The star of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, The Happening, demonstrates once more how unaccountably loathe producers are to give their boom microphones top billing.

During the showing I attended last night, the boom mike kept playfully piercing the top edge of the screen. After ten minutes, I left the auditorium to talk to the theater manager. “We tried lowering the screen’s top mask line,” she explained, “but it cut off most of the actors’ heads.” I returned to my seat resigned to put up with this assault on my always willing suspension of disbelief. Still, I took heart, reasoning that the nuisance would surely disappear as the film went on. Directors constantly review their films as they shoot them to correct just such problems. But no. The microphone or, to be more accurate, microphones, kept bouncing into one scene after another. One was muffled in furry fabric for outdoor recording. Another had turned red perhaps from embarrassment. If the scene had dialog, a boom mike appeared. This would have been intolerable but for one thing. Mr. Bouncing Mike was giving the liveliest performance in the film. Indeed, I would later discover that BM had become a celebrity on the internet. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were posting notices about its performance. One observer recorded that, in the theater he had attended, rowdy adolescents took to calling out, “Where’s the mike?” whenever it didn’t drop into a scene.

I don’t want to make this a star-is-born column. Suffice it to say that Shya­ma­lan’s carelessness with his boom suggests he harbors a self-destructive arrogance as well-developed as that possessed by any other swell in his industry.

With all of Shyamalan’s films, one thing stands true: Each has been more disappointing than the one before. I reviewed The Sixth Sense nine years ago with great enthusiasm. It further confirmed my opinion that films are worth writing about, that at their best they can afford the kind of pleasure and provocation that other arts do, and I looked forward to seeing him fulfill his early promise. He never has. I did not write about his most recent works, The Village and The Lady in the Water, on principle. It’s unsporting to shoot caged foxes. So why am I taking aim at The Happening? I suppose out of an odd combination of wonder and regret. I cannot understand how so talented a young man can have persisted in such folly. And, unless by some marketing miracle or public craze The Happening makes money, Shyamalan will not likely be able to raise the capital to make another film.

From the first, Shyamalan has been enamored of the Big Idea, an infatuation fatal to narrative art. In The Happening, the Big Idea is that Mother Nature has become fed up with mankind—a notion that has some provenance, I believe. Anyway, the rhododendrons, aspidistras, and arborvitae have conspired to exhale toxins into the air that invade human neurotransmitters and block whatever it is that keeps us from sinking knitting needles into our necks or walking off girders 20 stories above Manhattan. You would be amazed at how the bodies pile up when this whatever-it-is is blocked. When grade-school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his buddy, Julian (John Leguizamo), discover what’s happening on the streets outside their classrooms, they grab their families and head west, assuming Manhattan is under a terrorist attack. But everywhere they go, they come upon people killing themselves. At last, Elliot finds a farm owned by a paranoid recluse (a wonderfully over-the-top Betty Buckley). Having no other recourse, Elliot and his wife, [...]]]> A review of The Happening (produced and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox and UTV Motion Pictures; written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan)

The star of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, The Happening, demonstrates once more how unaccountably loathe producers are to give their boom microphones top billing.

During the showing I attended last night, the boom mike kept playfully piercing the top edge of the screen. After ten minutes, I left the auditorium to talk to the theater manager. “We tried lowering the screen’s top mask line,” she explained, “but it cut off most of the actors’ heads.” I returned to my seat resigned to put up with this assault on my always willing suspension of disbelief. Still, I took heart, reasoning that the nuisance would surely disappear as the film went on. Directors constantly review their films as they shoot them to correct just such problems. But no. The microphone or, to be more accurate, microphones, kept bouncing into one scene after another. One was muffled in furry fabric for outdoor recording. Another had turned red perhaps from embarrassment. If the scene had dialog, a boom mike appeared. This would have been intolerable but for one thing. Mr. Bouncing Mike was giving the liveliest performance in the film. Indeed, I would later discover that BM had become a celebrity on the internet. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were posting notices about its performance. One observer recorded that, in the theater he had attended, rowdy adolescents took to calling out, “Where’s the mike?” whenever it didn’t drop into a scene.

I don’t want to make this a star-is-born column. Suffice it to say that Shya­ma­lan’s carelessness with his boom suggests he harbors a self-destructive arrogance as well-developed as that possessed by any other swell in his industry.

