It’s a phrase that glimmers with righteous indignation.  You think of that masked molester with a gun shimmying through your daughter’s bedroom window, and you want to go blow his brains out.  Who tolerates evil?

“We have a choice to make today,” added Beck.

Over the course of his 6,000-word altar call, he clarified what he meant.  As Americans, we must choose to exercise “faith, hope, and love.”  We must “pick up our stick” as Moses did, and stand for freedom.  We must not fall asleep like the disciples of Jesus at Gethsemane.  We must tithe at a church, synagogue, or mosque.  We must “pledge our lives and fortunes” to eliminating our national debt.  We must study the “sacred scriptures of our country”—the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, “I Have a Dream.”  “This isn’t about one church or one faith over another; it is about the eternal principles of God.”

That last is an interesting contrast.  In another time, “denominational differences,” as Charlie Brown told Linus, tended to separate.  And there were even bigger heretics to fry when it came to the differences between “faiths” such as Christianity and Islam.  Or Christianity and Mormonism.

But Glenn Beck is a Mormon, and these “eternal principles of God” he espouses reflect that fact.  And for conservatives standing at the anxious bench on the Washington Mall, Beck was the one mediator between Mormon ideologue Cleon Skousen and man.

Like Beck’s, Skousen’s Mormonism is not the sort that publicly preaches that Jesus and Lucifer are brethren or that Elohim was once a mere mortal.  In The 5,000 Year Leap: Twenty-Eight Great Ideas That Are Changing the World (Glenn Beck’s favorite book) Skou­sen elaborates on a list of principles that, he claims, were cemented into the foundation of the United States.  They include “The United States of America shall be a republic” (no. 12) and “The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution” (no. 18).

The trouble is, Skousen claims that these ideas were derived by the Founding Fathers from the Bible, and modus ponens, the United States is God’s country.  “The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race” (no. 28).

What’s so Mormon about all of this?  The above could have been said by any number of Christians who paint the Founding Fathers not as the wise, classically trained deists they were but as devout Bibliophiles.

And yet everything about this America-is-God’s-country ideology is Mormon to the core.  It serves as the false foundation of a religion that finds the center of human history not in the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection of Christ but in “another revelation of Jesus Christ” in the terrestrial “promised land” on which we stand.  It is Manichaean, declaring our external enemies evil and ourselves good, locating wickedness not in the hearts of sinful men but in the foes of a human government that will wither as the grass.  It is the religion of America—not the real, historical America, but the America of myth and fantasy.

“If we do these things,” Beck preached, “we will heal our nation.”  The phrase is reminiscent of 2 Chronicles 7:14, so often cited at rallies on the National Day of Prayer.  If my people, which are called by my name, shall . . . return to limited government (no. 19)?  Operate according to the will of the majority (no. 20)?  Be debt-free (no. 27)?  The assumption here is that Americans, like the Israelites of old, are uniquely “my [God’s] people.”  And that it is not “I the Lord” but “We the gods” who can “heal their land.”

Observers of American Christianity have noticed that, by and large, evangelicals no longer place much emphasis on America’s divine mission to protect and defend Israel.  Attendance at Christians-for-Israel conferences is down.  John Hagee and the Left Behind movies now evoke embarrassment.  The Bush Years are over.  America has “outgrown” dispensationalism.

All true, but there has also been a transference.  America’s divine mission is no longer the protection of Israel but the preservation of “freedom” here and abroad.  Muslims are no longer the enemy of Jews but the enemy of “our way of life.”  And conservative American Christians—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—are joining evangelicals in this new dispensationalism, as they did at the Restoring Honor rally (alongside “240 men and women from all faiths represent[ing] thousands of clergy”).  There they applauded a man who denies that Jesus is the eternal Son of God, as he invited them to “find out who God truly is.”

Read "Mormon Apocalypse, Part 1" here.

This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  To subscribe (12 issues for $19.99), click here.

We call it American exceptionalism—the belief that, from among the countries of the world, the United States of America has been uniquely called by God to be X. In this equation, X equals whatever you think America stands for.

The Shining City on a Hill, the New Jerusalem, Manifest Destiny, the Sacred Union, the Great Society, the protector of God’s chosen people—X has many incarnations, some of them draped with Geneva gowns or encased in sidewinder missiles.

Harsh realities have pulled Christians back from the brink of this idolatry—half a million dead here, a generation lost to a sexual or unitarian revolution there—causing believers to remember that Stone that smashed the idol of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, or that line from Kipling about being one with Nineveh and Tyre. Maybe we’re not so special after all. Or just as special as, say, those Iraqi Christians recently liberated from their homes and churches.

Like Rome, America has a religion that supports and guarantees her greatness, one that sacralizes her exceptionalism. Imagine, if you will, if this country had a sacred past, one that factored into the salvation narrative itself. You look at this vast continent, and your mind boggles—all of this land, and it was only occupied by loincloth-wearing animists for a thousand or more years? Was anyone else here before them? Where did the lost tribes of Israel go? What if they came here! And since transatlantic travel was pretty scarce during the first century a.d., and since Jesus Christ came first “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” wouldn’t it follow that He appeared, resurrected from the dead, right here in America? And lest the gates of Hell prevail, doesn’t it then follow that a record of this would be written down, on golden tablets that would endure centuries of weather, and buried for later discovery? And (skipping ahead) wouldn’t the discovery here of “another testament of Jesus Christ” firmly establish the uniqueness, the permanence of America? And (skipping further ahead) wouldn’t any threat to America therefore be an attack on God?

