We’re about 50 miles east of Toledo, cruising along the Ohio Turnpike on our way to Cleveland for the wedding of longtime Chronicles contributor Tom Piatak. Satisfied from a lunch of cabbage rolls, paprikas dumplings, and Hungarian sausage at the original Tony Packo’s, I have Amy’s MacBook open on my lap and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. album shuffling on the iPod. “Dancing in the Dark” isn’t helping me shake the feeling that I should quit browsing news items in NetNewsWire, avoiding the writing I intended to do. (“I get up in the evening, and I ain’t got nothing to say / I come home in the morning, go to bed feeling the same way.”)

The Rockford Register Star’s newsfeed provides only headlines, so I’m running through it quickly and inattentively. As I move on to the next item, the words of the previous headline finally register: “Local author, historian Lundin dies.”

Startled, I read Amy the headline, then pull out the cellphone to call the office. When Aaron answers, I ask him if he’s heard the news. “I don’t have internet access out here on the turnpike, so I’ve only seen the headline. What happened?”

He hasn’t heard, so he pulls up the Register Star’s website. The story is under a different headline now: “Lundin was Rockford’s ‘Historical Consciousness.’” Indeed. Rockford has had her share of historians over the years (though relatively few serious ones since the 1940’s), but only Lundin ever truly earned the title of “Rockford’s historian.” Through his books, most notably Rockford: An Illustrated History, and his constant presence whenever and wherever anyone might require an historical perspective on the challenges facing Rockford (especially in manufacturing), Lundin worked tirelessly to remind Rockfordians of their heritage. His interest didn’t stop at the borders of the city, or even of Winnebago County—a proud Swede, he wrote a brief book on Swedish immigration to Rockford—but like every good patriot, he put those broader interests in the service of his hometown. He placed himself in its service as well: Jon cut short a promising academic career at Yale and Oxford, where he was completing his dissertation on a Jacobite poet, to return home. It may not be fair to say that, if something had no relevance to Rockford, Jon wasn’t interested in it; but in the time I knew him, he certainly was much less likely to talk about it, and he always had a way of turning the conversation back to what did interest him—and what should have interested his interlocutors as well.

Unfortunately for me, our conversations were too few. I had met Jon a few times over the years, but my first extended discussion with him was held standing up in my office, when he came to buy a stack of the November 2005 issue of Chronicles. My column that month (“Revitalizing Rockford”) was based on a speech I had given at a one-day conference on the crisis in manufacturing. Jon had come to the lunchtime talk by Rockford Institute board chairman David Hartman on border-adjusted value-added taxation, but he couldn’t make it to the evening presentation, where I had presented a Frank Capra-esque solution to the crisis, drawn from the history of manufacturing in Rockford and from the contemporary experience of organizations such as the Manufacturing Alliance of the Rock River Valley.

When the column came out, MARRV board member Bob Trojan sent a copy to Lundin, which inspired the unexpected visit and the purchase. I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise if I had wanted to—but I didn’t want to, because it was fascinating just to listen to Jon explain the overlap he saw between his ideas and mine, and how manufacturing could yet be revived in Rockford, and how the future didn’t have to look like the present. He asked if he could come back sometime to talk at greater length, and then, without warning, he said goodbye and was down the stairs and out the door.

Jon never did come back to the office, but, a little over a year later, we met up again, this time at an awards ceremony for MARRV. I had written a profile of MARRV in this space (“A Third Way,” October 2006), and Dee Lynn, MARRV’s secretary, had called to ask me to come. Under the pressure of deadlines, I almost blew it off at the last minute. I arrived late, and, on the way in, a young lady handed me a form to fill out for door prizes. I almost passed the opportunity by, but she gave me a pen, and I obediently filled out the ticket.

The top prize, I discovered when the drawing began, was a big-screen TV donated by Wal-Mart, and I spent the next several minutes in fear of actually winning it. I didn’t have to worry: My ticket was drawn a few prizes before. Jon’s friend Mike Molander had donated autographed copies of Rockford: An Illustrated History and Lundin’s Swedetown, and I couldn’t have been more pleased to win them. I’ve consulted Rockford: An Illustrated History extensively over the years, but I had always had to check a copy out of the library. Mike, who had attended the conference on manufacturing and read my article on MARRV, insisted that Jon should personalize the autographs.

When I presented the books to him, Jon told me how sorry he was that I had won his books and not the TV. I looked up at him in surprise—he stood a few inches above six feet—and saw the twinkle in his eyes. He had about as much love for Wal-Mart as I do. We spent the next half-hour discussing my columns, manufacturing, Wal-Mart, MARRV, National Lock (one of the greatest manufacturing success stories in the history of the United States, let alone in Rockford), and P.A. Peterson, perhaps Jon’s greatest inspiration and one of the giants of Rockford industry, whose investments in local companies, and his philanthropic work, helped usher in Rockford’s golden age. Then Jon asked if we might meet sometime for lunch, said goodbye, and once again was gone.

Thus began my acquaintance with Jon Lundin. I wish I could write “friendship,” but that would be claiming more than I have a right to, and it would do a disservice to the many, many men and women in Rockford with whom Jon maintained lifelong friendships. I think that we were headed there, but we ran out of time.

After our discussion, I decided that I wouldn’t wait for Jon to set a lunch date. I sent him a copy of my speech from the 2006 meeting of the John Randolph Club (published as “Are the Good Times Really Over?” the following January) and reminded him of his need for food. A few weeks later, he called. In the avalanche of e-mails that he received every day, he’d apparently missed mine. But Bob Trojan had once again intervened, sending him a copy of my speech. “Let’s have lunch,” Jon said. “Do you like Laotian food?”

Aaron and I hadn’t been to the Lanexang, on the lower end of Seventh Street near Broadway (an area once known as “Swede Heaven”), in several years. Jon, however, ate there often, and always the same dish, and he always asked politely for a slight alteration, even though the waitress already knew how he liked his food. Their exchange illustrated a certain humility, a sense that Jon had that there was no particular reason why anyone should remember something about him, and that humility was reflected in our conversation. He offered me a copy of an editorial that he had written and told me I could keep it—if I wanted to. He had been trying to work through some of the same issues involving trade and manufacturing and free enterprise that I had touched on in my columns, and he wanted to know how our thoughts had so closely converged. The truth is that his historical work had helped me throw off the last vestiges of economic determinism. The great entrepreneurs and inventors of Rockford hadn’t worried at all about comparative advantage, and the best factory owners had always paid their workers a living wage, no matter what others were paying in other parts of the country—and they still made a profit. We talked about whether competition from China made that impossible today, but Jon wasn’t too worried—the answer lay in out-innovating the Chinese, discovering new processes and products that they simply could not produce (not yet, anyway).

As we were leaving, Jon pointed out a house at the end of the parking lot. “That was P.A. Peterson’s house,” back when Seventh Street was the heart of Rockford, before Peterson himself moved up to State Street. Mostly covered in siding, the stone exterior showed through at points, and Aaron and I suddenly saw through new eyes a building we had passed hundreds of times.