With all of Shyamalan’s films, one thing stands true: Each has been more disappointing than the one before. I reviewed The Sixth Sense nine years ago with great enthusiasm. It further confirmed my opinion that films are worth writing about, that at their best they can afford the kind of pleasure and provocation that other arts do, and I looked forward to seeing him fulfill his early promise. He never has. I did not write about his most recent works, The Village and The Lady in the Water, on principle. It’s unsporting to shoot caged foxes. So why am I taking aim at The Happening? I suppose out of an odd combination of wonder and regret. I cannot understand how so talented a young man can have persisted in such folly. And, unless by some marketing miracle or public craze The Happening makes money, Shyamalan will not likely be able to raise the capital to make another film.

From the first, Shyamalan has been enamored of the Big Idea, an infatuation fatal to narrative art. In The Happening, the Big Idea is that Mother Nature has become fed up with mankind—a notion that has some provenance, I believe. Anyway, the rhododendrons, aspidistras, and arborvitae have conspired to exhale toxins into the air that invade human neurotransmitters and block whatever it is that keeps us from sinking knitting needles into our necks or walking off girders 20 stories above Manhattan. You would be amazed at how the bodies pile up when this whatever-it-is is blocked. When grade-school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his buddy, Julian (John Leguizamo), discover what’s happening on the streets outside their classrooms, they grab their families and head west, assuming Manhattan is under a terrorist attack. But everywhere they go, they come upon people killing themselves. At last, Elliot finds a farm owned by a paranoid recluse (a wonderfully over-the-top Betty Buckley). Having no other recourse, Elliot and his wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel working her terrified baby blues overtime), hunker down, despite Ms. Buckley’s harangues on the poisoned state of modern America.

Nothing is wrong with this premise, but Shyamalan handles its elaboration with a laughable disregard for human plausibility and artistic finesse, especially with Mr. BM butting in every few minutes. While people all around them are cutting their throats and throwing themselves under tractors, Elliot and Alma keep arguing over whether they are really committed to each other. She feels compelled to tell him she went out for dessert with a coworker, and he confesses to making goo-goo eyes at a woman in the pharmacy. I half expected they would stop to confer with a marriage counselor on their mad dash just ahead of those bad-breath flowers across rural Pennsylvania.

Shyamalan cavalierly abandons his allegory whenever he feels it’s time to thump one of his thematic points. Here we are to understand that lack of commitment is toxic to marriages. OK, I’ll buy this, but jeepers, let’s first get out of the way of that ill wind blowing from the East!

Shyamalan, too, needs to step aside from the mighty draft of his hubris and decide whether he wants to tell stories or give sermons. They are not the same thing.

George McCartney is Chronicles' film editor.

This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Like most teachers, I have learned at least as much from my students as they have learned from me. An Argentinian graduate student at St. Louis University came to me for help on his M.A. thesis in 1970 or so, having heard that I supposedly knew something about contemporary American foreign policy. He was a communist, he said, whose brother was a Jesuit fighting the revolution (with machine guns) in northeastern Brazil. He wanted to prove that the burden of U.S. policy in Latin America was not economic (as all of us were taught in those days) but political.

The text he presented to me was Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports, published by Doubleday in 1961. Surprisingly few Americans knew of its existence, despite the fact that its second chapter, “International Security: The Military Aspect,” had been introduced by Nelson Rockefeller on Dave Garroway’s Today Show in 1958. Garroway offered his audience free copies, with Rockefeller’s permission, and the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund ponied up for the over 200,000 orders that came in.

Ernesto Ruiz, my student, considered Prospect the smoking gun of American politics: We were building an empire of democracy and gearing up to enforce it all over the world. Anaconda Copper, Standard Oil, United Fruit—it was all a smokescreen. The empire of democracy was the end, and everything else was means. The United States had been testing things in Latin America for decades. He said that Vietnam was a distraction. The goal was much bigger.

I had recently finished a doctoral dissertation on U.S. relations with Spain during World War II, reading thousands of State Department condemnations of the evil Franco, while the same progressives proclaimed that the (much worse) “neutral” Swedes had “given us an inward and spiritual grace, but not necessarily an outward and visible sign” of their purity. The liberal statists had endless tolerance for progressive Swedish hypocrisy, and no appreciation for the strategic subtlety of the “fascist” caudillo. Perhaps I was prepared for my commie student’s argument.

The Rockefeller Panels were convened by Nelson in 1956 after he had split from Ike over his administration’s reluctance to tax us into unlimited “foreign aid.” Rockefeller would go on to beat fellow billionaire Averell Harriman in the New York governor’s race and turn over the panels to his brother David, but Nelson had already purchased the best Americans money could buy. Henry Kissinger chaired the panels but stepped aside to write his own Realpolitik book once the Dean Rusks and Maxwell Taylors and Adolf Berles and Chuck Percys turned them into a Wilsonian dreamworld. The panelists became a Who’s Who of JFK and LBJ empire builders; look for the guys and gals who gave us Vietnam, and they are there.

