The American Enterprise articles from March 1997

The American Enterprise archives from March 1997

Tradition works.(importance of tradition)
March 1, 1997... A week ago I was in a cab in Washington, D.C., when my driver (a Nigerian immigrant, like many D.C. cabbies) began to do something interesting. He started talking on his two-way radio with at least two other drivers in a fast, repetitive,...

Sidelights.(compilation of trivia)
March 1, 1997... Two beers for the newly single: Royal Divorcee Ale from England ("The taste? Bitter.") and Alimony Ale from California ("It's irreconcilably different").... Nashville's Bongo Coffee Shop proudly displays a cinnamon roll that bears a striking...

Scan.(modernity and tradition in diverse spheres)
March 1, 1997... UNSPORTING QUOTAS Syracuse University has had a wrestling team since 1922. In January, the university announced it is dropping the sport. Uncompetitive? Lack of student interest? Nope. S.U. wrestlers have been nationally ranked at...

Indicators.(status of the US economy)
March 1, 1997... MISMEASURING THE COST OF LIVING Economists have known for a long time that the government's Consumer Price Index overstates yearly increases in the U.S. cost of living. Is this a big deal? Yes it is. The index is used as a basic inflation...

"Live" with TAE: Wynton Marsalis & Stanley Crouch.(The American Enterprise)(jazz musicians)(Interview)
March 1, 1997... WYNTON MARSALIS AND STANLEY CROUCH ARE TWO OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL, FORWARD-LOOKING MEN IN JAZZ--LARGELY BECAUSE THEY LOOK BACK-WARD, TOO. The Marsalis family doesn't have a jazz tradition; it has a jazz dynasty. Patriarch Ellis Marsalis is...

Courtship and The Rules (Or why young women need flowers and candy).
March 1, 1997... There is a tradition in my house of not reading bestsellers, but I've made an exception for The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. Politically incorrect from the title on, this guide to old-fashioned coquetry has...

The vital tradition of manhood.
March 1, 1997... It is a straightforward fact that half of the human population is born male. Being a male and becoming a man, however, are two different things. To become a man, a boy has to undergo a process that is often stormy and perilous. The...

Manners matter.(importance of etiquette rules)
March 1, 1997... Society's condemnation of etiquette for being artificial and repressive stems from an idealistic if hopelessly naive belief in what we might call Original Innocence--the idea that people are born naturally good but corrupted by civilization....

Why the traditional family will never become obsolete.
March 1, 1997... In 1978, anthropologist Mary Leakey made a breathtaking discovery in a fossil lava bed in east Africa: the first human footprints, 3.6 million years old. They clearly indicate two creatures walking upright, between four and five feet tall, one...

Custom-built communities: two essays on local patriotism.
March 1, 1997... Does Shorty Live Here Anymore? By Bill Kauffman The nearby village of LeRoy--pronounced La-Roy by its residents; and Leee-Roy, as in Selmon or Jordan, by the rest of us--is a gold mine of nicknames. Its leafy streets are populated by...

Glimpses of a traditionalist counterculture.
March 1, 1997... Rearing adolescents today, amidst the decadence and distractions of the late-twentieth century, is not easy. Is it realistic to expect that typical young Americans can still be convinced in large numbers to respect their ancestral faiths, to...

Why traditional education is more progressive?(traditional education versus modern education)
March 1, 1997... I would label myself a political liberal and an educational conservative, or perhaps more accurately, an educational pragmatist. Political liberals really ought to oppose progressive educational ideas because they have led to practical failure...

Tradition and the military: an interview with James Webb.(includes excerpts from James Webb's novels and speech)(Interview)
March 1, 1997... James Webb isn't likely to forget military tradition as he works in his Arlington office overlooking the Iwo Jima Memorial. The walls, shelves, and tables bristle with mementos of his varied life: military honors; a model of the three-soldiers...

Winds of the Appalachians.(father of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe)(Obituary)
March 1, 1997... The Father of Bluegrass Music--a big, rawboned, intense, and stubborn man named Bill Monroe--died last year. From Tokyo to Moscow to Nashville (where his high lonesome sound was once little appreciated) there came an avalanche of tribute to...

Comeback!(return of old-style ballparks)
March 1, 1997... For a half-century after 1910, baseball was worshipped in artful cathedrals of the outdoors. The parks that teams played in were intimate, irregular, and entertaining in themselves. Recall the ivy of Chicago's Wrigley Field. The monuments at...