We had only one more lunch with Jon, again at the Lanexang. We talked about MARRV, and the recent announcement that this cooperative organization that we had both firmly believed would play an important role in the future of manufacturing in Rockford had been bought by SupplyCore, a Rockford defense contractor. Jon didn’t hide his disappointment. Rockford would need something to take its place, and Jon was already giving some thought to the matter.

Jon had to leave early to sign some papers drawn up by the Illinois Department of Transportation. IDOT, he explained, is widening Kishwaukee Street based on a traffic study conducted years ago, when far more factory workers and trucks traveled the road. Though the current width can more than handle the current traffic, the bureaucracy could not be swayed, and IDOT had raised the threat of eminent domain on several houses that Jon had restored. In the end, he had convinced them to take just parts of the lawn and to save the houses, but he had to sign the papers that afternoon or the deal was off. Still, he hung around until less than five minutes before his meeting, not wanting to cut the conversation short.

As he left, he promised to get me a copy of his newest book, a biography of Rockford manufacturing legend Howard Colman. As Aaron and I settled up the bill, we talked about all of the questions we had for Jon that we would have to save for our next lunch. Now, those questions will go unanswered. I wish I woulda known, I wish I coulda called ya, just to say goodbye . . .

Jon Lundin was 64, though he could have passed for 15 years shy of that. Death came for him just a month before his 30th wedding anniversary. Two and a half months earlier, on February 22, as my family and I waited for a table at Altamore Ristorante to celebrate Amy’s birthday, we could hear laughter and sounds of celebration in the dining room. While we were wondering whom the party was for, Jon came out, eyes twinkling and face flushed with excitement. I introduced him to Amy and told him it was her birthday. “It’s my birthday, too!” he exclaimed, then blurted out, “How old are you?” When Amy told him that she was 39, he replied, laughing, “So am I!” On one level, that was probably close to the truth: Jon had energy and vitality unmatched in men half his age. He left behind more unfinished projects than most men even start in a lifetime.

Another song ends, and Amy shuts off the iPod. I look up from the laptop and see our exit approaching. We haven’t heard all of the album, and I consider turning it back on until we reach our hotel. I glance at the screen to see which song is next, and then unplug the iPod. “Your Hometown” is one of my favorite songs, but the last thing I want to hear about right now is “Main Street’s white-washed windows and vacant stores.” Today, I want to see my hometown through the eyes of one of the greatest of its native sons, who, in the Prologue to Rockford: An Illustrated History, displayed an honesty and integrity lacking in far too many historians, amateur or professional:

The book is in all respects a highly personal history whose approach is both qualitative and selective. I have left out some stories and included others for the simple reason that I liked some stories better than others, and I have depended on anecdotes to make my points because I think they are more apt to be remembered than simple facts. . . .

Local history is always a mixed bag of fact and fantasy, including a number of things of questionable authenticity that we are reluctant to ignore. I have made every effort to corroborate the accuracy of the details in the following pages and have tried to be objective in recounting them; but I still believe the only real reason for writing a book such as this is that it’s interesting, and whether entirely true or not, that it makes a good story.

It does, and he did. Requiescat in pace, Jon Lundin.

Scott P. Richert is Chronicles' executive editor.

This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Hoax

Produced and distributed by Miramax Films
Directed by Lasse Hallstrom
Screenplay by William Wheeler

With The Hoax, Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom and his screenwriter, William Wheeler, have at long last given Clifford Irving his due. They have done so by portraying their subject with about as much honesty as Irving did Howard Hughes when he concocted his infamous fake autobiography of the billionaire. They have altered, misshaped, abridged, and invented. In short, they have lied, exuberantly. While I’ve frequently chided directors and writers for such shenanigans, I cannot stir myself to moral indignation in this case. By thumbing their noses at the facts, Hallstrom and Wheeler have aspired to a higher truthiness, as Stephen Colbert might say. Their narrative method can be understood as a gloss on Irving’s own fusion of reckless imagination and shameless chutzpah. As such, it pays fitting tribute to a literary scoundrel while exposing the dunces in high places who allowed him to get as far as he did.

Playing Irving, Richard Gere sets the tone of this satire when he explains to his friend and accomplice Richard Suskind (Alfred Molina) how he conned the editors at McGraw-Hill and Time. His technique is simplicity itself. “The more outrageous I sound,” he gleefully confides, “the more convincing I am!”

Of course, compared to Irving, Hallstrom and Wheeler are pikers in the lying department, but they have tried admirably. They portray Irving in 1971 as a financially strapped novelist about to be evicted from his Upstate New York home. Undaunted by looming indigence, he dons a tuxedo to attend Truman Capote’s masked Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, where he meets his editor, played by the winsomely elegant Hope Davis. She takes the festive occasion to inform him that his latest manuscript, Rudnick’s Problem, has been rejected. She doesn’t say why, but we are left to infer that it is because it’s such a transparent attempt to cash in on Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. To add to Irving’s gathering gloom, he glimpses his former and still ominous mistress Nina von Pallandt, the singing baroness, across the celebrity-crowded room. All this is presented in a skillfully marshaled montage orchestrated to make Irving’s plunge into charlatanism seem all but inevitable. There is a slight difficulty, however: None of it is true. As of 1971, Irving had been residing on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza for nine years, and he was reasonably well off. As for Capote’s party, it was held five years earlier, in 1966. Furthermore, as far as I can discover, Irving never tried his hand—his literary hand, that is—at Portnoy’s enthusiasm.

Why these deviations from the truth? I can only think that Wheeler was impatient with the reality. He wanted an Irving driven by economic desperation and goaded by being just outside the literary world’s magic showroom, his nose flattened against its glittering pane. This would seem to make for a better story. But, as so often happens, the truth is far more interesting. Irving had been publishing with McGraw-Hill for 12 years, had cultivated good relations with his editors, and had recently signed a four-book contract. He had every reason to expect a successful future. Yet he preferred to gamble these enviable prospects on a lunatic criminal venture that promised shaky odds at best. Why?

I recall being puzzled by the affair when the news first broke in. How, I had wondered, did Irving expect to get away with it? Prompted by the film, I’ve done a little research and now see how a clever but fatally self-absorbed New York wise guy could be mightily tempted to perpetrate such a scam. First, the mysterious Hughes was hot, profitable copy. There were three biographies of the aviator turned womanizing showman written between 1967 and 1971, each woven from generally available information, tabloid gossip, and sordid speculation. Second, Hughes hadn’t made a public appearance or statement since 1957. Only an inner circle of his upper-echelon employees knew with any certainty where he was living, and many of his factotums hadn’t seen him face to face for over a decade. Third—and this is crucial—Irving had hit the mother lode of genuine Hughesiana. He had stolen the unpublished memoirs of Hughes’ former chief executive officer, the 80-year-old Noah Dietrich, who had worked for the great man for 32 years and knew where the bodies were buried. Fourth, Hughes was rumored to be near death. This last detail almost certainly clinched the matter. Irving must have calculated that, once Hughes had taken off on his final flight, there would be no one who could convincingly debunk his as-told-to autobiography.