Prospect for America does not represent a conspiracy. On the contrary, it was the most public, up-front, in-your-face statement of American empire since Albert Beveridge’s “March of the Flag” speech in 1898. It stands directly in the line of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman (whose NSC-68 summed it all up but was still “top secret” when the Rockefeller Panels met). It prefigured Kennedy’s “pay any price” and Johnson’s Great Society in Southeast Asia, and surfaced again in Clinton’s bombs over the Balkans and in the Bush Doctrine of 2002.

Furthermore, it was “bipartisan.” One recalls here M. Stanton Evans’ quip that the “stupid party” and the “evil party” get together to do something really stupid and evil, which is called “bipartisanship.” Prospect envisioned a world of peacefully cooperating states, tied together by what we now call “globalization” and enforced by a strong U.S.-dominated series of shifting alliances. [...]]]> Who are the spear-carriers of government policies? This is a tale that puts pieces together over the course of a few decades. Neocons eat stories like this for breakfast.

Like most teachers, I have learned at least as much from my students as they have learned from me. An Argentinian graduate student at St. Louis University came to me for help on his M.A. thesis in 1970 or so, having heard that I supposedly knew something about contemporary American foreign policy. He was a communist, he said, whose brother was a Jesuit fighting the revolution (with machine guns) in northeastern Brazil. He wanted to prove that the burden of U.S. policy in Latin America was not economic (as all of us were taught in those days) but political.

The text he presented to me was Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports, published by Doubleday in 1961. Surprisingly few Americans knew of its existence, despite the fact that its second chapter, “International Security: The Military Aspect,” had been introduced by Nelson Rockefeller on Dave Garroway’s Today Show in 1958. Garroway offered his audience free copies, with Rockefeller’s permission, and the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund ponied up for the over 200,000 orders that came in.

Ernesto Ruiz, my student, considered Prospect the smoking gun of American politics: We were building an empire of democracy and gearing up to enforce it all over the world. Anaconda Copper, Standard Oil, United Fruit—it was all a smokescreen. The empire of democracy was the end, and everything else was means. The United States had been testing things in Latin America for decades. He said that Vietnam was a distraction. The goal was much bigger.

I had recently finished a doctoral dissertation on U.S. relations with Spain during World War II, reading thousands of State Department condemnations of the evil Franco, while the same progressives proclaimed that the (much worse) “neutral” Swedes had “given us an inward and spiritual grace, but not necessarily an outward and visible sign” of their purity. The liberal statists had endless tolerance for progressive Swedish hypocrisy, and no appreciation for the strategic subtlety of the “fascist” caudillo. Perhaps I was prepared for my commie student’s argument.

The Rockefeller Panels were convened by Nelson in 1956 after he had split from Ike over his administration’s reluctance to tax us into unlimited “foreign aid.” Rockefeller would go on to beat fellow billionaire Averell Harriman in the New York governor’s race and turn over the panels to his brother David, but Nelson had already purchased the best Americans money could buy. Henry Kissinger chaired the panels but stepped aside to write his own Realpolitik book once the Dean Rusks and Maxwell Taylors and Adolf Berles and Chuck Percys turned them into a Wilsonian dreamworld. The panelists became a Who’s Who of JFK and LBJ empire builders; look for the guys and gals who gave us Vietnam, and they are there.

Prospect for America does not represent a conspiracy. On the contrary, it was the most public, up-front, in-your-face statement of American empire since Albert Beveridge’s “March of the Flag” speech in 1898. It stands directly in the line of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman (whose NSC-68 summed it all up but was still “top secret” when the Rockefeller Panels met). It prefigured Kennedy’s “pay any price” and Johnson’s Great Society in Southeast Asia, and surfaced again in Clinton’s bombs over the Balkans and in the Bush Doctrine of 2002.

Furthermore, it was “bipartisan.” One recalls here M. Stanton Evans’ quip that the “stupid party” and the “evil party” get together to do something really stupid and evil, which is called “bipartisanship.” Prospect envisioned a world of peacefully cooperating states, tied together by what we now call “globalization” and enforced by a strong U.S.-dominated series of shifting alliances. It called for political, economic, social, educational, and military initiatives powered by the “Democratic Idea.” The glue was the struggle against the Soviet Union; the goal was “the future of America and the freedom of the world.” It is a short leap forward to the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war and a short leap backward to Beveridge’s call for us to be “the propagandists and not the misers of liberty.”

