TILTING AT WINDMILLS

Peters, Charles

TILTING AT WINDMILLS Wen RW. Apple Jr., the London correspondent of The New York Times, returned to this country for a visit a year ago, he was impressed by the "new stirrings of patriotism"...

...The only flaw I can find is an unanswered lettertothe-editor from Eugene Balof that says the air strikes against the Bismarck in 1941 were "ineffective!' It is true that surface ships sank the Bismarck...
...Why do people marry...
...This should be a battle worth watching, since both sides have firmly established their ability to rise above ordinary moral standards in their pursuit of the two-Mercedes garage...
...This is why we support a draft...
...On October 12 it burst into flames at the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn...
...The group will focus on corporate responsibility for the arms race...
...You may have noticed that Dan Rather kept saying, "What's really important is what's happening with those House seats...
...Did the story run on the front page...
...We could eliminate the tax deduction for interest paid on consumer debt and use the increased tax revenue to reduce the tax rate on interest earned...
...My fears that liberated women imitate the worst absurdities of the male are sadly reinforced by this recent headline for The New York Times: "Lung Cancer Rising as Killer of Women, U.S...
...Those words became the title of a cover article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine last December...
...That's how many members voted against permitting doctors to prescribe heroin to relieve the otherwise unbearable pain of terminally ill cancer patients...
...It was the agency's deputy inspector general...
...What I like about lotteries is that, like the wealth success confers on professional athletes and entertainers, they break the established pattern of who can be rich and bring badly needed new blood into our upper classes...
...The surgeon later insists he was told he was not needed...
...One reason is that the Transit Authority is riddled with I'm-all-right-Jack employees who, if they are not incompetent, simply don't care...
...The evidence showed that during a robbery he had killed three men by shooting them in the back...
...What solution do the administrators propose...
...It was "seaborne aircraft," writes Winston Churchill, "who struck the decisive blows...
...The Republican party paid Gerald Ford $200,000 to go around the country campaigning for various Republican candidates this year...
...Congress is on vacation for a good part of the summer, and interns get to open all the mail from the lobbyists...
...Hire "attendance counselors...
...He has also been trying to help restore American competitiveness by lowering the cost of capital, which is now three times as much for our firms as it is for their Japanese competitors...
...Exactly 355...
...What followed is a matter of dispute...
...Who says he's just a cardboard movie actor who recites words written by others...
...What happens to organizations once they've accomplished their original purpose...
...The party is in decline because of its sell-out to various groups...
...A surgeon on call is summoned to the hospital but once there is told that the gunshot victim, a Miami sanitation worker, has a different medical insurance plan than the one he, the physician, is associated with...
...It should not seek salvation by adding one more to the list...
...This is terrible advice...
...Attitudes toward crime— when I started this magazine I could not find one liberal journalist who would take a tough stand—are but one example...
...You think you should do your part but you're damned if you want to be the only one on your block who is out in that foxhole while the rest of the guys are back home getting laid and driving around in cars...
...Articles that bring together fact, feeling, and analysis will, we predict elsewhere in this issue (see page 12), be the wave of the future in journalism...
...The fire burned out of control until the floor of the car melted...
...Balcony tickets to concerts, the theater, the ballet, the opera, could be had for $1.20 or $1.80...
...That's where you make the connections for the job afterwards...
...Well, you won't believe it, but even that was in a movie...
...The victim dies on the operating table...
...Under the draft you serve and so does that jerk across the street...
...If the fire had occurred a few minutes earlier while the train was in a tunnel under the East River, "There could have been a major tragedy," according to a report by Suzanne Daley of The New York Times...
...The state supreme court said that the evidence against Couture was "overwhelming...
...Meanwhile, the surgeon goes to the hospital coffee shop because, as he later says, he was told the victim was stable and another surgeon would be coming in to treat him...
...Paul Tsongas attained neoliberal sainthood when he recognized the sucker problem at the time of the Chrysler bailout...
...These are the vacations associated with conferences and conventions that often involve tax deductions larger than the amount many welfare mothers receive...
...But the real reason, I learned, was not so altruistic, "All I've heard is internships are great," said the tall one with the Cartier tank watch...
...At that time Ike leaned toward the ScrantonLodge wing of the Republican party and seemed to share Herblock's view of Nixon as a faintly sinister fellow with too much five o'clock shadow...
...But INFACT has dedicated itself to a whole new cause: the peace movement...
...I often imagine the poor huddled around their sets watching "Wall Street Week...
...Respect for the entrepreneur has grown enormously since the early days of The Washington Monthly, when it was another subject I couldn't get liberal journalists to write about...
...Apple Jr., the London correspondent of The New York Times, returned to this country for a visit a year ago, he was impressed by the "new stirrings of patriotism" he found as he traveled across the land...
...One of Ronald Reagan's great moments, right...
...Car 9000 had nine such failures...
...One of them was election night...
...In fact, now that you're serving together, you may find that he's not a jerk at all...
...What they wanted was a volunteer who had the skill to help them, who could speak their language, and understand their customs...
...So while your mother may never have heard of us, she's probably saying some of the very same things we are...
...He had been complaining that he thought the trip was a waste of time...
...The flag-waving at the Olympics and at the Democratic and Republican conventions offered further evidence to support Apple's thesis...
...I don't know why they do these days, but for the women of my generation, it often seemed that they married to realize the unfulfilled ambitions of their parents...
...It is welldocumented that Dwight Eisenhower's regard for Nixon was not excessive during his presidency or in the years immediately following it...
...The subway and the bus cost 5 cents, as did a glass of beer...
...They were exactly as quoted above...