W. Cleon Skousen thought so. For him the threat was the Red Menace, and he fought it on behalf of Elohim as an FBI special agent, a speaker for the John Birch Society, and in his book The Naked Communist (1958), in which he prophetically listed the goals of communism—many of which were fulfilled during the Cold War.

Skousen, you may have guessed, was a committed Mormon. As such, he denied the key tenets of Christianity, while using biblical terminology. Thus, for example, he believed that the one we all know as god, the father of Jesus (and Lucifer), was once a mere creature, but this “Elohim” “acquired,” through virtue, the glory and power of a god, being recognized as such by the universe’s “vast numbers of intelligences.” Thus, Skousen wrote (in 1953),

since God “acquired” the honor and sustaining influence of “all things” it follows . . . that if He should do anything to violate the confidence or “sense of justice” of these intelligences, they would promptly withdraw their support, and the “power” of God would disintegrate.

You may ask yourself, why in the world would anyone become a Mormon? This perception isn’t lost on the Latter-Day Saints, who don’t advertise that you, too, could rule your own galaxy, any more than Tom Cruise speaks publicly of the fate of the Thetans. Instead, they make those heartwarming commercials about family time and other things that interest conservatives.

Like, say, the threat of communism. Or liberals. Or the “racist” Barack Obama. Or any other threat to the aforementioned American exceptionalism.

Glenn Beck, the weeping conservative firebrand, has been a Mormon for a little over ten years. And while he pays homage to the writings of such great conservatives as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—which writings he calls “our American scriptures”—Beck has made it no secret that his favorite author is Cleon Skou­sen. Not Cleon Skousen, apologist of Interplanetary Elohim, but Cleon Skousen, author of The 5,000 Year Leap (1981), a catalog of the “divine” teachings of America’s Founding Fathers, who, it turns out, were to a man advocates of Mormon-style American exceptionalism. Beck urges his audiences to purchase the book, for which he has written a new Foreword.

It was the unstated theme of Mormon-style American exceptionalism that undergirded every word of Glenn Beck’s keynote speech at his recent “ecumenical” Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C.

To be continued . . .

Read "Mormon Apocalypse, Part 2" here.

This article first appeared in the October 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  To subscribe (12 issues for $19.99), click here.

The Dear Leader of the United States reminds me of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is a man who won’t take his own side in a fight. More precisely, his own country’s side.

Barack Obama seems to hate calling anyone our enemy. It isn’t nice. It’s not Christian, as he understands Christianity. Well, Christ enjoins us to love our enemies. But that presupposes that we can know who our enemies are. He doesn’t tell us to have no enemies, which is hardly possible.

Some people will choose to be our enemies and will often tell us so. The ancient Romans didn’t pretend to be friends of the early Christians.

Christians are told to be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” The founders of the American Republic had few illusions about man and government.

Freedom, they insisted, depended on “jealousy,” not “confidence” or faith in rulers. They would have thought Obama foolish or cynical for demanding that we give our rulers the benefit of the doubt for good motives. Government, as they knew, is the natural enemy of liberty. They weren’t hypnotized, as later generations would be, by the word democracy. Nor were they terribly shocked by evidence of Original Sin.

Liberal high hopes for our first black president were a hangover from the naive old belief in the Noble Savage. Obama has banked heavily on that belief. Samuel Johnson, immune to every form of ideology, never fell for such emotional rubbish: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”

The jingoism of democracy defies reason. Frequent headlines attest that elected rulers are no more corruption-proof than any others.

Nothing seems to disillusion Obama, however. He used to teach constitutional law; but if he ever read the Federalist, it appears to have been lost on him. His literacy is quite superficial. He barely knows what he is saying, and he never mentions the Tenth Amendment, the key to the whole Constitution. (Even Lincoln knew that much.)

James Madison explained that the new Constitution didn’t give the federal government new powers but rather “invigorated” those powers it already had under the Articles of Confederation. Obama wouldn’t know what he was talking about.

Federal powers, Madison said, would be “few and defined,” and those of the states, “numerous and indefinite.”

Johnson opposed popular elections, on the grounds that the choice of a “rabble” had no more moral value than that of sheer chance. It isn’t hard to guess what he would have thought of opinion polls and approval ratings.

Obama may be the perfect representative of a nation that no longer speaks the language of its ancestors. True, he is more fluent than George W. Bush, but both have done much to bring government into disrepute.

To dispraise Obama is by no means to praise Bush. On the contrary, Obama’s presidency is the result of Bush’s. Americans today grossly overvalue politics and regard political victories as substantive achievements. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson can put such things in proper perspective. Even Johnson’s offhand witticisms reveal a mind as profound as it is hilarious.

The U.S. Constitution, as I often say, poses no serious threat to our form of government. It has roughly the same tenuous relation to our political institutions as the book of Revelation has to the Unitarian Church.

Arizona’s attempt to discourage illegal immigration has exposed the huge gulf between Obama and most Americans. At the rate he is going, he seems more likely to be deported than reelected.