It is one thing to proclaim and another thing to act, although sometimes a “planning process” results in self-fulfilling prophesies. Dean Rusk, David Sarnoff, Townsend Hoopes, Harlan Cleveland, Maxwell Taylor, Roger Hilsman, Walt W. Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, and dozens of others would move into policy positions in the (very educable) John Kennedy and (very aggressive) Lyndon Johnson administrations. An interesting character, unknown to most of us, who tied much of this together, was the Ultimate Insider, Roswell Gilpatric.

“Ros,” as he was known, was a Democrat who frequented the Rockefeller and later the Kennedy social circles, and became the intimate of Robert S. McNamara. “Ros and I,” Big Mac often wrote, believe this about this and that about that. As undersecretary of defense, a member of the National Security Council and its “ExCom,” Ros was in on everything from 1961 to 1964. He was a Yalie (Phi Beta Kappa, 1928; law, 1931) and quickly became a partner in the Cravath firm in Manhattan. Cravath has provided us with many “public servants” thanks to its generous policy of encouraging partners to take time off to help presidents do their duty; “It was felt that government experience would be helpful.” Ros was “a rainmaker whose extensive business contacts brought business to the firm.” He was handsome, charming, and most of the time he kept out of sight.

He liked Nelson Rockefeller, as most people apparently did, and quietly helped him get elected as New York governor (firms such as Cravath have to cover their bases). He moved from the Rockefeller Security Panel to the Department of Defense seamlessly, having also cultivated the Kennedys a few years earlier. Ros was a loyal guy, most of the time. He helped take the fall for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, took on the job of giving the speech that (had anybody been listening) blew Kennedy’s cover on the “missile gap” lies of the 1960 campaign, was in the middle of the Mongoose operation that never got Castro, and apparently was one of the very few who knew that the Vietnamese generals were going to assassinate Diem.

This shameful episode is one we know something about, despite the almost total lack of access to the Kennedy papers at Harvard (which, as long as even one Kennedy draws a public breath, will be closed to public scrutiny). JFK appointed Ros to organize an Interdepartmental Task Force (a euphemism for ignoring and overriding the legally constituted responsibilities of the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, USIA, and military intelligence) to “appraise” and “recommend” actions for the already (by 1961) out-of-control mess in Southeast Asia. Ros’s group came up with “A Program of Action to Prevent Communist Domination of South Vietnam” in just over two weeks. It recommended, among other things, the introduction of U.S. ground troops. But a sticking point was both the image and the recalcitrant reality of South Vietnam’s leader: Diem had to be, or at least had to seem to be, a democrat—or in Kennedy terms, a reformer. Washington’s action had to be predicated upon the aims of Prospect for America in Southeast Asia.

Ros’s report had two problems to address that couldn’t be discussed publicly: How to cover unilateral American aggression under the Geneva Accords, and how to deal with Diem if he didn’t want to become a democrat. The former Ros dismissed with a little bit of sophistry: Since the communists ignored Geneva Accord inhibitions, so then could we. It wouldn’t be hard to fool the American people about such morally relative matters. Just do a covert war, and explain it later. The latter Ros was more ambivalent about, but his report gave the clear implication that if Diem continued to be a problem, then eliminate the problem.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk gave voice to this approach in the fall of 1961 when he recommended that if we were to introduce ground troops it would be best simply to take over the machinery of government in the South. Rusk was no stranger to such thinking: In 1949-50, as a functionary in Dean Acheson’s State Department, he had favored promoting a coup—even an assassination—against Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT regime in the waning months of the Chinese civil war.

Ros did not say, “Let’s kill Diem and take over the government of South Vietnam so we can effectively prevent communist domination of Southeast Asia.” He did produce a report that triggered a series of other reports—a memorandum from McGeorge Bundy, a very public dispatching of Vice President LBJ to Vietnam, a less publicized but crucial “fact-finding mission” to Vietnam by Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Walt W. Rostow—which represent Prospect for America in action. Ros was probably not the idea-man for all this. He was a sycophant and spear-carrier. But he was in the middle of a gang that took our empire to a new level.

Ros had to whisper convincing things in a lot of ears to be in the middle of so much. He got too close to Kennedy to last long under LBJ, but was given good exit cover as chairman of a study on nuclear proliferation.

If one studies the self-serving memoirs and histories of his era, Ros emerges as the Ultimate Insider. He knew everybody. He evaded all scandals (including his own obvious connection between General Dynamics and very shaky defense contracts). It is hard to determine what he believed, except that his loyal support of empire was apparently tempered by a certain ambivalence. He is supposed to have said in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, “Essentially, Mr. President, this is a choice between limited action and unlimited action; and most of us think that it’s better to start with limited action.” His Maryland farm was a kind of Kennedy compound south; his movement around Wall Street and the farm and Washington Got Things Done.