Let’s not overlook the fabulously foolish executives at McGraw-Hill. On this score, Wheeler’s script shines with a wicked sheen. Despite initial doubts and ongoing suspicions, these ladies and gentlemen became the unwitting—or is that witless?—co-conspirators in Irving’s fraud. The first to fall under Irving’s spell was his editor, a Chinese-American woman whom the film has unaccountably transformed into a disconcertingly round-eyed Davis. When she learns that Irving has reeled in the Big Kahuna, she chortles hyperbolically that “this book will sell more copies than the Bible.” Like so many in her industry, she’s clearly convinced that sales volume is the only criterion for a book’s worth. Harold McGraw, aging grandson of the McGraw who founded the house, has doubts about the project, however. Although a professional handwriting analyst has certified the authenticity of Irving’s forged letters from Hughes to himself, he’s put off by the fictional Hughes’s supposed demands for more and more money. (Once Irving thought he had the publishing house hooked, he couldn’t resist having his imaginary Hughes escalate his original demand for $400,000 to $1 million, the check to be transmitted to him by Irving himself since, of course, Hughes wasn’t about to reveal his whereabouts. “It’s sleazy,” McGraw complains to the company’s CEO, Shelton Fisher (a marvelously calculating Stanley Tucci). McGraw then makes what seems at first a needless declaration: “I’m a publisher.” But this is not a job description. He is invoking the moral standards to which his trade is supposedly committed. Made of sterner stuff, Fisher all but yawns in McGraw’s face. “You’re an employee, Harold,” he reminds the older man, belittlingly. “Roll the presses.” And so they did—only to become book burners when the truth emerged. Here is the film’s satiric target: The hypocritical calculus with which modern publishing balances morality with greed. Hallstrom has made of Irving a lens to expose this deliciously unsavory stew of everyday corruption among both the knowing and the deluded. His film reminds us that publishers, as their title implies, exert enormous control over our public discourse. It is not surprising, then, that they should be jealous of their power and strive to protect their prerogatives under a mantle of moral seriousness, especially when they are most devoted to turning a buck. At all costs, they must be believed. How else can they prevent the public from snickering unprofitably at the ghost-written ruminations to be found in the Oprah-endorsed memoirs of our political leaders, each a study in studied sincerity?

Hallstrom has been exceptionally well served by his cast. Richard Gere creates a five-foot-ten version of the six-foot-four Irving, thus implicitly cutting him down to size. I’ve never thought much of Gere as an actor. Perhaps this is because of the roles he has chosen. He has always seemed to me to emanate a sleazy self-assurance that’s as much personal as thespian. He reminds me of a clever roué who is just self-regarding enough to remain unscathed by his debaucheries. But here, made to resemble Irving under a kinked coiffure and behind an enlarged proboscis, Gere uses his slippery persona to great effect. He makes Irving the kind of liar who is so obvious that you can’t help doubting your instinctive distrust. No one would be quite so brazen. His Irving is a manipulative wonder, spinning stories of meeting Hughes in Mexico and Puerto Rico, which we watch unfold in hue-drained color-film stock, suggesting the source of these scenes to be the more shadowy recesses of his larcenous brain.

One scene perfectly reveals Irving’s devious showmanship. He’s at McGraw-Hill’s offices with his accomplice Suskind, talking up his interviews with Hughes. As if from nowhere, Suskind interrupts Irving while he’s in full fictional tilt. “Prune,” Suskind blurts. The general conversation ceases as every eye turns toward him. “He gave me a prune,” he continues unhelpfully, staring back at the puzzled faces. After an awkward pause, Irving smoothly resumes control. When they met Hughes in Mexico, he explains, they found the hypochondriacal billionaire sitting cross-legged on his net-tented bed, from which dais he lectured them on the virtues of organic produce, offering Suskind a single prune to prove his point.

Although Suskind helped Irving pull off his scam, he was never in the same league as a supposed friend. Irving hustled him into his scheme to do the donkey work of research. Accordingly, Molina plays Suskind as a comical plodder hopelessly out of step with the glib Irving. This makes Suskind the perfect foil to reveal Irving’s talent for the scam, and Molina has seized the opportunity to provide the film’s biggest laughs. At the same time, Hallstrom never lets the fun obscure what a bastard Irving is—a man who does not hesitate to fast-talk his slow-witted friend into taking part in his high-stakes criminal plot. Nor does Irving scruple to involve his wife, Edith (Marcia Gay Harden). She’s a Swiss national, and he makes use of her to set up a bank account in Geneva under the name H.R. Hughes, so she can cash the advance checks McGraw-Hill draws to the phantom Hughes. For their assistance, Suskind and Edith were convicted along with Irving. Suskind did 5 months; Edith, 14; Irving, 17.

Irving, of course, is a survivor. Undeterred by his disgrace, he has gone on to publish novels and journalism, including The Hoax, the account of the Hughes affair that Hallstrom has used for his film. What’s more, you can visit his website and download the offending tome itself, The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, for $5.95. I’ve scanned the opening chapters, which Irving has graciously made available for free. They seem to me so self-evidently fraudulent that I’m amazed the McGraw-Hill brass didn’t do time alongside their errant author for the crime of willfully believing him. Irving repeatedly quotes his Hughes so as to build a firewall between the book and suspicions of fraud. He has Hughes insist on absolute secrecy, firmly establishing that no one in his company, none of his attorneys or advisors, is to know anything about the project. Quite convenient. Then, more entertainingly, there are the passages in which Irving compares himself to Hughes in order to celebrate his own accomplishments as an author and a man. “We were both tall—Hughes nearly six foot three and I an inch taller. Tall men instinctively understand each other’s physical stance, the still-living memory of adolescent awkwardness, the vulnerability.” Nice touch, that taller.

Elsewhere, we’re treated to Hughes’ assessment of Irving. “You’re an outsider, of a sort—a kind of cultivated maverick. . . . That’s probably why I get along with you. I have to like any man who goes his own way.”

How could the McGraw-Hill people not have heard in Irving’s self-infatuated grandiosity the voice of a venal fabulist? Easy. Their ears were ringing with the sound a well-fed register makes: Ka-ching!

George McCartney is Chronicles' film editor.

This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

According to the briefing, “Africa represents about 35 percent of the world’s land mass, about 25 percent of the world’s population . . . [which includes] 400 million Muslims, 400 million non-Muslims—very significant amount of natural resource . . . but most especially a remarkable human potential on the continent.” Yet, organizing the new command on the basis of continental geography rather than on a political and strategic basis is problematic. The Horn of Africa, which has been a radical Muslim hot spot, should have stayed in Central Command; the Mediterranean coastal states should have been left in the European Command.

The Bush administration is not alone in looking to expand its influence in Africa. A Beijing Summit on China-Africa Cooperation was held last November, following numerous visits to Africa by Chinese President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, and Foreign Minister Li Zhao­xing. President Hu made another trip to Africa in February.

The Washington-based Jamestown Foundation devoted the April 5 issue of its journal China Brief to Africa. Mauro De Lorenzo, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted in the lead article that “What distinguishes China’s involvement in Africa from that of other nations is that it is accompanied by a clear government policy in support of African commercial ventures, abundant financing and tax benefits for Chinese firms operating abroad and robust diplomacy toward the region.” Chinese interest, however, is focused on securing raw materials and energy supplies, not local economic development. Most of the increase in trade since 2000 has been oil imports from the Sudan and Angola. Beijing likes to call this “complementary” trade, paid for by Chinese exports of manufactured goods. But this is also the old colonial pattern that keeps the resource suppliers underdeveloped, while their fuel and metals go to support economic growth in China.