Like most people of both major parties, Obama takes for granted that the War Between the States ended as it should have—with slavery abolished and secession crushed. It also marked the virtual extinction of the Tenth Amendment, which George Will says is “dead as a doornail.”

Was anyone very surprised when O­ba­ma’s second Supreme Court nominee turned out to be a fanatical lesbian? It was quite in character for him—one more Historic First for this President without precedent. In the view of today’s liberalism, there is no such thing as sexual perversion, as long as both (or all) parties give their consent. If this widespread attitude needs a name, it might be dubbed sexual bolshevism—the Playboy Philosophy with a vengeance.

Some politicians’ vices become eponymous—McCarthyite, Clintonian—and it looks as if the incumbent may earn his own niche in the lexicon of invective. After one of the warmest and most hopeful welcomes any president-elect has ever received, he has quickly proceeded to disappoint and alienate the country that chose him. He evidently despises the rabble, and the feeling seems to be mutual.

This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Break out the Booze?
by Thomas Fleming

views

Academic Sins
by John Willson

The Uses of a Liberal Education
by Catharine Savage Brosman

news

Okinawa Occupied
by Allen Mendenhall

reviews

An Unfinished Story
by James Bissett
[Srdja Trifkovic, The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia]

Sustained Magnificence
by Derek Turner
[Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945]

A Legend for Our Time
by Matthew A. Roberts
[Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy]

A Question of Dots
by Gerald J. Russello
[Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State]

correspondence

Hanging With the Snarks: An Academic Memoir
by Clyde Wilson

The Quest for Certitude
by Jonathan Chaves

vital signs

Terminating an Unwanted Parentcy
by Kenneth Zaretzke

columns

Adios, Rio Nido
by Justin Raimondo

Caring in Colorado (and Everywhere)
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Give Me Back My Frock!
by Aaron D. Wolf

Who’ll Stop the Rain?
by Scott P. Richert

The Man Who Won the Revolution
by Roger D. McGrath

The Daughter of Time
by Philip Jenkins

Retreat From Eden II
by Andrei Navrozov

Advertising Himself
[Inception]
by George McCartney

Sympathy for the Devil
by Taki Theodoracopulos

poetry

“Julian at Prayer” and
“A Talisman Against Falling”
by Stella Nesanovich

Polemics & Exchanges

American Proscenium
"The Panic of 2011"
by John Seiler

Cultural Revolutions
—"Manufacturing Bust" (Greg Kaza)

The largest industrial states have recorded manufacturing job losses under President Obama. These include California (121,000), Texas (62,400), Illinois (59,000), Pennsylvania (50,900), North Carolina (50,400), Ohio (46,400), Indiana (29,200), and Michigan (23,900). National manufacturing job losses under President Obama have been broad-based. Durable-goods industry sectors that have recorded job losses under Obama include wood products, nonmetallic mineral products, primary metals, fabricated metals, machinery, computer and electronic products, electrical equipment and appliances, transportation equipment, furniture and related products, and miscellaneous manufacturing. Non-durable-goods sectors that have recorded losses include food manufacturing, beverages and tobacco products, textile products, apparel, leather and allied products, printing and related support activities, petroleum and coal products, chemicals, and plastics and rubber products. No manufacturing sector has yet to record a gain.

Most incumbent Republicans lack the credibility to raise the issue. They were, after all, largely silent on manufacturing job losses under President George W. Bush. Manufacturing contracted by 4.5 million jobs under the Republican Bush, a 27-percent decline unlikely ever to be surpassed. The longest consecutive monthly increase in manufacturing jobs under President Bush was five months (December 2005 through April 2006). Obama has already exceeded that record in 2010, recording six consecutive months of small gains from January to June after monthly declines last year.

Most Republicans have listened for too long to economists who argue manufacturing job losses are unimportant as long as output expands. This argument overlooks countries like China, where manufacturing employment and output have both increased. It downplays the social consequences for families, including a greater government role as good-paying private-sector jobs disappear. It also ignores the political implications of long-term manufacturing job losses in a state such as Ohio, the key to the Electoral College. President Richard M. Nixon, the last Republican to preside over a net national gain in domestic manufacturing jobs, won Ohio’s electoral votes twice, as did Clinton. How will these Republicans assail Obama’s record to date in Ohio when nearly one in three manufacturing jobs (322,400) disappeared there under his predecessor?

Economists who defend President Oba­ma’s economic policies argue he inherited an economy in recession and note that Bush also presided over a net loss of manufacturing jobs. But at some point President Obama’s economic policies, as they apply to the domestic manufacturing sector, will be judged on their own merit. And thus far under Obama, national manufacturing employment has declined to the level of spring 1941 (11.6 million), shortly before U.S. entry into World War II.

This article first appeared in the September 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Deep-sixing the death tax is part of the cancellation of most of President George W. Bush’s 2003 tax cuts. Republicans in the White House and Congress, in their Karl Rovian sneakiness, put a termination date on their otherwise sensible tax cuts. The reason is now clear: The tax increases are being used in campaigns against Democrats who won’t extend the tax cuts.

But wait, there’s more. In 2011, the top income-tax rate will rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. The capital-gains tax will jump from 15 percent to 20 percent, an increase of one third, choking off vital capital needed for an economic recovery. And unlike the income tax, the capital-gains tax is not indexed to inflation.

