We’re living through a time when Americans are challenged to comprehend and assimilate things we’ve never encountered before, things with no clear precedent in our public lives. Some of the most bewildering are provided by our elected leaders at the highest level of power and responsibility. If you saw Gerald Herbert’s AP photo of President […]
Hal Crowther
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Dough-faced nation
Excise a few historical and cultural references and Marilynne Robinson’s new novel Gilead, set in 1956, could have been written in 1880. An extended soliloquy by an aging Iowa clergyman with a failing heart, Gilead is water from another well, from another time–a time when Americans were less puzzled by moral earnestness and sane, quiet […]
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Believing in miracles
PRAGUEThe miraculous Infant of Prague is a wax baby doll, 400 years old and roughly “the height and weight of a prairie dog,” as I described him when we first met in the winter of 1989. The Infant, known to Czechs as the Jesulatko, is the best-dressed religious icon in all the world. In 1989 […]
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In the realms of the unreal
When Ronald Reagan and Ray Charles died within a week of each other, there was a message scrawled on America’s chalkboard for anyone who cared to read it. They were legendary entertainers; one was black, one was blind, one was of sound mind when he died and the other had spent 10 years staring into […]
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With trembling fingers
I used to take a drink on occasion with a network newsman famed for his impenetrable calm–his apparent pulse rate that of a large mammal in deep hibernation–and in an avuncular moment he advised me that I’d do all right, in the long run, if I could only avoid the kind of journalism committed to […]
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Confession, dedicated to a fighting nun
A few years ago I received a letter of encouragement from Sister Evelyn Mattern, whom I had never met. There was something I’d written that she endorsed, I can’t recall the subject. I’d always been an outspoken admirer of the tiny, fearless regiment of Catholic activists, some of the last true friends of the poor […]
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The kids are all right
As an antidote to despair, consider Seabiscuit. The tremendous popular success of the book and the motion picture reminds us that Americans will still root for an underdog, still hiss when a fat, arrogant plutocrat like the film’s archvillain, Samuel Riddle–a caricature of bloated capitalist privilege–sneers at the dreams of the common man and his […]
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Counter intelligence
It was a sleepy afternoon in June, and in the Atlanta office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents were amusing themselves the best they could–shredding obsolete field reports about strange Arabs in Florida flight schools who didn’t want to learn how to land, or reframing pictures of J. Edgar Hoover in his prom dress. […]
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Weapons of mass stupidity
It’s the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people–a fulsome flattery that intensifies when they ask “the people” to swallow something exceptionally inedible. What the people never hear from anyone, or from anyone with further ambitions, is the truth. If a public figure wishes to leave the […]
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Hal Crowther on Iraq
When I’m disoriented by the pressure of immense events, my tendency is to defer to someone whose moral authority is beyond question. These people are in pitifully short supply. But certainly Nelson Mandela qualifies–a man in his 80s with no more deals to make except his final peace with God, a man who spent the […]
