By Wayne Allensworth The period of totality was approaching. We watched and waited and glanced up when the clouds broke above us deep in the heart of the Texas hill country. I craned my neck and felt the way I had when I was drawn to look upward symbolically at the heavens by the Sistine Chapel ceiling, my neck aching, but not thinking about it. Caught up in a unique moment in the flow of time. A...
By R. Cort Kirkwood (The New American) O.J. Simpson’s prostate-cancer death occasions recalling not his remarkable football career, but instead his acquittal in the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ron Goldman, on June 12, 1994. The evidence showed that Simpson was guilty; the jury nullified what should have been an obvious verdict, as one of the jurors admitted years later...
by Wayne Allensworth My most recent article for Chronicles… The next summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is set for July of this year in Washington, D.C., following the 75th anniversary of the alliance’s founding on April 4. The organization’s leading lights will discuss “important issues” and “provide strategic direction” for NATO. The NATO website also explains...
By Wayne Allensworth To be wise is to suffer—Sophocles, Oedipus Rex For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow—Ecclesiastes 1:18 Readers sometimes tell me that my articles are depressing. So be it. Nobody likes to hear bad news. There are lots of things that, under certain circumstances, one is perhaps better off not knowing. But maybe...
Sexual Economics and the Technological/Social Nexus By Wayne Allensworth My paternal grandfather was a boilermaker. When I was a boy, he made his living working with an oxy-acetylene gas torch, used to cut through steel plates, and an arc welder, used in fabricating the boilers, pipes, and other objects manufactured at the plant where he worked in Houston, Texas. He had learned his trade...
Part 1: The Deconstruction of Masculinity By Wayne Allensworth We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. C. S. Lewis “The Abolition of Man” Many of our young men no longer find the prospect of marriage and fatherhood a very attractive option. In the post-modern...
By Wayne Allensworth The trophy hangs in my office nowadays. When I was a boy at home, for a time it faced my bed. The black centered eyes gazed at me at night, the head looking wise somehow. The thick neck. The “points” of its wide antlers. The ears seemingly on alert. It had hung in our kitchen when I was very young, just over the kitchen table. The kitchen was small, as was the...
by Wayne Allensworth March and April are special months for true Texans. March 2 is Texas Independence Day. March 6 is Alamo Day. And April 21 marks Sam Houston’s victory over Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. Being a Texan has always been the bedrock of my identity. I’m an American because I’m a Texan. And my boyhood memories are full of Texas Independence Day commemorations...
By Wayne Allensworth I was looking through my late father’s personal effects recently and ran across a letter. It wasn’t just any letter, but one he had kept from among his late brother Harold’s belongings. A gunner on a B-24, he died on D-Day in World War II. It was from a young lady named Virginia in his hometown of Houston, Texas. Harold went through training in San Antonio and was...
By R. Cort Kirkwood (The New American) On the heels of the latest revelation that another diversity officer at Harvard University plagiarized her doctoral thesis, the school now faces the unpleasant task of explaining why the search committee that hired former president Claudine Gay — forced to resign after her plagiarism was revealed — did not check her scholarship. The latest blow to the...
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