Individuals and businesses are taking profits in 2010 to avoid paying higher 2011 taxes. They will stop doing that on January 1. The tax increases will trigger the Panic of 2011, the second dip of the Great Recession.

Things are going to be worse than they were in the Great Depression. Back then, the country’s moral fiber was stronger. Far fewer people had mortgages. There were no credit cards. Since the 1930’s, the U.S. industrial base, which was still by far the world’s largest, has greatly eroded, and it soon will be surpassed by China’s.

For America’s industrial decline, my Chronicles colleague Tom Piatak blames free trade. I blame the lack of a gold standard, excessive regulations, and high taxes. I especially blame the 1971 “Nixon Shock,” which ended the $35 gold standard, and the ensuing inflation that jammed the middle class into upper-income tax brackets. But both of us want America to have strong producing industries.

By contrast, most politicians, economists, and bankers are happy with an economy based on folks foreclosing on one another’s houses. I’m not joking. One guy I know puts food on a modest table by getting paid one dollar each for pictures he takes of foreclosed houses; 125 pictures per day equals $125, barely enough to survive. Another man I know works for a mortgage company, paying families $1,500 each for not trashing their foreclosed homes before they go and live on the streets.

The economists also tell us that in the summer of 2009 a “recovery” was magically conjured up by President Bush’s $700 billion TARP stimulus, President Obama’s $827 billion stimulus—all of it borrowed money—and Fed boss Ben Bernanke’s doubling of the money supply in 2009.

But the “recovery” money was used to bail out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. Having a hard time avoiding foreclosure? Tough. Wall Street not only grabbed your money but ran up trillions of credit in your name. Your grandkids will be paying down the debt.

During the “recovery,” the official unemployment rate has remained close to ten percent. That number is bogus. To make the unemployment numbers look better for his 1996 reelection bid, President Clinton removed people who had despaired and quit looking for work. If those numbers are included, as they are on Shadowstats.com, unemployment is really above 20 percent—a depression level by any measure.

Another major weight on the economy is the Iraq war, with a cost of up to five trillion dollars, as calculated by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz; he includes not just “defense” spending but the cost of VA benefits for wounded veterans and cumulative interest on the money borrowed from China and Japan to pay for the war. As during the Vietnam War, we’ve learned the hard way Sun Tzu’s warning: “There is no instance of a nation profiting from prolonged warfare.”

Meanwhile, Social Security ran into the red in 2010, seven years earlier than expected, piling higher a national debt that is now rising rapidly above $13 trillion. Obama just socialized medical care, 17 percent of the economy, bringing untold inefficiencies and suffering. For the post-election lame-duck session, Democrats are lusting to pass a “carbon-tax” bill to fight a global-warming threat proved bogus by Climategate. And Republicans are pushing Obama to nuke Iran’s alleged nukes, which could send oil prices up to $300 per barrel.

As we saw on September 15, 2008, when the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy precipitated the Panic of 2008, a recession or depression starts with a triggering event that detonates thousands of pounds of TNT-infused economic rot. The next trigger will be pulled on January 1. Even if the Democrats running Congress pass an extension of the Bush tax cuts to reduce their losses in the November elections, they will mess it up somehow. The trigger will still be pulled.

I hope I’m wrong.

This article first appeared in the September 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Some recent Australian cultural trends—massive Islamic immigration, for instance—are so obvious that even an economist can detect them. Others occur so stealthily that they attract no attention, until you suddenly look around and think, Hey, whatever happened to such-and-such?

Ireland’s influence on Australia falls into the latter category. Once it was inescapable; now it has faded. Its very fading is a momentous incident, like the silence demonstrated by the nocturnal dog. No Australian 30 years ago would have predicted such a decline.

From the country’s federation in 1901 until the 1970’s, the Australian Labor Party abounded in Irish surnames: O’Malley, Scullin, Lyons, Chifley, Calwell, Walsh, Cahill, Murphy, O’Halloran, McKenna, Daly, Kane (sometimes Anglicized as Cain), Cavanagh, Burke, Hanlon, Hogan, Gair. Study any list of Australian Catholic bishops’ surnames from this period, and you’ll see the same thing: Moran, Kelly, Mannix, Lyons (again), Muldoon, Simonds, O’Collins, O’Brien, Sheehan, Cassidy, Clancy. An Aussie born before 1965 will remember how lavish St. Patrick’s Day celebrations were in Sydney and Melbourne, not to mention other Australian cities. All of which might sound similar to the Irish experience in the United States.

But it shouldn’t. Because, for one thing, Australia underwent nothing like the huge Irish influx that marked the United States after the Great Famine. Those Irish who came to Australia mostly came before the 1840’s. By post-famine U.S. arrivals’ standards, they were seldom too badly off. Unpleasant transportation logistics, yes. Coffin ships, no. Partly as a result, Irish political agitation in Australia remained pretty mild.

The one conspicuous exception to this generalization came with two national-service referenda that set Aussie against Aussie during World War I. Most Australian Protestants supported conscription. Most Australian Catholics (which effectively meant most Irish-Australian Catholics) opposed it. Firmest of the voices against conscription was Melbourne Archbishop Daniel Mannix, who called the hostilities “just a sordid trade war,” and who led the anticonscription forces at both referenda (1916 and 1917). Each time, the anticonscriptionists won. Nevertheless, they won by margins narrow enough to ensure that ill feeling on the matter long outlived the actual referendum results.

