Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Great Books Series An estimable dithyramb, chock-full of wise counsel, from Sol Gordon, Ph.D. and author of You, Psychology For You, Living Fully, and other...
...We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now...
...You feel inferior and insecure...
...Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift...
...The State Legislature is considering new laws to protect joggers...
...The New You Sol Gordon, Ph.D...
...And neither do I. What can we do...
...That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility...
...The energy-auto-highway complex raises prices di-rectly...
...What follows are excerpts from the Wonderboy's recent utterance on energy lifted from the redoubtable Times of New York, our national newspaper of record: This is a special night for me...
...July 18, 1979] The Center Magazine Another of the profs, this time Dr...
...I, for one, would have hoped that the Open Letter's signers, as well as their apologists, would have given their action a little more thought before leaping into print to attack a country that surely expected a great deal more of them...
...It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans...
...I will do my best, but I will not do it alone...
...That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves...
...We can regain our confidence...
...stop talking and start walking...
...stop cursing and start praying...
...Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom...
...When you are with your lover, you feel happy, elevated, and secure...
...It did not, for example, square with the American role in Southeast Asia, or, later, with Richard Nixon's way of managing American politics...
...and Mrs...
...They do succeed in stifling and corrupting it-but never completely...
...Exactly three years ago on July 15, 1976, I accepted the nomination of my party to run for President of the United States...
...Adam Hochschild, cerebrating furiously in the bosom of the incomparable Mother Jones, comes up with glad tidings for all: ...recent events, particularly the upheaval in Iran, which we covered in the last issue, have made it abundantly clear that the basic assumption of the Post-Vietnam Syndrome is wrong: the U.S...
...This makes one wonder if Berns has ever been near a criminal courtroom in his life...
...More and more people are coming to think so...
...First of all, we must face the truth and then we can change our course...
...imperialism and subversion of the political system...
...Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this natian...
...There is no more powerful social idea, and it is strongest when it .sustains and spreads itself-as, indeed, it does...
...We simply must have faith in each other...
...Is the price too high...
...Christopher Jencks, explains another of the profs' failures, this time "Why Students Aren't Learning": Students discovered that the vision of the world in their textbooks was seriously misleading...
...Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country...
...It permits wide and fruitful, if sometimes loose, combinations of interest inside and outside the United Nations...
...We are at a turning point in our history...
...The right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others...
...He continued: "Why a father (Robert F. Kennedy) would be taken away from his 11 children, all of whom needed his love and affection, and why, in the case of John Kennedy, why at the time, when I personally felt he was making such a difference in terms of the lives of the people of this country and people throughout the world, should his presence be erased...
...It was classic Ugly American military aid that built up the brutal regime responsible for the death of a good American, Bill Woods, and uncounted thousands of Guatemalans...
...One is the path I've warned about tonight-the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest...
...has not ceased to support reactionary dictatorships around the world...
...Faith in our ability to govern ourselves and faith in the future of this nation...
...And it was U.S...
...All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path: the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values...
...We know the strength of America...
...You have enough time and energy for most of the things you want to do...
...that I could not for the life of me understand why Vietnam had been singled out over, for instance, West Germany and the United States, and, finally, that I would never join in a public denunciation of a sdcialist country...
...The hospital-doctor-drug company complex jacks up hospital charges by 14 percent a year...
...Immature love is exhausting...
...One can spend one's life thinking of a whole scene or scenario of different potential plots from 1963, but I have accepted the Warren Commission's final judgment...
...July 16, 1979] The Nation The droll Professor Bertram M. Gross, author of Friendly Fascism and other economic classics too numerous to mention, makes the dismal science sing thanks to hyphens and hogwash: Everyone talks about inflation, but, unlike the weather, a few people actually do something-they push prices higher...
...Stephen Morglin, elucidates the hellish capitalists' tools of thralldom: War and poverty...
...There are two paths to choose...
...I try to devote my energies to the more positive and constructive forms of life...
...go Read at least two books about it, like The Heart of Loving by Eugene Kennedy and The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, and then set about the business of discovering all the other things that may be missing from your life...