China has come under criticism for her protection of the Islamic Sudanese regime, which is waging genocide against non-Muslim Africans in Darfur. Beijing has used its veto power at the United Nations to block sanctions and limit the use of peacekeeping forces. Supplying weapons and training to regime forces and deploying substantial Chinese security troops to protect its investments undercuts Beijing’s claim that it opposes “intervention” in Africa’s internal affairs. It just opposes intervention by others. Beijing has also been arming the brutal, failed regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

In the late 19th century, there was a “scramble for Africa” among the major European powers. In the course of two decades, the entire continent was placed under European flags. Britain held the most lucrative areas, Egypt and South Africa, the latter attracting substantial white settlement. Despite investing much blood and treasure there, however, London’s efforts returned little. Even in 1906, with the region fairly stable, Africa (including Egypt) was a market for less than ten percent of British exports.

Sub-Saharan Africa was a strategic backwater during both world wars. During the Cold War, the Soviets tried to exploit national-liberation movements to spread their influence. Fidel Castro provided Cuban troops to spearhead Moscow’s efforts, but, instead of wealth and glory, the expeditions brought home only an AIDS epidemic.

In 2006, U.S. trade with Sub-Saharan Africa showed a deficit of $47.1 billion, with exports of only $12.1 billion against imports of $59.2 billion. Most of this trade was oil related, and with only two countries: Nigeria ($27.9 billion of imports against $2.2 billion of exports) and Angola ($11.7 billion of imports against $1.5 billion in exports). A two-way trade volume of $71.3 billion with this region is trivial out of a total U.S. world-trade volume of $3.6 trillion. Africa is still a poor, high-risk region, as the Chinese learned on April 24 when Somali rebels raided their oil field at Abole, Ethiopia, killing 74 local and Chinese workers.

At his briefing, Henry said “that AFRICOM was not being stood up in response to Chinese presence on the continent. It was not being stood up solely for the effort of enhanced counterterrorism, and it was not being stood up in order to secure resources.” So why is this new command being created? It fills a gap on Pentagon maps, but it appears to have no strategic mission worth the effort. With American forces overstretched in regions of much greater value, it can only be hoped that Henry’s claim that “AFRICOM does not mean the dramatic increase in resources to the African continent from the Department of Defense or from the U.S. government” will be firm policy.

William R. Hawkins is senior fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council.

This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

From 1996 to 1999, the war in Kosovo was an internal conflict between the secessionist KLA—which, at one time, was designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department—and the armed forces of the rump Yugoslavia of Serbia and Montenegro.

Citing an alleged massacre of Albanian civilians by Serbian forces in the village of Racak in January 1999, the U.S. government and NATO allies officially intervened. Meeting in Rambouillet, France, that February and March, they drafted a “peace accord,” which offered the KLA de facto independence for Kosovo immediately, and de jure independence in three years. During that interval, Kosovo would be administered as a NATO protectorate. The U.S. government introduced a military annex to the accord under which NATO personnel would be immune from all legal actions—civil, criminal, or administrative—and NATO forces would have unfettered access to any and all parts of Yugoslavia. And all the costs would be borne by Belgrade. Yugoslavia would have been a virtual colony of NATO.

When Belgrade refused to sign the accord, NATO attacked. The war lasted from March 24 to June 10, 1999. Kosovo became a U.N. protectorate (UNMIK), whose final status—some form of independence from Serbia—would be determined in the future. That future is now, and it is posing political and strategic problems for the Bush administration.

U.S. foreign policy toward Kosovo, which culminated in military intervention in 1999, was a continuation of the policy Washington had pursued in Bosnia and Croatia in 1995. Each of the three wars contributed to a profound transformation in U.S. foreign policy. In Washington’s eyes, the end of the Cold War meant a transition from a bipolar world, which functioned within a set of political, military, and legal restraints, to a unipolar one. The U.S. government was now the world’s hyperpower, without rival or limitation. For Washington, the Yugoslav wars provided an opportunity to demonstrate this to the rest of the world, thereby accomplishing several key objectives.

First, Washington set out to demonize the Serbs in order to discredit and suppress not just Serbian ethnicity but any manifestation of ethnic nationalism, since such nationalism undermines the legitimacy of the dominant ideology of the virtues of multiethnic states and transnational corporations.

Second, U.S. policymakers sought to dismember an inconvenient state—in this case, one supported by Russia, thereby establishing a precedent. Later, that precedent would be applied to the union of Serbia and Montenegro, then Serbia, and, perhaps, even to Iran. In so doing, Washington hoped to weaken and isolate Russia, both internationally and in Europe.

It also established another precedent, in promoting ethnic cleansing by proxy. The Clinton administration covertly armed, trained, supported, and advised the government of Croatia for the August 1995 military offensive known as Operation Storm. Though it was aimed at the secessionist Republic of Serbian Krajina, it resulted in the expulsion of an estimated 300,000 Serbs from Croatia. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), after ten years, the Serbs still have not been permitted to return to Croatia. The precedent was repeated in 1999 when the Red Cross reported that the KLA had expelled between 200,000 and 250,000 Serbs from Kosovo. It was repeated yet again in 2001 in Afghanistan, in the wake of the U.S. invasion, when our “ally,” the Northern Alliance, consisting mostly of ethnic Tajiks, sought to expel a million ethnic Pash-tuns from northern Afghanistan. According to the UNHCR, nearly 100,000 Pashtuns fled, becoming refugees either elsewhere in Afghanistan or in Pakistan. In Iraq, both Kurdish and Shiite militias, whose political parties are members of the national government—another ally of the Bush administration—currently engage in ethnic cleansing. In Kirkuk, Kurds are reversing the process of “Arabization,” while in Baghdad, Shiites are cleansing Sunni neighborhoods.

By supporting Muslim demands for a united Bosnia and an independent Kosovo, Washington hoped to persuade Muslims, especially in Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—all key U.S. allies—that they are wrong to regard U.S. foreign policy toward Palestinians, Kashmiris, Moros, and Uighurs as evidence of any hostility toward Islam on our part.

Washington also sought to encourage Muslims in Albania, Bosnia, and Kosovo to promote a secularized, individualistic Islam, in which mosque and state are separate, which would undermine the appeal of traditional Islam, especially in the West.

With the Cold War ended, Washington sought to justify NATO’s continued existence by waging war on Bosnia and Kosovo. These wars required a radical redefinition of NATO’s mission and area of responsibility. These ad hoc military interventions became official policy after September 11. NATO’s 2002 Prague Summit Declaration stated,

We, the Heads of State and Government of the member countries of the North Atlantic Alliance, met today to enlarge our Alliance and further strengthen NATO to meet the grave new threats and profound security challenges of the 21st century . . . so that NATO can better carry out the full range of its missions and respond collectively to those challenges, including the threat posed by terrorism and by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery . . . NATO must be able to field forces that can move quickly to wherever they are needed . . . to sustain operations over distance and time . . . to achieve their objectives.