We need not make too much of that, though. Yes, Anglo-Australians and Irish-Australians had their sectarian strife. Yes, they traded witless insults in the school playground and discreetly—or sometimes openly—discriminated against each other in the workforce. (This discrimination is analyzed in a fascinating 2009 book by Sydney journalist Cliff Baxter, Reach for the Stars.) But they were not beating each other up, let alone committing mass murder, Belfast-style. A general sanity prevailed.

Such sanity had several advantages, but chiefly this one: When the real thuggee overtook Northern Ireland in 1969, most Irish-Australians exhibited much greater caution than their American counterparts about getting involved with it. During the 1970’s, Melbourne’s Celtic Club had a reputation—whether justified or not—for being a Sinn Féin activists’ haunt, and the police would periodically raid it. More frequent in Australia than such overt action was a certain indiscriminate sentimentality toward Irish Republicanism. This broke out in occasional foolish utterances, especially in 1979 when Lord Mountbatten was murdered (“Guess what we did in the holidays!” chirruped one Sydney undergraduate newspaper at the time) and regarding the Bobby-Sands-led hunger strikes two years afterward. What it never produced, in Australia, was anything as systematic, politically well connected, and cashed-up as the Noraid network in the United States.

Today the Irish heritage is but one Australian strand (and by no means the most prominent) among a dozen. The layman in the pew at the typical Australian Mass is likelier to have an Italian, Maltese, Lebanese, East Timorese, Chinese, or Filipino background than an Irish one. He feels no interest in those Hibernian icons—Eamon De Valera, Patrick Pearse, the Easter Rising—routinely invoked by Australian priests a few decades back.

Of course, many an Irish-Australian (femocrat Germaine Greer, for instance) can be found among militant ex-Catholics. We have our own “misery memoirs”—Angela’s Antipodean Ashes, perhaps?—in which the more boringly bourgeois an author’s childhood, the more lurid the tales of incestuous proletarian abuse with which he laughs all the way to the bank. So in some ways, Irish visitors to modern Australia would feel right at home.

Except that in other ways, they wouldn’t. Contrast the public response in Ireland concerning the Murphy and Ryan Reports with the public response in Australia concerning the government’s rather similar “Forgotten Australians” announcement.

This latter event occurred last November. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the (since deposed) opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, Families Minister Jenny Macklin, and everybody who was anybody, my dear, met in Canberra’s Parliament House. There they apologized profusely to the half-million children—many of them postwar migrants—who, in government-run institutions, suffered abuse. Or were thought to have suffered abuse. Or knew someone thought to have suffered abuse. Or knew someone who did the cleaning for the third cousin of the next-door neighbor of someone thought to have suffered abuse.

Lots of tears were shed, pious Oprah-style resolutions made, pompous newspaper editorials published—but in taverns, barbershops, and taxis around the country, a different attitude prevailed. Thousands of Australians privately derided the brouhaha as the biggest joke since Little Nell’s death.

As for the March 2010 feeding frenzy over Irish clerical abuse (and the concomitant calls for Pope Benedict XVI to resign), it is simply impossible to convey the scorn that the average Australian, whatever his own religious allegiance or lack thereof, feels for such hysteria. We who actually have a grasp, however slight, of modern cultural history find the spectacle before us (that of Catholics being lectured on moral issues by the spiritual descendants of Alfred Kinsey, Bertrand “Dirty Bertie” Russell, Margaret Sanger, and Marie Stopes) to be pure comedy gold—fully comparable with I Love Lucy, Carry On, Jeeves, the 1937 Soviet constitution, and Princess Diana’s funeral.

In other words, when confronted with politics as psychotherapeutic debauch, Australians—including Irish-Australians—have retained some healthy skepticism. Too many Irish in Ireland give outsiders the impression of having lost this skepticism. Perhaps we should blame globalist sermons from Bono and from ex-President Mary Robinson, sermons which we Aussies have for the most part been miraculously spared.

Maybe some Irish-Australians should move to Dublin and teach Irish elites how to be properly, cynically Irish again. The shades of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien surely demand no less.

This article first appeared in the August 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

There is—there must be–all the difference in the world between an autobiography and a novel written in the first person. Are we clear? Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History, for example, has much in common with Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield or even Great Expectations, with the obvious exceptions that the “truth” seems to be fiction, and the fiction seems to be true. So then, we are not clear. And possibly an autobiography should be read as though it were fiction—at least, Karl Rove’s narrative should be read as fiction. And I recommend this approach for one particular reason: The book is much more comfortable to consume as a mythic artifact than as a discursive account of life and politics.

Dickens’ Great Expectations obviously has an ironic title, and to appreciate the point, we have to read the book alertly and even think about what we remember. Such an approach would not bear fruit with the Rove romance, however. His book has a title that is the opposite of ironic, whatever that might be. Courage and Consequence is about neither the one nor the other. The subtitle is even more anti-ironic: What is a “Conservative” and what is “the Fight”? No one would learn anything about those questions that she did not bring with her to the text. I don’t think that the readers of this journal need any explanations about courage, consequences, conservatism, or conflict, but perhaps there may be some use in noting what this first-person narrative signed by Karl Rove indicates about these and other matters of interest and concern.

