Bossi. Now that the Lega is once again in the ruling coalition and facing the wrath of the EU for cracking down on Third World immigration, it seems a good time to take a second look.
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In this primitive period of East-West unity, Rome established its preeminence above all in the context of theological controversies, where it took on the role of unflinching champion of orthodoxy. The Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople had formulated a creed that became the universal bedrock of faith, but in a certain sense they did not go far enough, for they did not speak explicitly to the different theories about Jesus Christ, His personhood and natures, that arose and clashed in the fifth century. This was a matter of special concern for the emperors in Constantinople, who looked with anxiety to...
Kwame was dreaming the same dream. He was living in the village where his grandfather ruled. His father had taken him into the woods to cut wood, and he was set upon by men in hoods who knocked him out. When he awoke, he was on board a sailing ship, a slave, on the way to America. He was put to work on a farm, where they beat him when he did not understand English or showed any resentment. He ran away several times until the white men crippled his feet: He could still work, but he could never run. Night after night, he dreamed of his village and the community of love shared by his family and the other people of the village. When he awoke from the dream, he was in a cold sweat, and his wife Beauty brought him a cup of boiled chicory with milk. She was all he had to cling to in a world filled with ugliness and horror…
