Category: Feature

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

13 Oct, 2016

The Long Awaited Death of the Noble Prizes

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The Swedish Academy has announced that the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Robert Zimmerman, aka “Bob Dylan.”  Although the announcement left several hundred literate readers in USA—there are at least that many—scratching their heads, the award should be understood as the latest move in a struggle between the Dumb Swede Academy and the Dumb Norwegian Academy. In their campaigns to make the entire world as dumb as Scandinavia, the two confederacies of dunces have pulled off many coups.  In recent decades, the Dumb Swedes have scored a string of successes, hunting up obscure Third World writers, unknown in...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

12 Oct, 2016

Wednesday’s Child:  Time of Troubles

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Attentive readers may recall my post back in April, “Just Don’t Call it Praetorian,” in which I compared the newly formed National Guard, Russia’s president’s 350,000-strong personal army, to Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) in Nazi Germany.  One reason for its creation, I argued, was to counterbalance the army of Ramzan Kadyrov’s Kremlin loyalists, historically a clone of Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Now another reason has come to the fore, and it deserves a separate post – especially in view of the fact that I first broached the subject with an article in the June 2011 issue of a magazine that the founder...

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Feature / Fleming

11 Oct, 2016

Rabbi Jacob Neusner, R.I.P.

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My friend Marco Respinti just wrote to ask me about Jacob Neusner, who died (so I learned) on October 8.   Perhaps my readers will bear with me, if I share a few thoughts on an old friend. How did I recruit Neusner for Chronicles?  I had read several of his popular articles in a number of places, including (as I recall) The National Review.  Finding writers is a large part of an editor’s job, and that means reading a lot of often uninteresting articles and books.  While Neusner wrote too much and too quickly to become much of a prose...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

10 Oct, 2016

Hating Trump for Fun and Profit

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Yes, we watched the debate, though it seemed a wretched way to spend a Sunday evening.  I won’t pretend that we had planned to say the Rosary before reading Scripture.  I was thinking more along lines of listening to a Gilbert and Sullivan recording—perhaps The Pinafore or Patience in the old D’Oyly Carte versions I grew up with—or a Charlie Chan movie.  I allowed myself to be outvoted by wife and son.  And, while  Donald Trump is by no means as clever as Charlie or as funny as Mantan Moreland, Hillary is far nastier than any of the murderous villains Charlie...

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Diary of a Jerk-Hunter / Feature / Fleming

7 Oct, 2016

Jerks 1, Part D

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Greeks and Romans viewed moderation and seld-restraint as an important ideal.  Our own barbarian ancestors were cut from a different cloth from the.  Celts, Germans, and Slaves were boasters who gloried in victory and were disconsolate in defeat.  For them, self-restraint meant passing up an opportunity to get drunk or have a good time pillaging and raping.  But under the influences exerted by Roman law, the Church, and classical  literature, the upper classes developed rules of conduct that forbade mistreatment of women, children, and the poor, and encouraged an air of self-possession.  As time went on the long forgotten code of the...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

5 Oct, 2016

Second Debate: Death and Transfiguration and Tom Kaine

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Before I watch Tim Kaine debate again, I’m going to have Tom Hanks strap me into Old Sparky and pull the switch, as in “The Green Mile” movie. Basically, the Mark of Kaine said executing murderers is wrong according to his Catholic faith, but he did it as Virginia’s governor because that’s what voters wanted; that killing an unborn child is wrong, again according to his Catholic faith, but abortion should not be banned, even if voters want that, because doing so would violate a woman’s right to “choose,” similar to preventing her from choosing red over blue shoes; and...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

5 Oct, 2016

Wednesday’s Child: Gadarene Light

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Like any massive fraud, whether successful or unsuccessful, Russia’s recent parliamentary election is an interesting subject.  Fraud, swindle, pyramid–perpetrated or operated by all sorts of impostors, flimflam artists, and snake oil salesmen–where would world literature be without them?  Thomas Mann’s Hochstapler, or confidence man, in Confessions of Felix Krull is alone worth a million real-life fraud victims. Conrad would never have written Chance, the masterwork that pulled him out of obscurity, without its central character, the swindler Smith de Barral.  Gogol would not have written Dead Souls without Chichikov, the spectre of Western monopoly capitalism in the guise of a...

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Feature / Fleming

3 Oct, 2016

Properties of Blood I.7: Dueling for Honor, Part C

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I have some work to do on the conclusion of Chapter 6–a discussion of Faulkner’s “An Odor of Verbena” delayed because I can’t see to find my copy of the book.  I am therefore moving forward with Chapter 7. From Judicial Combat to the Private Duel It took many centuries for Germans to begin to accept some of the more humane traditions of Roman law, which would, in any event, be interpreted by kings and their courtiers as justification for ever expanding the royal prerogative and diminishing the primitive liberties of their subjects. Judicial combat, while a far cry from a...

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Diary of a Jerk-Hunter / Feature / Fleming

29 Sep, 2016

Jerks I: Home of the Free, Land of the Jerk, Part C–

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Overgrown Children The exaggerated display of emotions is not limited to children.  Adults who throw temper tantrums are no longer despised, as they once were.  They are often celebrated for their spontaneity or, in the case of successful athletes, adored for getting away with doing as they please.  There was a time when tennis was a gentleman’s game, when the loser congratulated his victorious player and did not blame  the umpires.  Even in the 1970’s, when crybabies like Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe were staging their amateur theatricals on the court, Arthur Ashe was still acting like a grownup, on...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

29 Sep, 2016

First Debate Postmortem: Trump Won Where He Had To

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Pundits and polls are all over the place on who “won” the First Debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Gorgon. But I haven’t seen any major analysis of how they did among those who will decide this election: suburban, white voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. It’s because, assuming he wins Florida and North Carolina, which he likely will, those are the “swing states” he needs to win. Any combination of Ohio + Michigan or Pennsylvania and he’s in like Ronald Reagan. The New York Post reported from a bar in Youngstown, Pa., “[Ken] Reed, 35, is a registered...