So, speaking impersonally about personal matters, I note for the record the mythic aspect of the early years. Karl Rove is far from the first hero who had a mythic birth, a confused parentage, and even a tragic background, particularly as it relates to his mother’s suicide. His functional father was not his biological father, and the story has been dwelt on in the blogs in an attempt to associate Rove with homosexuality, a political spin that need not detain us. So much for the early years, somewhat tinted with rose. They would have provided a Freudian with a field day, a romancer with a gold mine, and a mythographer with a hedge fund. Our creative approach is paying off already!

OK, so let’s check out the Bildungsroman aspect—you know, the education of the hustler as a young man. Now what happened was that Karl Rove became, at a young age, a political operative or hack, a spin artist, a consultant, an expert about the arcane manipulations of politics in the ward-heeler sense of the word. If you are interested in focus groups, polling, and the manipulation of issues and debates, there might be something of some slight interest for you in this book. But as for education—while there is experience—there is little to be found here. In Bill Clinton’s autobiography, we learn that a college professor threw a copy of The Republic on the floor and pronounced to his class, “Plato is a fascist!” In Karl Rove’s text, political thought began with Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, Jr., and National Review was a “weekly.” Karl was a Westerner, Karl related to Texas, and Karl liked the Bushes. That was the education. Like the Clintons, Karl was a college politician, and like them, he never grew up. Unlike them, he was a College Republican, and unlike the Clintons, he never obtained his college degree. And it shows.

Turning from the mythic aspects, we look now to aspects of myth. Karl is self-conscious—he knows that he is a myth. His 34th and final chapter is entitled “Rove: the Myth.” What is the Myth? The Myth of the enemy is that he is a little troll who looks as if he were drawn by Charles Ad­dams; the myth of the narrative is that he is not. The Myth is that he is a weirdo and, what is worse, an unscrupulous liar and bullslinger who has done incalculable damage to the people who supported George W. Bush; the myth of the narrative is that It Just Ain’t So. The Myth about his inhumanity is contraindicated by his second marriage and the son of that marriage; but the myth of the narrative omits entirely the recent DIVORCE NO. 2.

Therefore, much of the narrative is required to overcome the Myth with a myth. Question: What must you do, when they say you are a space alien in disguise? Answer: Refer frequently to your human (not alien) emotions, your human mistakes, your human love, and your human fears in the form of understandable bodily discomforts and human embarrassments, yet still omitting DIVORCE NO. 2. Examples: “I felt like vomiting”; vetting candidates is like “a proctology exam”; I “salivated” at the thought of using research about Al Gore, etc., etc. Love of Abraham Lincoln and of rock music are other hallmarks of humanity. So is the loyalty to Bush, who was right about Iraq. But just here the mythology becomes so over the top as to lose all persuasiveness.

I have come to learn through bitter experience that Karl Rove’s autobiography cannot, finally, be productively compared with Victorian fiction (though some paragraphs of Esther Summerson still come to mind). Superior analogues suggest themselves from horror movies of the 1950’s: Invaders From Mars (Menzies, 1953), for example. The boy sees the flying saucer land behind the sand dune with the wordless chorus and then notices that his suddenly harsh father has a . . . thing . . . on the back of his neck. Or more obviously, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956): Pod People keep Kevin McCarthy from doing Dana Wynter, and everybody thinks he’s crazy because the trucks are driven by College Republicans. If this is McCarthyism, count me in, and as for snatching the body of Dana Wynter in 1956, count me in again as well—even, or even especially, when she was bad. I don’t see yet any analogy with The Creature From the Black Lagoon, but I’m working on it. The SEQUEL NO. 2—The Creature Walks Among Us—has got to be the answer.

This article first appeared in the August 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Srdja Trifkovic is no stranger to Chronicles readers, many of whom have found his articles commenting on foreign affairs, with particular attention to the Balkans, to be insightful, penetrating, and written with authority. His latest book, The Krajina Chronicle, provides further confirmation of his extraordinary talent.

The book is a history of the Serbian warrior-farmers who formed the first line of defense against Islamic invasions into the Habsburg Empire. It is a story of heroism and tragedy that reaches far beyond the old military frontier of the western Balkans. It is also a story that touches on some of the most eventful periods of European history. It ends tragically with the mass expulsion of the Krajina Serbs from their ancestral lands by Croatian military forces in August 1995, during Operation Storm. These forces, trained and equipped by the United States, drove out almost all of the Serbs from Croatia in a matter of days. The operation was made easier because the Krajina Serbs were ordered not to resist by their supposed ally, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

The Krajina Chronicle begins by tracing the early Slav settlements in the western Balkans in the sixth century and describes how, over time, the antipathies that developed between Croats and Serbs were intensified by religious and cultural differences, the Croats becoming Roman Catholic and the Serbs adopting the Orthodox Faith of the Byzantine Empire. By the Middle Ages, Trifkovic documents, Serbian settlements were well established in a number of regions in territory that was later to become Croatia—a fact that is denied by some Croat revisionists. These settlements were strengthened over the years by influxes of Serbian refugees fleeing the march of the Ottoman Turks. These hardy settlers eventually were transformed by their Austrian hosts into the warrior-farmers of the Krajina. And warriors indeed they were! Quite apart from resisting Islam’s encroachment into Central Europe, these Serbs fought in almost all of the wars entered into by the Habsburg monarchy from the 17th to the 20th century.