Thus, NATO is no longer a defensive alliance, and its sphere is no longer restricted to Europe. This enables the U.S. government to maintain, even increase, its Cold War level of influence in Europe and provides Washington with a reservoir of bases and troops from NATO countries to help implement its policy objectives as far away as Afghanistan and Iraq.

In attacking Yugoslavia, Washington also sought to test the ability of the U.S. government to impose political settlements that advance its interests. The more contradictory and arbitrary those settlements are—rejecting national self-determination in Bosnia but championing it in Kosovo—the more our power is projected.

The final status of Kosovo is to be decided by the U.N. Security Council. Its special envoy, Martti Ahtisaari, a former president of Finland, is reportedly recommending independence in all but name. (See www.unosek.org/unosek/index.html.) The Serbs have rejected this plan, and, while Moscow has stated that it will veto this recommendation unless both the Serbs and the Albanians agree to it, Washington favors it. Such a plan, if implemented, would fail to bring peace or justice to that region of the Balkans.

Any U.N. Security Council decision is expected to reflect “The Guiding Principles for a Settlement of Kosovo’s Status” set out in 2005 by the United States, England, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia—collectively known as the Contact Group. Principle Six declares that “There will be no changes in the current territory of Kosovo, i.e. no partition of Kosovo and no union of Kosovo with any country or part of any country.”

The current proposal for Kosovo independence violates international law while claiming to uphold it; it institutionalizes ethnic and religious discrimination and seeks to sanction both in law, denying the Christian Serbs of Kosovo the legal right to national self-determination, while granting and denying that right to the Muslim Albanians of Kosovo.

If national self-determination under international law forbids the partition of a territory, then U.N. member-states Bangladesh, Ireland, Israel, Moldova, Pakistan, and all the successor states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are illegitimate. So, too, are the western borders of U.N. member-states Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which were shaped by the post-World War II partition of Germany.

The plan both allows Albanians in Kosovo the right to secede from Serbia and denies them the right to unite with Albania. If the U.N. Security Council insists this restriction is in accordance with international law on the right to national self-determination, then it should also insist that the unifications of Germany, Vietnam, and Yemen were illegal, and future unifications of Ireland or Korea would have to be prohibited as well. Conversely, it would have to consider the Republic of Somaliland, which seceded from Somalia, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which seceded from Cyprus—states the United Nations refuses to recognize—to be, in fact, legitimate.

The plan advocates multiethnic statehood while dismembering a multiethnic state. The push for Kosovo independence is predicated upon it being a multiethnic state. As part of Serbia, however, it is already in one. By championing the concept of multiethnicity, the proposal undermines not only its own justification for Kosovo’s independence but the legitimacy of all the successor states to the former Yugoslavia: Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia—none of which are as multiethnic or as multireligious as was the former Yugoslavia.

Both Bosnia and Serbia constitute federal republics. Bosnia consists of two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Republika Srpska. Serbia has two autonomous provinces: Kosovo-Metohija and Vojvodina. Both Bosnia and Kosovo are U.N. protectorates. Yet, Muslim Kosovo is to gain independence, while Christian Republika Srpska faces abolition and consolidation in a unitary Bosnian state. Such a policy is nothing short of institutionalized ethnic and religious discrimination.

The Security Council claims that Kosovo is an exception in international law. The legal principles announced for it are deemed to have no applicability to other disputes. This maneuver is an attempt to deny the protection of international law to parties in three specific conflicts—Transnistria in Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. Such an arbitrary claim of exceptionality undermines the moral authority of international law, making it nothing more than a law of the jungle defined and enforced for the benefit of the more powerful states.

A just and enduring political settlement for Kosovo requires that Bosnia be treated in an identical manner. If Kosovo has the right to secede from Serbia, then the Republika Srpska must have the right to secede from Bosnia.

An independent Kosovo must have the right to unite with Albania. Similarly, an independent Republika Srpska must have the right to unite with Serbia.

To resolve the Serbian refugee crisis, there should be a population exchange between Serbia and Montenegro, on the one hand, and Kosovo and Albania, on the other. Serbian refugees would agree not to return to Kosovo, while the Serbs still there would agree to relocate to Serbia. In exchange, Albanians in Serbia and Montenegro would relocate to Kosovo and Albania. There is a legal precedent for this in the “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations” (1923). With the approval of the international community, it successfully transferred over a million Greeks from Turkey to Greece and 400,000 Turks from Greece to Turkey. Other examples of successful population transfers include those between Bulgaria and Turkey in 1913 and 1950-89; Bulgaria and Greece in 1919; Poland and the Soviet Union in 1945; and Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1946.

The Bush administration favors the current proposal for Kosovo’s independence without appreciating the problems, political and strategic, it presents to U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, the White House is behaving as if the United States, as the world’s hyperpower, can overcome any problems that may arise—a notion that Afghanistan and Iraq should have dispelled.

The immediate problem is that Kosovo, perhaps more than Bosnia, has become a haven for Islamic militants and for organized crime. Both pose direct threats to Europe, and independence will only make it worse—for Europe and for the “War on Terror.”

If the Security Council proposal is implemented, the secessionist regimes of Transnistria in Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, will demand international recognition of their independence. Such official recognition would likely begin with Russia and then snowball. Since the Bush administration opposed independence for these regions, this would be viewed by many, including many Americans, as a political victory for Moscow and a political defeat for Washington.

Next would be Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenians there will also insist on international recognition of their independence from Azerbaijan—something that both Turkey and Azerbaijan oppose. Armenian-Americans, however, support it, and they constitute an influential ethnic lobbying group. The Bush administration would be caught in the middle, and any decision would displease an important ally.

The strategic prize, however, is the Crimea, which has been part of Russia since 1783. With the Bolshevik Revolution, it became an autonomous republic, then an oblast of the Russian SFSR. In 1954, jurisdiction was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR as a symbolic gesture honoring the historic unity of the two Slavic peoples. When the Soviet Union fell, the Crimea reluctantly agreed to remain part of the Ukraine, but as an autonomous republic. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the Crimea is Russian. It is home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. If the U.N. Security Council votes on independence for Kosovo, the government of the Crimea would likely call for a vote on Crimean independence, which would easily pass, then demand international recognition. This would be followed by a vote on union with Russia. And Moscow would certainly accept the return of the Crimea to Russia.

This would be a major defeat for U.S. foreign policy. Since the Yugoslav wars of the 90’s, Washington has assumed that Russia, because of her size, natural resources, and nuclear weapons, has the potential to reemerge as a rival. To prevent this, the U.S. government has pursued a policy of containment. It supported the expansion of NATO eastward to include former Soviet republics, in violation of promises made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The anticipated impact of NATO enlargement, however, was trumped by Russia’s emergence as a principal supplier of oil and natural gas to Europe. Washington used the war in Afghanistan to displace Russia from the former Soviet Central Asian republics. After its initial success, which culminated in Kyrgyzstan’s “Tulip Revolution,” the U.S. government has seen its influence decline, while Russia’s has grown. In the Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” Washington supported the overthrow of a pro-Russian government and its replacement with a pro-American one. The new government soon announced its intention to join NATO and to expel Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea—to humiliate Moscow and disrupt its naval operations. Then, a general election replaced that government with another pro-Russian one. If independence for Kosovo results in the return of the Crimea to Russia, U.S. foreign policy will have come full circle since the Yugoslav wars. The world would no longer be unipolar, and the U.S. government would no longer be the world’s hyperpower.