Ros also rivaled his presidential mentor: Lots of women. Unlike JFK, he had four wives, the third of whom divorced him because of his affair with—Jacqueline Kennedy. “She dumped me for Onassis,” he said. Such is the fate of the Ultimate Insider, and such is the course of empire. Ever heard of him? The neocons have.

John Willson is professor emeritus of history at Hillsdale College.

This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

It might seem politically incorrect to say this, but the Berlin Olympics were the best ever staged, the last time white American and European men and women competed on an equal level with blacks, despite the great feat of Jesse Owens in winning four gold medals. The first games after the war, the 1948 London Olympics, were a festival for pure amateurs, as were the Helsinki and Melbourne games that followed. The best postwar Olympics were the Rome ones (1960). Europe had rebounded from the catastrophe of World War II, and Germany had been invited to compete. I remember them well. The crown prince of Greece, now ex-King Constantine, won a gold in the dragon-class sailing in the bay of Naples. Ari Onassis, the original Greek tycoon, came into the shower room where the prince was cleaning up after he and his crew had been dunked into the filthy waters of Naples—my father was crewing for him—and got into the shower fully clothed, kissing the prince and congratulating him. That night there was a great ball in the palazzo of the duke of Serra di Cassano, with most of Europe’s reigning royals attending. For a 23-year-old, it was quite impressive stuff.

On the field, a blond German, Armin Hary, won the 100-meter dash, the first non-American to win the most prestigious of events since 1928, and an Italian, Livio Berutti, won the 200 meters. The Roma stadium went wild as the Italian led from the start, chased by three African-Americans. Three white American hurdlers came one, two, three in the 400-meter hurdles, led by Glenn Davis, and a young Cassius Clay won the light-heavyweight title in the Palazzetto dello Sport, although an Australian friend of mine by the name of Madigan almost beat him—I was certain he had won—in the semifinal. The grand finale was the Marathon, won by a barefooted Ethiopian sergeant, Abebe Bekila, who smiled all along the route leading into the Borghese gardens and down the Via Veneto, and who rightly received the greatest cheers from the crowd.

The Rome Olympics were my last, although I did attend the judo competition in Athens in 2004. The games became much too big after Rome, much too politicized, and drugs began to play a much too important role. The Cold War saw nation-by-nation medal counts, although counting was against the spirit of the games. In 1984 the Los Angeles games became the first Olympics in which corporate sponsors got their filthy hooks in deep, making the event look like one big advertisement. It’s been downhill ever since. Athlete after athlete has been caught cheating with drugs, and all records are now suspect, as they well should be. In the 2004 Athens Olympics the Greek government spent $12 billion, five percent of the country’s economy. Many of the lavish facilities built so a political party could show off to the world lie empty and unused. In my not-so-humble opinion, the only way to save the games is to do away with them.

To begin with they are much too big and too inclusive. Rhythmic underwater dancing has more to do with entertainment than with sport. Although women’s softball has been eliminated, beach volleyball has not. Watching beautifully built women in [...]]]> Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts. On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my uncle, a hurdler, was the first athlete the Führer’s gaze fell upon as the parade of the 1936 games began, because we Greeks always go in first, having started the games back in 776 B.C., and because my uncle was the flag carrier. The taxi driver did not seem impressed in the least.

It might seem politically incorrect to say this, but the Berlin Olympics were the best ever staged, the last time white American and European men and women competed on an equal level with blacks, despite the great feat of Jesse Owens in winning four gold medals. The first games after the war, the 1948 London Olympics, were a festival for pure amateurs, as were the Helsinki and Melbourne games that followed. The best postwar Olympics were the Rome ones (1960). Europe had rebounded from the catastrophe of World War II, and Germany had been invited to compete. I remember them well. The crown prince of Greece, now ex-King Constantine, won a gold in the dragon-class sailing in the bay of Naples. Ari Onassis, the original Greek tycoon, came into the shower room where the prince was cleaning up after he and his crew had been dunked into the filthy waters of Naples—my father was crewing for him—and got into the shower fully clothed, kissing the prince and congratulating him. That night there was a great ball in the palazzo of the duke of Serra di Cassano, with most of Europe’s reigning royals attending. For a 23-year-old, it was quite impressive stuff.