Used primarily as light cavalry and infantry, they played an important role in all of the many battles in which they were engaged. In the Seven Years’ War, for example, the Serbs contributed 88,000 troops to the Habsburg armies, and during the Napoleonic Wars they sent 11 regiments against Napoleon’s forces. (In World War I, when Austria invaded Serbia in 1914, the Krajina Serbs fought against their fellow Serbs.) In return for military service, the Serbs were given land and special privileges exempting them from local taxes and laws. They owed their loyalty to Vienna, not to the Croatian or Hungarian nobility. The special status afforded the Serbs was deeply resented by their Croatian neighbors.

As Croatian nationalism became increasingly prominent in the 19th century, the existence of a Serbian population with special privileges, a different religion, and different loyalties complicated and impeded the ability of Croatian leaders to deal with their Hungarian and Austrian rulers. As Trifkovic explains, this led to extreme antagonism, bordering on a “morbid obsession,” toward the minority Serbian population. This hatred of the Serbs was exemplified by speeches and writings of the Croatian political activist Ante Starcevic (1823-96), who was ahead of his time in advocating genocide against the Serbs. Starcevic wrote that the Serbs are “the race of slaves, beasts worse than any other,” fit for extermination. Trifkovic points out that there is hardly a town in today’s Croatia that does not have a street, square, or institution named for Starcevic, who is often referred to as the Father of the Nation.

Notwithstanding Croatia’s almost pathological hatred of the Serbs, it was Serbia that saved Croatia from being carved up at the end of World War I. Having been on the losing side of that conflict, Croatia, under the terms of the Treaty of London, risked losing much of her territory to Italy and Serbia. She would have been reduced to four counties around Zagreb and lost much of her coastline. Serbia rejected the Treaty of London, however, opting instead to incorporate Croatia into the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, thus uniting all of the South Slavs in one state that was to become Yugoslavia. While uniting all of the South Slavs may have been seen as a logical step in the spirit of Slavic self-determination, the new state soon ran into the same old difficulties. No sooner had it been proclaimed than Croatian politicians began agitating to break it apart.

In fact, Trifkovic argues, the bitter legacy of Serb-Croat relations seems to have been accentuated by the union:

From the moment of its creation at the end of the Great War until its disintegration just over seven decades later, Yugoslavia was constantly beset by national problems. . . . [P]roblems which proved impossible to solve, in the first royalist Yugoslavia [1918-41] were no less difficult in the second, communist one [1945-91].

The Krajina Chronicle provides a stirring narrative of the events that followed the formation of the first Yugoslavia until its abrupt and violent breakup after the Nazi invasion in April 1941. Hitler quickly gave control of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Ante Pavelic, the leader of the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement. The Ustashe immediately embarked on a murderous campaign against the Serbs in Croatia. The policy was explicitly proclaimed: Kill one third, convert one third to Catholicism, and expel the remaining third from Croatia.

Trifkovic’s story of this mass murder spares no ghastly detail of the insane slaughter that took place in that early spring and summer of 1941. Most of the killing was done by cutting victims’ throats or by smashing their heads with a mallet or an ax. Later, when camps were set up to deal with the large numbers of the dispossessed—mainly Serbs, but also Jews and gypsies—the killing methods remained the same. How many lost their lives is not known, but estimates by holocaust historians range from 500,000 to 530,000. (Almost all of the author’s sources are senior German and Italian military or diplomatic personnel. When senior SS officers complain to Berlin about the killings, the reader is left with no doubt about the horrors inflicted upon the Serbs of the Krajina.)

The book also deals with the intricacies of wartime Yugoslavia and with the factional disputes and battles between Tito’s Partisans and Draza Mihailovic’s royalist Chetniks. Although both were engaged in a ferocious resistance against German and Italian occupiers, their real struggle was against each other in a bloody civil war.

Here again, Trifkovic presents a perceptive analysis of the forces at play in wartime Yugoslavia and of the eventual decision by Churchill to back Tito and to stop further military support to the Mihailovic forces. The Soviet army’s entry into Yugoslavia in the fall of 1944 decided the fate of the anticommunist forces, including thousands of Krajina Serbs. Although many found their way into Austria, hoping to be welcomed by the Western allies, they were betrayed by the British and Americans at the Yalta conference in February 1945, when Churchill and Roosevelt acceded to Stalin’s demand that all Soviet citizens be returned to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, anticommunist Serbs were included in this category.

In May 1945 the British army returned to Yugoslavia several thousand anticommunist Serbs who, upon arrival, were summarily shot. Fortunately, 14,000 Serbs, most of them from the Krajina, managed to find their way to Italy, where U.S. authorities refused to hand them over to Tito. Many of them ended up in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia.