...When you are with your lover, you spend the time fighting and arguing...
...We can regain our unity...
...foreign policy...
...Bantam Books, 1979] The New York Times The most stupendous lucubration, the most divine sonority, the finest logical thread ever woven by an American statesman in this century...
...Sublime, poetic, super-duper-a Gettysburg Address for jugheads...
...You don't like it...
...Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face...
...May 1979] The Village Voice A magisterial pronunciamento on human freedom from Herr Wilhelm Kunstler, addressing all true-blue humanitarians in the audience of the Village Voice: About a month or so ago, I received a form letter from Joan Baez asking me to co-sign an Open Letter to appear in The New York Times and several other wide circulation newspapers, condemning the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for alleged violations of human rights I immediately wrote back and, in words or substance said...
...June 28, 1979] The New York Times On the tenth anniversary of his famed Chappaquiddick marathon swim, the Massachusetts Messiah gives himself over to an ethical enquiry via the Socratic method, revealing once again why he is so irresistible to logicians and sentimentalists alike: Told that Mr...
...We are strong...
...To ideologize liberty is to diminish the force of this elemental human urge...
...I promised to you a President who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain and shares your dreams and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you...
...Shades of Barry Goldwater...
...arms that have helped Indochina carry out one of the largest peasant murders anywhere since World War II...
...we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem, and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence of America...
...Where are these judges...
...July/August 1979] Saturday Review A sadly uncelebrated Harvard prof, Dr...
...To learn more about love, try falling in and out of it, and analyze what you learn as you...
...destruction of the community and environment...
...One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: We've got to stop crying and start sweating...
...The food conglomerate-factory-farm-supermarket complex aims to do as well...
...Can he be talking about the ones all criminal lawyers know so well who impose the harshest sentences in the Western world...
...June 23, 1979] Mother Jones Mr...
...Kopechne still feel they don't know "the full story of Chappaquiddick," Senator Kennedy said, "I would just say, as someone also who has lost members of their family in tragic circumstances, it is indeed difficult to live with those losses and live with those realities...
...The Banking-Federal Reserve complex pushes up interest rates (real as well as nominal) to enhance bank profitability...
...Its enemies pay it lip service and try . to coopt it...
...You feel tired and incapacitated most of the time...
...May 11, 1979] The New York Review of Books Professor Graham Hughes, an apparent amnesiac, suffers an acute attack while reviewing Walter Berns' latest book on capital punishment: Part of the general moral rot, he [Professor Berns tells us, is that judges are reluctant to punish criminals, but rather blame society for crime...
...The best brief label I can think of for this is, paradoxically enough, the Russian "par-tiinost"-partisanship-in the name of freedom, of course...
...Richard C. Hottlet heaves up the refreshing doctrine of dynamic fatuity-a doctrine we can all prosper from: One central weakness in Moynihan's approach is his insistence on an ideological underpinning of U.S...
...We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem...
...and author of You, Psychology For You, Living Fully, and other modern classics: How can you tell if you are really in love ? Mature love is energizing...
...June 1979...
...Let your voice be heard...
...The industrial-military complex conjures up new forms of inflationary spending on multi-billion-dollar overkill...
...It is a certain route to failure...
...July 7, 1979] The American Funeral Director Another alarming example of government's propensity to tamper with the free market, brought to light by the renowned American Funeral Director, trade magazine of the mortician's art: New Jersey authorities report that during a recent 12-month period 20 Jerseyites were killed by automobiles while they were jogging for their health...
...The strength we need will not come from the White House but from every house in America...
...Each and every one of these social ills is used by capitalists to maintain their hegemony...
...June 18, 1979] Commonweal In reviewing the most recent book to come from the violent pen of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Mr...
...The city hall-real estate-planning commission complex encourages the kind of speculative development that shoots up rents, land prices and the cost of new housing...
...Liberty, variously perceived-as it must be to be free-is the moral common denominator of many more people than live in Pat Moynihan's 29 embattled democracies...
...racism and sexism...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