Joseph E. Fallon writes from Rye, New York.

This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

So Giuliani told a double lie—the falsehood that Paul had claimed that the war in Iraq inspired the terrorist attacks of September 11 (a chronological impossibility), and the greater absurdity that he’d never heard of the blowback theory.

If the Stupid Party does not want to lose the 2008 election, not to mention its tenuous hold on solid conservative voters, it had better think twice about nominating “America’s Mayor” for president. A liar, an adulterer, and a leftist goon, Giuliani has already out-Clintoned Bill Clinton, and on many of the same low crimes and misdemeanors.

Topping the list of the goombah’s infamous deeds are his sordid marital monkeyshines. He dumped his first wife on grounds similar to those used by Henry VIII when he tossed Catherine of Aragon overboard. After 14 years of marriage, Giuliani “discovered” that his wife was a second cousin and received a declaration of nullity from the Church. He then married Donna Hanover, whose principal claim to fame is having wangled the lead role in an off-Broadway production of The Vagina Monologues. While married to Hanover, Giuliani jumped between the sheets with his next wife, Judith Nathan, the home wrecker who was prowling Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence, before the mayor’s second marriage ended. Hanover learned of her forthcoming divorce when Giuliani announced it at a press conference. Not surprisingly, Hanover accused Giuliani of “open and notorious adultery” and received a restraining order to bar Nathan from the mansion. At least Clinton has been down the aisle only once.

Also like Clinton, Giuliani has parlayed politics into tremendous wealth. In December 2001, just three months after the terrorist attacks, Giuliani opened a consulting firm, Giuliani Partners LLC. The original principals included Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief accused of ties to the Mob and guilty of misdemeanor corruption; a former priest accused of covering up sex abuse in the Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island; and an FBI agent who pilfered souvenirs from Ground Zero. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, the firm collected more than $100 million in fees over five years, and Giuliani became a multimillionaire. His clients “have included a pharmaceutical company that, with Giuliani’s help, resolved a lengthy Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with only a fine; a confessed drug smuggler who hired Giuliani to ensure his security company could do business with the federal government; and the horse racing industry, eager to recover public confidence after a betting scandal.”

For “someone who lived through” September 11, Giuliani is rather soft on illegal immigration. In the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald wrote that the man who would be president went to the mat to stop the federal government from enforcing the country’s immigration laws. “Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. . . . The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to ‘terrorize people.’ Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government.”

Giuliani is also a staunch supporter of abortion. So wedded is he to the cause of infanticide that he claims it for conservatives. To justify legally murdering the unborn, he observed that “a strict constructionist” Supreme Court, out of respect for precedent, would never overturn Roe v. Wade. Of course, Giuliani is of the “personally opposed, but” persuasion, a reformulated version of the famous Clintonian locution “safe, legal, and rare.”

Giuliani’s personal life and leftist politics may explain his conduct when he was U.S. attorney in Manhattan. In that job, he railroaded “junk-bond” king Michael Milken and others for crimes they did not commit. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote, “Giuliani was unknown until in search of name recognition he staged a stormtrooper assault on the financial firm Princeton/Newport involving fifty federal marshals outfitted with automatic weapons and bulletproof vests. On another occasion, he had two New York investment bankers hauled off their trading floor in handcuffs. Giuliani’s victims had done nothing and were exonerated.”

This is the man the “Hannitized” Smear Bund of conservatives thinks should be president. So they mauled Ron Paul, the only candidate who understands the Constitution and what it was meant, and not meant, to do. The conservatives who backed George W. Bush for president can be excused, at least partly, because he, as McCain and Romney do today, told them lies to get elected.

To his credit, Giuliani hasn’t done that. He’s a liberal, and proud of it. So the conservatives who back him cannot be excused. If the GOP nominates Giuliani, “a small man in search of a balcony,” as columnist Jimmy Breslin called him, the party may be more stupid than anyone thinks, but at least it would reveal the GOP for what it is and likely spell the end of its undeserved reputation as the political home for conservatives.

Come to think of it, maybe nominating Giuliani isn’t such a bad idea after all. It would leave American conservatives homeless and give candidates such as Ron Paul a serious chance to compete for their votes.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Since the September 11 terror attacks, militant Islam has given ammunition to those in the secularized West who were already disposed to damn “religion” as such, without splitting too many hairs about fine distinctions between, say, Islam and popery.

Consider the mere title of Hitchens’ polemic: God Is Not Great: How Religion Spoils Everything. The book won a laudatory lead review from Michael Kinsley in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review section, less for its content, which Kinsley barely touched on, than for its brilliance as a veteran contrarian’s latest career move. Takes one to know one, I guess.

Kinsley was basically reviewing author, not book, saluting him on his successful strategy for winning publicity, the principle being that there is no such thing as bad publicity, by which rule the surly atheist has earned the fellowship of such devout men of the cloth as the Reverend Sharpton.

“God is not great”? “Religion poisons everything”? Is the animus here antitheistic, or just antimonotheistic? What does it mean? How, if at all, does it apply to Homer? Does “religion” ruin the Iliad? Or is the Iliad an object lesson of some sort, illustrating how the gods, or perhaps a belief in them not necessarily shared by the poet, incited the Trojan War (a quagmire if ever there was one, though the Greek attackers may have expected it to be a cakewalk)?

However that may be, Hitchens is telling us about his feelings, not his thoughts. Unlike Russell, he hardly purports to explain philosophically “why I am not a Christian,” though he wants us to think he has philosophically sophisticated reasons for his comprehensive grudge. And unlike such more dispassionate unbelievers of an older generation as Rudolf Carnap and Anthony Flew, he doesn’t bother with publicity-repellent, “value-free” analysis of abstract ideas and neutral propositions.

Religion and its votaries are bad, that’s all. Look at all the wars it has caused. Not only that, it sometimes opposes war! Check out the last two popes’ objections to the Anglo-American wars on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Religion is no good, I tell you! Never mind that Hitchens himself has favored both wars. (Then again, some atheists haven’t.)

And besides, to shift our focus just a bit, religion is notoriously hostile to Reason and Science. Does the name Charles Darwin ring a bell? Possibly you’ve seen the movie Inherit the Wind. Can you dig it? Give me that old-time irreligion: Reason and Science have spoken, with one conclusive voice.

Well, the truth of Darwinism may seem self-evident to liberal-arts majors, especially those who watch Animal Planet, but Hitchens appears blissfully unaware, as they say, of what can be (and has been) said by critics of the idea. Of these, my favorite is the late Australian philosopher David Stove, himself an atheist, who finds Darwin’s thesis not only false but absurd on its face, “a ridiculous slander on human beings.” Stove’s book, Darwinian Fairytales, makes a scathingly witty attack on the very premises that the Darwinists assume to be impregnable.

Stove’s argument is startlingly simple: If Darwin’s theory of a “ruthless struggle for survival” among human beings were true, the human race could never have existed. Human life just isn’t like that. Period. Every human being depends on parental care and protection until near-maturity. Without these, obviously, none of us could survive. Man is, and must be, a cooperative creature.

