Reviews and Reflections on Life In America
By Wayne Allensworth The idea of progress holds that mankind has advanced in the past … is now advancing and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future… The idea of progress is a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future. It is inseparable from a sense of time flowing in a unilinear fashion. — Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress The 21st Century has been...
R. Cort Kirkwood My late dear friend and mentor Howard Phillips, one of the few conservatives who went broke because he didn’t sell out to Conservatism Inc., gave me the following advice: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.” We must therefore not be angry with a young conservative you’ve never heard of, Jack Butler, who recently suggested at National Review that Pat...
By Wayne Allensworth I had to be careful. The ornaments were wrapped, each one in tissue paper and some of them were very old. I had dropped a couple of them and they shattered. As brittle as dried leaves. Their skins had grown thin as they had grown old. Christmas ornaments collected by my mother over time. So many Santa Claus ornaments, old St. Nick in his jolliest attire, thick beard and...
By Wayne Allensworth A light in the night sky on a prairie horizon. A falling star passing through a deep blue firmament that phases ever so subtly to lighter shades of blue bordered by a wisp of cottony clouds. The red orange hues of the setting sun. Stark tree limbs seem to reach for the star on a smoky autumn evening. Let your eyes stay riveted on the star as long as you can see its proud...
By Wayne Allensworth On Veteran’s Day, Tom Piatak reminded us of some veterans who will never be thanked for their service, men who, after heroically performing their duty on the U.S.S. Liberty, have been all but forgotten. None of the hawkish GOP presidential candidates, much less any Democrats, will ever ask for a moment of silence for the men lost, and none have or ever will demand that their...
By Tom Piatak On this Veterans Day, in a special way, I honor the men who served on the USS Liberty. Here is the very impressive list of medals they received, including one Medal of Honor, two posthumous Navy Crosses, over a dozen Silver Stars, nearly two dozen Bronze Stars, and 208 Purple Hearts. In other words, the Liberty’s crew was one of the most decorated in U.S. Navy history...
By Wayne Allensworth I was walking down a path that skirted a fence line not far from our home. In the neighboring pasture the great longhorns, one of them a majestic bull, grazed quietly, looking up casually to watch me pass. The great bull shook his head and snorted, then went back to grazing. Overhead, a hawk hovered over the trail, then a second one appeared above the other raptor, twin...
By Wayne Allensworth (Edvard Munch, The Scream) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming This is the third of my articles on Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, and its implications. An overview of his ideas is found in A Hole in the World and Between Two Worlds: Iain...
By Wayne Allensworth As it appears the Israelis are gearing up for a ground campaign in Gaza, threatening a general war in the Middle East that could draw American fighting men into the festivities, it’s time to assess just what America has at stake at home relative to its already overextended foreign commitments. It’s now becoming clear that “MAGA” was always an illusion. “America First” was the...
By Wayne Allensworth I was taking a walk on a cool morning. Fall had finally arrived after a blistering summer. Live oak limbs made a canopy over the path, and their long shadows trailed across me, with little breaks between the limbs where the smoky autumn sun shined through. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a butterfly’s shadow tracing its way through the limbs, and I looked up and...
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