On the field, a blond German, Armin Hary, won the 100-meter dash, the first non-American to win the most prestigious of events since 1928, and an Italian, Livio Berutti, won the 200 meters. The Roma stadium went wild as the Italian led from the start, chased by three African-Americans. Three white American hurdlers came one, two, three in the 400-meter hurdles, led by Glenn Davis, and a young Cassius Clay won the light-heavyweight title in the Palazzetto dello Sport, although an Australian friend of mine by the name of Madigan almost beat him—I was certain he had won—in the semifinal. The grand finale was the Marathon, won by a barefooted Ethiopian sergeant, Abebe Bekila, who smiled all along the route leading into the Borghese gardens and down the Via Veneto, and who rightly received the greatest cheers from the crowd.

The Rome Olympics were my last, although I did attend the judo competition in Athens in 2004. The games became much too big after Rome, much too politicized, and drugs began to play a much too important role. The Cold War saw nation-by-nation medal counts, although counting was against the spirit of the games. In 1984 the Los Angeles games became the first Olympics in which corporate sponsors got their filthy hooks in deep, making the event look like one big advertisement. It’s been downhill ever since. Athlete after athlete has been caught cheating with drugs, and all records are now suspect, as they well should be. In the 2004 Athens Olympics the Greek government spent $12 billion, five percent of the country’s economy. Many of the lavish facilities built so a political party could show off to the world lie empty and unused. In my not-so-humble opinion, the only way to save the games is to do away with them.

To begin with they are much too big and too inclusive. Rhythmic underwater dancing has more to do with entertainment than with sport. Although women’s softball has been eliminated, beach volleyball has not. Watching beautifully built women in tiny bikinis playing on sand has more to do with Playboy than with what the ancient Greeks had in mind. The games, after all, were started because the ancients believed it made their soldiers fighting fit. A foot race in armor was introduced at the 65th Games in 520 b.c. The other three events were running, wrestling, and the pentathlon, which included running and wrestling as well as the discus, javelin, and jumping. In other words, the games represented real life. No synchronized swimming and certainly no Tae Kwan Do, a phony martial art that resembles touch football. (Contestants wear padding and score points by touching the adversary.) Victors back then were given a simple wreath of olive sprays and the statue and victory poem that would be created in their honor back home. They were considered to be blessed by the gods. No Coca-Cola endorsements, no cornflakes contracts, no Nike sponsorships. Only glory.

So here’s Chronicles’ blueprint to save the bloated, cheating, corporate games: First and foremost they have to return to their original site, Olympia, in the northwest Peloponnese, where their spirit lives on. Shaded by olive, pine, and poplar, scented by oregano and thyme, the games would be restricted to track and field, wrestling, boxing, swimming, and equestrian events. Nothing else. No tennis, no football, no baseball and other invented sports. Greed, corruption, and commercialism would be eliminated at a stroke. Only amateurs need apply. The pros have their own world championships and other drug festivals. The Olympics will remain pure, and the winners will enjoy eternal glory.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Taki Theodoracopulos is a contributing editor to Chronicles.

This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

UD’s Residence Life program for incoming students did not, as you might expect, confine itself to imparting lessons on the city’s bus system or hip restaurants and beer joints. Instead, it taught students what’s wrong with whitey.

Consider these excerpts from the program’s core document: “A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States. . . . By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)

“REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites. . . . In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’

“A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called ‘blaming the victim’).”

Last year, when the university watchdog group FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) publicized this bizarre screed, UD’s president canceled the program. “While I believe that recent press accounts misrepresent the purpose of the residential life program at the University of Delaware,” he declaimed, “there are questions about its practices that must be addressed and there are reasons for concern that the actual purpose is not being fulfilled. It is not feasible to evaluate these issues without a full and broad-based review.”

How one could “misrepresent” the purpose of the program is unimaginable, given the inflammatory and naked vitriol directed at palefaces. This is the key demographic group, of course, supporting the university through contributions. In any event, this past spring, a new, improved program rose from the ashes of the old one. The program plan published online does not include the words racist or racism or hate, or even the cosmically silly multicultural. Diversity shows up six times, which must be an all-time low for a document published by university eggheads.

What possessed UD’s administration to create such a program, and what did they hope to accomplish? Since it is whites who are promoting this nonsense, antiwhite racism doesn’t fully explain it. Rather, the “all-whites-are-racist” trope emerging from the First State’s phrontistery and other education factories is merely part of the radical left’s broader attack on Western culture and Christianity, which the left perceives as white racial artifacts impeding the imposition of leftist ideology on society. If all whites are racist, then so is Western civilization. And so, then, is Christianity itself.

Much of this racialism emerges from an ideology for which “race does not exist.” So, how can one destroy something that isn’t there?