To meet this clear objection, Darwinists appeal to prehistory: Man, they admit, is cooperative now, but was not in primitive times. This won’t do, Stove replies. Apart from the sheer absence of evidence, Darwinism is a “universal generalization,” purporting to be a scientific law, true in all times and places. So if it was ever true of man, it must still be true today, and we see clearly that it isn’t. Therefore, it was never true.

Stove disclaims any special scientific knowledge and never appeals, for example, to the fossil record. He merely applies linguistic analysis to Darwin’s claims and shows their vacuity and incoherence. He also makes short work of such dodges as Dawkins’ “selfish genes” and “memes.” The holes in Darwinism can’t be patched.

Speaking of overgeneralizations, Hitchens’ indiscriminate assertions about “religion” instantly raise the suspicion that he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. How could so many accusations, against so many disparate things, possibly be true? Is the religion of the ancient Hebrews indistinguishable from the religion of the Aztecs? Are Hindus hard to tell from Unitarians? Is there no essential difference between the thought of Jonathan Edwards and that of John Henry Newman?

Another of Hitchens’ reviewers, Stephen Prothero, author of Religious Literacy, remarks, “I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject.” Hitchens appears to be a total stranger to any form of religious experience. Does he even realize what he’s saying? He’s like a blind man discussing Renaissance painting—and condemning all of it in clichés he has overheard.

Besides being ignorant of his subject and wrong about it, Hitchens is preposterously self-congratulatory. Whereas believers are “literal and limited,” atheists (such as himself) are “ironic and inquiring.” What about Stalin and Kim Jong-il? They’re not true atheists, you see, since, as Orwell says, “a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” Thus, Hitchens rigs the whole debate.

Why shouldn’t he? “If God does not exist,” as Ivan Karamazov says, “everything is permitted,” including calumniating believers. Hitchens does believe in most of the Christian virtues, after all; he merely insists that only atheists actually practice them.

Contributing editor Joseph Sobran is a syndicated columnist.

This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Photography, as it happens, is the mobilizing impulse of the species under discussion. One can hardly imagine a locust swarm without at least one camera for each family subunit, and their progress through the world is a geometric series of voracious juxtapositions of landscapes, monuments, and backgrounds with their own likenesses, a kaleidoscopic process involving trillions of eventual permutations yet immovably focused on the self. Like a plague, their progress is expansionist and triumphal, arithmetically burgeoning on its advances, swelling with each pandemic success; like an infestation, it is vampiric and amoral, as unquestioning of its nature, its aims, and its ethics as any feeding beast’s; like a sign of the times, it is revelatory in its finality, a chilling sensation which its tidal ubiquity, from Rome to Damascus and from Bath to Tibet, drives home with what can only be described as an apocalyptic force. The camera, far more than the airplane or the automobile, is the pale hobbyhorse astride which this nightmare rides in insensate triumph through individual consciousness.

Permit me a fanciful digression. There are English words, deeply rooted in our common Indo-European mentality, whose onomatopoeic intent seems almost wholly repulsive, notably the cluster beginning in gn-, such as gnat or its cognate nit—respectively, gnus and gnida in Russian, where the initial g is not silent. Gnaw is another, as is the Russian gnoi, “pus,” and gnash, and gnarly. Now, it may well be that drawing the verb to know, along with the Greek root of gno as in gnosis, into this cluster is a folly of spurious semantics, but I am a writer, not an etymologist, and I can read words whichever way I like. Unlike the Marxist linguist Nikolai Marr, who had managed to derive the words of all the world’s languages from the Russian for rye only to be exposed as a fraud by Stalin, I merit this small indulgence. It is not my fault that, in the exasperation of an Italian mother telling her child “non fare lo gnorri” (“don’t act as if you know nothing about it”), I hear John Donne’s bell tolling for all mankind. And it occurs to me that if one wishes to describe with any degree of clinical accuracy the millenarian pestilence that has come to gnaw on civilization, one must begin at the beginning.

The beginning is where the Bible, and Kierkegaard in our own waning Victorian day, found Original Sin in the Fall of man. Famously, the Danish philosopher compared the fear that Adam desires to conquer through wisdom with vertigo, noting that the lapse into sin invariably takes place in a kind of dizziness of promise—particularly the promise of liberty. Contrasted with that hallucinogenic abstraction is faith, which, to the contrary, is akin to clarity and is, unlike phantom knowledge, a real power. An etymologist, incidentally, might support Kierkegaard’s view by pointing out that the English word soul originally meant “strength in the face of opposition,” a sense retained today in its cognate, resilience. It was man’s spirit, in other words, that proved unequal to the temptation of knowing.

Developing Kierkegaard’s view, one can describe the forbidden fruit of Genesis as a sort of controlled substance, as man’s first hallucinogenic drug, whose consumption in ever-increasing doses, as is the addict’s lot, has been the main feature of man’s progress to civilization since his expulsion from Eden. Wisdom, knowledge, understanding have served, like the mirages induced by certain narcotics, to rob him of the life force of faith he has been given as his main hereditament, leading him ever farther afield into a land of fantasy which he has long had no choice but to call reality. In Russian underworld argot, to introduce another point of semantics, heroin addicts speak of injecting the drug as broadening (“D’you broaden?”), while cocaine is known as plan (“Gives you a clear head”). So, too, is science a perpetual and unstoppable dilation, a worldview whose values obsolesce and pass like the effects of an addict’s hits, its reason parasitically insatiable, its escalating demand for fresh injections of knowledge a telltale paragraph from a case study in addiction. If drug abuse is slavery, it is slavery that befalls those in search of freedom.

“He is, like, on speed all the time.” Is there a more succinct way of introducing modern mass man? Come to think of it, is there a more accurate way of characterizing the workings of reason in a modern individual, of which Socrates is perhaps the first notable example? Does not the ineluctable sophistry of Plato’s Dialogues have that essentially interminable quality of modern life, elastic like chewing gum on the one hand and hard as teacher’s chalk on the other, which only the most wayward of pupils, after smoking a couple of joints, can savor with equanimity? Of course the joints, in this case, are the gnostic suppositions and epistemological contradistinctions, inventive metaphors and clever analogies, by which the philosopher broadens the argument in his obsession to expand his domain of thought and thereby to assert his own immanence in the soulless world he regards as real.

To be fair, like Nietzsche after him, Kierkegaard spares Socrates the kind of ridicule he heaps on every philosopher from Aristotle to Hegel, but now is not the time to be consistent. It takes no more than ordinary human courage to drink the hemlock, while the challenge to withstand temptation by immortality has been known to defeat titans, to say nothing of Adam in Eden. As the Russian writer Lev Shestov, one of the first to appreciate Kierkegaard, noted nearly a century ago, partaking of the fruit of knowledge

has made man lose even the ability to see his newfound impotence as a misfortune. He has become a knight of resignation, equating knowledge with truth. He has lost his freedom, yet he is quite unperturbed by it.

In other words, what Marx has famously called the opium of the people is not religion but Marx himself, Marx and all his predecessors in speculation starting with the eminently sympathetic Socrates. The opiate of the people is human reason.