Classical buildings in a modern age.(classical architect, Allan Greenberg)(Interview)
March 1, 1997... AS THE FAILINGS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE HAVE BECOME GLARINGLY EVIDENT OVER RECENT DECADES, THE UNITED STATES HAS EXPERIENCED A RESURGENCE OF INTEREST IN CLASSICAL DESIGN. ONE OF TODAY'S MOST PROMINENT CLASSICISTS IS ALLAN GREENBERG, A...

The dead poet: a true-life clash between lethal modernism and classic art.(Hungarian poet, Miklos Radnoti)
March 1, 1997... Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and I have been spending the last few years translating the poetry of Miklos Radnoti, the great Hungarian poet who died in the Holocaust. In her introduction to our translation, Zsuzsi describes his last days: From 1940-1944,...

In praise of archaic ritual.(Jewish and Christian traditions)
March 1, 1997... There's Nothing Outdated About Keeping Kosher A few years ago, my daughter Sarah took a stand that greatly upset one of her father's colleagues while making him enormously proud. This small incident illustrates the huge gap between the...

A dead white European male comforts a 20th century Jew.
March 1, 1997... 0ne of the most moving experiences in my teaching career occurred after a seminar discussion of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. A student came up to me to explain that she had missed the previous class because it was a...

Who's afraid of the future?(Virginia Postrel, James K. Glassman, Charles Murray, Christopher DeMuth)(Panel Discussion)
March 1, 1997... Since no look backward to tradition would be complete without a glance forward as well, we conclude our feature section with this condensed version of a panel discussion on "The Future" that was recently held at the American Enterprise...

Taking citizenship seriously.(Transcript)
March 1, 1997... Citizenship means full membership in the American republic. The goal of the naturalization process that grants citizenship to U.S. immigrants should therefore be Americanization, stated clearly without apology or embarrassment. Americanization...

In real life: the daily work of Americans.
March 1, 1997... MEETING MY FUTURES By Blake Hurst Conservatives like free markets. I know I do. Mostly. But in all my time spent with Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Joseph Schumpeter, nobody mentioned how hard free markets can be on a marriage....

Let's sell more U.S. visas.(creativity in business)
March 1, 1997... "We've done great on boat people. I see no problem with a few yacht people," quipped Harold Ezell, an Immigration and Naturalization Service official. Ezell was referring to the provision in the Immigration Act of 1990 that set up the...

The battle over correcting the consumer price index.(The Consumer Economist)
March 1, 1997... A recent Washington Post article opened my eyes to how some journalists view us economists. The story was about a poll the Post had conducted among, first, a group of economists and, then, a group of ordinary citizens. The survey featured...

The old-fashioned three-day weekend.(Flashback)
March 1, 1997... When tradition faces off against the almighty buck, smart money will always go with the buck. Consider one of the overlooked revolutions of our generation: the Uniform Holiday Act of 1968, which provided that beginning in 1971, Memorial Day,...

The Case for Mars.
March 1, 1997... By Robert Zubrin with Richard Wagner; The Free Press, 250 pages, $25 The recent discovery that life probably existed on Mars holds a number of stunning implications. One is that life may be common in the universe--that wide green planets,...

Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century.
March 1, 1997... By James Howard Kunstler, Simon & Schuster, 319 pages, $24 When I opened James Howard Kunstler's first nonfiction book four years ago, the irascible, bombastic tone of his descriptions immediately put me off. About the time that I got to his...

Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder.
March 1, 1997... By Kevin Lally; Henry Holt, 496 pages, $30 Eight pages into Wilder Times, author Kevin Lally tells the story of Ilse, the young whore with whom future movie maker Billy Wilder had an affair at age 18. For Maurice Zolotow, author of the 1977...

The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller.
March 1, 1997... By Cary Reich; Doubleday, 875 pages, $35 Nelson Rockefeller was the symbol of a type of liberal Republican that in recent years was assumed to be extinct. Colin Powell became perhaps this decade's only self-professed "Rockefeller...

The American Commonwealth (1888).
March 1, 1997... By James Bryce; Liberty Fund (1995) 2 vols.: 680 pages, 984 pages, $35 Perhaps it has always been hard to find critics of Alexis de Tocqueville. Today, it's almost impossible. In books, magazines, even on television and the Internet,...

The digest.(summaries of research)
March 1, 1997... POLITICS Rein in our Judges Edwin Meese III and Rhett DeHart, "The Imperial Judiciary... and What Congress Can Do About It," in Policy Review (January/February 1997), Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue N.E.,...

Opinion pulse.(data from the latest survey)
March 1, 1997... WELFARE REFORM UPDATE As President Clinton contemplates revisions of the welfare reform legislation passed last year, he should be aware of the strong public backing the law has. Six in ten say the legislation will make the system better,...