Even leftist race deniers know that [...]]]> In this space in the June issue, readers learned about a flock of students from the American Studies program at Randolph College who flapped off to the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada to study the profundities of the cathouse. They also learned about yet another aesthete who believes emissions from the nether regions of the human anatomy constitute art. But these two contributions to the chronicles of the campus have nothing on the University of Delaware’s failed Residence Life Program. Whereas the other schools joined the culture war with attacks on erudition and art, UD is battling against the White Man—not that the other schools haven’t honed their ideological tomahawks to lift a white scalp or two.

UD’s Residence Life program for incoming students did not, as you might expect, confine itself to imparting lessons on the city’s bus system or hip restaurants and beer joints. Instead, it taught students what’s wrong with whitey.

Consider these excerpts from the program’s core document: “A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States. . . . By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)

“REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites. . . . In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’

“A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called ‘blaming the victim’).”

Last year, when the university watchdog group FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) publicized this bizarre screed, UD’s president canceled the program. “While I believe that recent press accounts misrepresent the purpose of the residential life program at the University of Delaware,” he declaimed, “there are questions about its practices that must be addressed and there are reasons for concern that the actual purpose is not being fulfilled. It is not feasible to evaluate these issues without a full and broad-based review.”

How one could “misrepresent” the purpose of the program is unimaginable, given the inflammatory and naked vitriol directed at palefaces. This is the key demographic group, of course, supporting the university through contributions. In any event, this past spring, a new, improved program rose from the ashes of the old one. The program plan published online does not include the words racist or racism or hate, or even the cosmically silly multicultural. Diversity shows up six times, which must be an all-time low for a document published by university eggheads.

What possessed UD’s administration to create such a program, and what did they hope to accomplish? Since it is whites who are promoting this nonsense, antiwhite racism doesn’t fully explain it. Rather, the “all-whites-are-racist” trope emerging from the First State’s phrontistery and other education factories is merely part of the radical left’s broader attack on Western culture and Christianity, which the left perceives as white racial artifacts impeding the imposition of leftist ideology on society. If all whites are racist, then so is Western civilization. And so, then, is Christianity itself.

Much of this racialism emerges from an ideology for which “race does not exist.” So, how can one destroy something that isn’t there?

Even leftist race deniers know that race exists. But leftism is inherently mendacious. Even worse, it is congenitally totalitarian and viciously anti-Christian. It has always sought to destroy the Church. The historical fact that Caucasian missionaries successfully proselytized the Faith, along with its artistic, musical, and literary riches, is why whites, at long last, are a preferred and open target in the left’s war on culture and religion.

So the charge of racism only superficially attacks whites and really strikes at Western culture and the Faith itself, for anything affiliated with the white man must also bear the mark of Cain with which the left has branded him.

—R. Cort Kirkwood

This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

True, the world is always in chaos. True, much of the world is always hungry. True, rivers flood: It is in their job description that they do so. Yet it is only in recent times that it has become customary for them to do huge amounts of damage, monetarily and physically, when they flood, for it is only in recent times that builders, insurers, growers, and consumers have decided to repeal the laws of physics and build on, settle in, and plow lands that are tellingly labeled floodplains on hydrographic maps. Granted that this happens in California and New York, these days, as much as in the Midwest, but it is suggestive that Iowa, for one, is now clocking hundred-year floods every three or four years. It is not that the rivers have grown any larger or more likely to flood, but that targets for ruin have come to the rivers in increasing number, with inevitable result.

The habit of overlooking physical reality in the hope that nature will somehow play ball is a curiously American trait, and it will play out in all our pocketbooks in the near term. For this year the floods, more than sweeping away a few cars and inauspiciously located homes, are carrying off a good portion of the nation’s corn crop. That crop was already oversubscribed, thanks to record demand for maize worldwide, especially in booming economies such as China and India, and to the ever-increasing use of corn to produce bioethanol. In response to that demand, corn acreage has been increasing across the nation: In 2006, 78.3 million acres were under cultivation for corn, while in 2007 the figure was 90.5 million acres. In Iowa, with the largest amount of land in any state devoted to it, 13.9 million acres went to corn in 2007, up from 12.6 million acres in 2006; elsewhere in the Midwest and Upper South, the production of previously important crops such as soybeans, rice, and cotton fell markedly as farmers shifted to corn.