And so it came to pass that, as the visitor to Animal Farm “looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again,” in the concluding sentence of Orwell’s prescient satire, “it was impossible to say which was which.” Clearly, the apocalyptic morphology of the freedom-loving swine fascinated the English writer, much as the tourist’s mutation to locust fascinates my Russian photographer friend. A swine is a warm-blooded quadruped, however, with a distinctive symbolism that belongs to a kinder, gentler epoch, one in which the creatures of Manor Farm had given names and identifiable characters before their lapse into revolution. Not so with the world that has passed these ultimate decades in narcotic stupefaction, reminiscent of the scene in the film where Al Pacino, in the role of amateur drug dealer, leaps face-first into a heap of coke like a hog diving into the feeding trough. Which of man’s recent triumphs of reason, I wonder, does that heap represent? The neutron bomb? The White House at night? Russian democracy under President Putin? The nanotechnology superweapon being developed by friendly China?

Speculative philosophy and its many offspring, from political economy to quantum physics, share Adam’s desire to understand by generalizing and to see by expanding. They want to broaden the mind, to come up with a plan of action without which one’s head spins and all is fear, confusion, chance, and God. But no sooner is the needle in the forearm, no sooner is the formula on the blackboard and the people have heard over the wireless that something rational has just taken place in Munich, in Yalta, or in Washington, as everything becomes clear again, at least until it transpires that Hitler’s a villain, Joe Stalin is nobody’s uncle, and FDR had known that the Japs would attack Pearl Harbor, at which point a new injection of truth becomes necessary. The sole constant objective, meanwhile, is to keep on going, to go on broadening and planning, and to continue being revolutionary, like hamsters on a wheel, in search of the universal truth that sets man free.

“Man lacks the courage to think in categories by which he lives,” wrote Shestov, “and is reduced to living by categories in which he thinks.” Where the Apostolic Church, with Her methadone of occasionally imperfect faith, once had the task of mediation, as a kind of drug rehabilitation center, between man and the universe, in modern times it is Art, or even more absurdly Culture, that would encourage him to face reality. Yet, dipping into semantics once more, one finds that the meaning of art, extant in English in the word artful, is “trickery” or “illusion,” whereas in Russian, the word means “temptation.” Khudozhnik, Russian for “artist,” is even more frank, literally meaning “evildoer” or “malfeasant.” The tribesmen that until recently resisted the Europeans’ attempts to photograph them, like the primitive Saxons or Slavs who blackened the magic of art in their own day, had a fair sense of what progress is all about. Indeed, a believing Christian can easily argue that much in the evolution of Western aesthetics since at least the Renaissance has turned on deception and enfeeblement of the soul.

As for the modern mass man’s penchant for culture, it is a matter of indifference to the locusts swarming St. Mark’s Square whether the “bellini” at Florian are made with the real juice of white peaches, now out of season, or with the bottled simulacrum manufactured under the label of Cipriani. Nor is the fact that Bellini the painter and Cipriani the publican have nothing in common except fame, as a sports car and a lollipop may have nothing in common besides the color, detectable to their lens-like insect eyes, which perceive no reality apart from the reassuring heartbeat of individual immanence and the empowering conformism of collective ratiocination. What sort of language is it that has only I and we for pronouns? Whose verbs have only one tense, the future, and only one mood, the complacent indicative? Where the distinctions between man and pig, the White House and the Kremlin, right and wrong, are less significant than those between the yen and the euro?

What sort of culture is it that speaks such a language, and what salutary effect can its mediation possibly have on the ever more swift fall of man? I laugh from bitter experience, for I was born into a culture that overtly embraced the ethical positions covertly, unconsciously, or chaotically espoused by the materialist culture of the West today. Was not my Moscow of half a century ago the world capital of philosophical positivism? Her optimistic people were like insect soldiers, locusts moving in serried ranks, worker ants marching toward a luminous future, hoplites rubbing forelegs against shields with a deafening noise that drowned out the doubt of individual conscience. And here I stand, in St. Mark’s in Venice, in Piazza di Spagna in Rome, in Trafalgar Square in London, and see the same glassy eyes, which have now gone digital, still focused on a collective appraisal of a collective existence.

There, one is photographing his wife against the great winged lion. It is famous, that lion, which means it has immanence to spare. Hence truth—or wisdom, or knowledge, or culture—must belong to it, appertain to it, saturate its exterior like an invisible yet potent elixir, envelop it like biblical manna or cleave to it like greensward to the Apennine hillside. His wife belongs to him, after all, and, by making her a part of this gnomic marvel, he can sink his jaws into the very heart of the matter. Snap! His wife now exists, resplendent in a baseball cap and Adidas, and he has a picture of her to prove it, inside the little machine of whose workings he knows so much less than a prelapsarian Adam knew of shrubs and trees.

Snap! goes the gnathic shutter. Wow, that was a great one, honey. He is nobody’s fool, not him. Not one of those stupid morons who’d lived under communism for all that time, in Russia or wherever, until it went bankrupt and they started to live like us human beings again. Or one of those ignorant people in the Dark Ages, who only went to church and had all that garbage drummed into their heads from morning to night. Back home, he’s got television, of course, but once in a while, it’s good to get out. The fact is, he quite likes going places. Seeing things. Broadening the mind. And that’s the name of the game these days, though he did once hear some curmudgeonly foreign fellow say that if you broaden it too much, your brains will fall right out. Quite a joker, that Danish fellow.

Andrei Navrozov is Chronicles' European editor.

This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Ted's Timor Mortis
by Thomas Fleming

Stumbling past the half-truths.

VIEWS

Americans Don't Die!
by Roger D. McGrath

Casualties, from republic to empire.

Portraits
by George Garrett

Some notes on the poetry of growing old.

The Last Adieu
by George McCartney

A wake for the living.

A Dirge for the Living
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.

Happily ever after?

NEWS

Tethering the Hegemon
by Ted Galen Carpenter

The transatlantic divide on the use of force.

REVIEWS

An American Patrician
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

John Lukacs: George Kennan: A Study of Character

plus

James O. Tate on Clyde N. Wilson's Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture

David Middleton on William Baer's Writing Metrical Poetry

Fr. Michael P. Orsi on Debby Applegate's The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

Andrea Kirk Assaf on Kevin Seamus Hasson's The Right to Be Wrong

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Serbia: Serbia in Our Own Image
by Andrea Crandall

Letter From Quebec: Talking About Culture
by Sean Scallon

Letter From Texas: Well Into Spring, Even With Snow
by Wayne Allensworth

VITAL SIGNS

CONSERVATISM: The Enigmatic Professor Strauss, Part I
by Claude Polin

FOREIGN POLICY: Kosovo and Its Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy
by Joseph E. Fallon

COLUMNS

THE BARE BODKIN
by Joseph Sobran

HERESIES
by Aaron D. Wolf

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
The Hoax
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS
—William R. Hawkins: "A COM for Africa"
—R. Cort Kirkwood: "The GOP's Clinton"
POETRY

Coffee Shop Impersonal and Praying Hands
by Wilmer Mills

ON THE COVER

Cover and inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.