In Tito’s communist Yugoslavia, the Krajina Serbs were not granted any favors by the new regime. Their dreadful suffering at the hands of the Ustashe was not formally acknowledged, and the survivors were, in effect, denied the right to mourn and had to accept the new regime’s slogan of “Brotherhood and Unity.” Thousands of homeless and refugee Krajina Serbs were denied permission to return to Croatia and were resettled instead in the northern region of Vojvodina, on the Hungarian border. Throughout the Tito years the Serbian areas of Croatia remained economically underdeveloped and without a clearly defined political identity.

In the concluding chapters of the Krajina Chronicle, Trifkovic recounts the futile attempt by the Krajina Serbs to remain a part of what was left of the disintegrating Yugoslav Federation. When Franjo Tudj­man’s right-wing nationalist party came to power in 1990 with the undisguised aim of separating Croatia from Yugoslavia, the Serbs, determined to remain with Yugoslavia, formed an autonomous region and took up arms.

Croatia’s declaration of independence in May 1991 led to bitter fighting between the secessionist Croats and the Serbian minority. The conflict continued until a cease-fire was arranged in January 1992, which lasted with some exceptions until the devastating assault in August 1995 of Operation Storm, described by Carl Bildt, the U.N. special envoy to the former Yugoslavia, as “the most efficient ethnic cleansing we’ve seen in the Balkans.” Abandoned and betrayed by Milosevic and left to the mercy of a cowardly European Union and a vengeful Croatia supported by U.S. and NATO forces, the Krajina Serbs had come to the end of the line.

It is a credit to Srdja Trifkovic that his book will stand as a fitting, if perhaps the sole, testimony to a brave and extraordinary people—a compelling story, recounted in a stimulating and incisive narrative that covers a broad canvas without losing the attention to detail that brings life to historic events. The book also reveals the disturbing truth that the weak, however righteous their cause, remain at the mercy of the powerful.

This article first appeared in the September 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

For more information, or to purchase Dr. Trifkovic's The Krajina Chronicle, click here.

I’ll admit that I struggle a bit myself, and not just with the winters but the summers. Growing up a mile or two inland from Lake Michigan, I never knew that other parts of the Midwest (or even of the state) didn’t experience the moderating effects of the Big Lake. Even after 15 and more years, I have my doubts that I will ever become physically native to this place.

The onions, however, are a different story. Doubting their hardiness, I kept them in that same pot for five years. They grew and slowly multiplied until, last spring, they had become root-bound. I prepared a seven-foot row in the middle of one of our raised beds and planted most of them, though I kept a handful in the pot as insurance against a harsh winter.

I needn’t have worried. The onions were the first green to appear in our yard this spring, and as I write in mid-June, it would take several pots to hold them all. They simply did what nature intended them to do: put down roots, absorb the nutrients of their newly native soil, and get about the business of creating the next generation.

Doing what nature intended is a bit harder for people, especially those once rooted in a different soil. The bonds of memory and affection call us back, convince us that life was better way down upon the Swanee River or in the more temperate climes of the Lower Peninsula. Thinking that putting down roots in new soil is somehow a betrayal of the people and the place from which we came, we close ourselves in and grow too slowly. Perhaps without even realizing it, we live as if we’re strangers in a strange land. Five years pass, then ten, then fifteen, and our sights are still set on the old folks at home.

The onions will grow differently here in the dark, heavy clay soil of Northern Illinois than they did in the rich, sandy loam of West Michigan. A discriminating palate might even be able to discern a difference in flavor. But they will grow, because they can put down roots. Onions grow better in good soil than in poor soil, but they need soil of some type to keep them alive. Leave them in the pot long enough, and there will be no soil left.

Egyptian walking onions have a peculiar means of propagation. They don’t divide under the ground, nor do they produce seeds, as most onions do. Instead, at the very tip of every stalk, three or four sets (little bulbs) grow. Until they mature, their only connection to the soil is through the parent plant. When they fall to the ground, or are planted by man, they make their first contact with the soil.

There are times, most often in the summer and winter, not to mention the spring and the fall, when the call of home can be almost overwhelming. We grab a few days here or there and go back to Michigan, to stay in the house where I was reared, to visit my soon-to-be 98-year-old grandmother on her farm (where my father recently moved her onions to just outside her front door), to walk on the beach and climb sand dunes and to eat the local delicacies of the summers of my youth.

And through it all our children, who love their grandparents and their great-grandmother, who enjoy the time we spend in Michigan, still ask, “When are we going home?” They have taken root in a different land, and lived there all their lives, and they are connected through the soil to other people, to different places, to their own summer memories and sights and sounds and smells and flavors.

To move them for more than a month or two, even back to the land of their father and mother, would be like pulling up an onion by the roots. Given time and sufficient care, the onion will likely thrive in its new soil, but it will never be quite the same as it would have been had it remained where it was planted.

No one seems to know how Egyptian walking onions got the exotic part of their name, but the walking comes from their habit of growth. As summer stretches into fall, the sets grow larger, and the stalks weaken. The top of the plant gradually bends until the sets reach the ground, where they send out their own roots, the stalk withers and dies, and a new generation begins. Unless the grain of wheat . . .

Left on their own, Egyptian walking onions will spread, moving outward from generation to generation, moving back to fill in the holes left by the death of their ancestors. Still, without the intervention of man, they will never move far. When man does move them, though, they simply bow to the demands of their nature. Giving no thought for the morrow, they put down roots once again.

This article first appeared in the August 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.