This is the largest acreage given over to corn since World War II, with no exigency other than the hope for profit driving the boom. Corn has become big business, and so, for once, has all the infrastructure supporting it, to say nothing of the ground on which it grows; for the first time since the mid-1970’s, the value of cropland rose faster, by percentage, than that of residences in the world’s most-expensive cities, a boon to landholders, more and more of them corporations and fewer and fewer of them individuals. Late in June 2008, the fertilizer and oilseed firm Bunge Ltd. bought Corn Products International for $4.4 billion to secure its hold on “finished corn products,” mainly starches and sweeteners, but also to consolidate its land holdings to take advantage of the boom; meanwhile, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, the nation’s largest agribusinesses, concentrated on ethanol production, adding billions to coffers that have grown larger simply by virtue of a solid real-estate portfolio.

Corn is in high demand, and this has had the effect of driving up food prices dramatically. But the laws of supply and demand apply only so far, for, contrary to them, prices did not fall when agribusinesses began producing corn from horizon to horizon. Just the reverse occurred, thanks to that pressing international competition for what is [...]]]> Take one part high fuel prices. Mix in stagnant wages and high consumer prices generally. Stir in global uncertainty and an ever-exploding human population. Add misplaced production and chimera-chasing. Add to all that the floods of May and June 2008 that inundated much of Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, and you have a perfect storm—at least as far as corn is concerned. When it clears, corporate business will be the richer, but the world will be in chaos—and hungry.

True, the world is always in chaos. True, much of the world is always hungry. True, rivers flood: It is in their job description that they do so. Yet it is only in recent times that it has become customary for them to do huge amounts of damage, monetarily and physically, when they flood, for it is only in recent times that builders, insurers, growers, and consumers have decided to repeal the laws of physics and build on, settle in, and plow lands that are tellingly labeled floodplains on hydrographic maps. Granted that this happens in California and New York, these days, as much as in the Midwest, but it is suggestive that Iowa, for one, is now clocking hundred-year floods every three or four years. It is not that the rivers have grown any larger or more likely to flood, but that targets for ruin have come to the rivers in increasing number, with inevitable result.

The habit of overlooking physical reality in the hope that nature will somehow play ball is a curiously American trait, and it will play out in all our pocketbooks in the near term. For this year the floods, more than sweeping away a few cars and inauspiciously located homes, are carrying off a good portion of the nation’s corn crop. That crop was already oversubscribed, thanks to record demand for maize worldwide, especially in booming economies such as China and India, and to the ever-increasing use of corn to produce bioethanol. In response to that demand, corn acreage has been increasing across the nation: In 2006, 78.3 million acres were under cultivation for corn, while in 2007 the figure was 90.5 million acres. In Iowa, with the largest amount of land in any state devoted to it, 13.9 million acres went to corn in 2007, up from 12.6 million acres in 2006; elsewhere in the Midwest and Upper South, the production of previously important crops such as soybeans, rice, and cotton fell markedly as farmers shifted to corn.

This is the largest acreage given over to corn since World War II, with no exigency other than the hope for profit driving the boom. Corn has become big business, and so, for once, has all the infrastructure supporting it, to say nothing of the ground on which it grows; for the first time since the mid-1970’s, the value of cropland rose faster, by percentage, than that of residences in the world’s most-expensive cities, a boon to landholders, more and more of them corporations and fewer and fewer of them individuals. Late in June 2008, the fertilizer and oilseed firm Bunge Ltd. bought Corn Products International for $4.4 billion to secure its hold on “finished corn products,” mainly starches and sweeteners, but also to consolidate its land holdings to take advantage of the boom; meanwhile, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, the nation’s largest agribusinesses, concentrated on ethanol production, adding billions to coffers that have grown larger simply by virtue of a solid real-estate portfolio.

Corn is in high demand, and this has had the effect of driving up food prices dramatically. But the laws of supply and demand apply only so far, for, contrary to them, prices did not fall when agribusinesses began producing corn from horizon to horizon. Just the reverse occurred, thanks to that pressing international competition for what is globally appearing to be a scarce resource—maize in particular, that is, but, in the coming years, foodstuffs in general. Indeed, corn topped seven dollars per bushel in June, twice the level of June 2007. Like that of oil, the price of corn promises to go nowhere but north, particularly given the loss of so much of this year’s crop.

The floods of 2008 will restrict supply in the near term. So will the cost of oil; according to the USDA, it is projected that corn acreage will fall to 86 million acres in the coming harvest, mostly as a response to what economists call “input costs”—namely, the price of the fuel and petrochemical fertilizers needed to grow crops on an industrial scale. (And why not use corn-based ethanol for fuel? Because it’s too expensive—but now we’re getting into matters that are headache-inducing in their complexity.) Mexico, India, and other Third World countries are rushing to make up the difference as U.S. producers continue to turn over crops to fuel production instead of food, but the perfect storm has already done its damage. In its wake can come only poverty and hunger.

—Gregory McNamee

This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.