...Since Ford is a rich man, why does he ask to be paid...
...This shortage of information was especially severe on the House and gubernatorial races...
...You'd think the group would hold a party and disband," writes Weiss...
...The words were written by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse...
...It's hard to imagine a better choice...
...It is also true that welfare mothers do not get the taxsubsidized vacations that the middle and upper classes are becoming accustomed to view as their right...
...So have we...
...Tsongas, despite his illness, continues to function in ways that I must say I admire very much...
...One of his suggestions: "Our current tax policy discourages savings by taxing individuals on the interest they earn and giving them deductions on the interest they pay...
...Doesn't he believe in his party and its candidates enough to volunteer his services...
...Twenty percent of the District of Columbia's public school students are absent each day...
...I am grateful to James Fallows and Nicholas Lemann for helping Timothy Noah and Jonathan Rowe put out the November edition of The Monthly while I was on vacation...
...The headline in The Washington Post read, "CPAC Says to Throw Out Old Cribs, Hand-Me-Down Nursery Equipment Called Dangerous...
...Get a firsthand look at a democratic government and pick up the slack on unfinished business...
...After all, his boss, the inspector general, had been the head of the covert operations division when the manual was written and distributed...
...The irony was that except for the presidential returns they hadn't told us what "it all" was...
...Then he would turn to another commentator who would repeat the observation but not give us the actual returns...
...But there are still times when we want just the facts and not a lot of color and commentary...
...But when our volunteers reached the villages of the third world, they found no one wanted to talk about these things...
...Donald Couture was convicted of murder by a Connecticut jury...
...So the New Jersey was firing shells that were all more than 30 years old...
...The truth is that the great majority of the Marcos opposition is noncommunist...
...They were here in Washington to solicit congressional internships for next summer, ostensibly a fine goal for a summer's work...
...This year these races came perilously close to being ignored as the networks interviewed one pundit after another on the meaning of it all...
...Walter Shapiro's article on the impossibility of living a modest, middle-class life in modern Manhattan (see page 44) reminds me how easy that life was to lead when I arrived there in January 1946 to enter Columbia...
...Regis Corporation got $121 million in tax refunds while it was making $124 million in profits...
...The staff does call another surgeon at home but before he can reach the hospital the victim's condition deteriorates...
...For that year, at least, it removed the five o'clock shadow...
...Why is it that so many of us in the middle and upper classes can become so enraged at the slightest abuse of the public treasury by a welfare mother, yet not be embarrassed at all by the Social Security payments our own mothers receive that they don't need...
...The other, which has since become known, at least to a few people, was Anna Chennault's successful efforts to get Thieu to torpedo the Paris peace talks, which arrested the growing momentum toward Humphrey the weekend before the election...
...The General Accounting Office is charged with the responsibility of appraising the efficiency of other government agencies...
...Charles Peters...
...I suspect the major factor has been the decline in the population of males aged 18 to 25, the group that has the greatest tendency to get into trouble...
...Because during the trial the prosecutor had called Couture "a rat," "a murderous fiend," and "a merciless killer...
...Ironically, a number of commentators are now counseling the Democratic party to rebuild itself by catering to the special interests of the middle class...
...The candidate was played by Spencer Tracy...
...Buried at the bottom of a column on life in Florida by Jon Nordheimer of The New York Times was an example of the quality of mercy we have come to expect from the medical profession: A man is shot in the abdomen and his aorta is severed, but paramedics stabilize him and get him to a Miami hospital where the emergency room staff gives him blood transfusions and prepares him for surgery...
...Why...
...But, alas, as we found out in Lebanon, it could not...
...While neoliberalism as a movement of people who so identify themselves is tiny indeed, many of the ideas associated with it have flourished in recent years...
...Oh yeah...
...It used to be that, on these occasions, the networks would run down the totals in the House, Senate, and gubernatorial races every half hour...
...Half of the first volunteers' training consisted of courses in American studies, world affairs, and communism...
...The James Fallows/Gary Hart approach is now dominant among thoughtful Democrats...
...Agency Says...
...One was Julie and David's clean-up of Dad's act...
...That summer they rose to - 10 cents, amidst anguished complaints about runaway inflation...
...There is no reason for such a vote other than that an opponent might use it against you...
...Here is another case where questionable behavior by a law-enforcement official—in this case very mildly questionable behavior—is used by a court to revoke conviction of a clearly guilty criminal...
...I don't want to die," the victim says before losing consciousness...
...You won't be a sucker...
...The emergency room physician goes to the cafeteria twice and implores the first surgeon to begin surgery, he later says, to be turned down...
...But they did so only after air attacks had left it circling helplessly, unable to return to safe harbor...
...A laudable cause, yet one can't help suspecting that a motivating factor in many of these cases, if not this one, is an existing list of contributors, which is hard to abandon when there are officials of the group who want to preserve the salaries to which they have become accustomed...
...My question is what does this new patriotism mean...
...The presidential candidate grabs the microphone and says, "Don't cut me off, I'm paying for this broadcast...
...said the other, suddenly very interested...
...National defense is another...
...You make the replies and get first cracks at the great cocktail parties—you get to go to all of them...
...Similarly, when we started our "Culture of Bureaucracy" section in 1969, most people thought we must be writing about Mozart at Constitution Hall...
...It won its battle against Nestle's marketing of a baby formula in the third world that caused severe health problems for infants...
...One wonders how the editors go about making these inspired decisions...
...Tat there just might be something wrong with the Internal Revenue Code is suggested by the fact that for the years 1981-83, the St...
...In fact most of our mothers have long since used up their contribution to Social Security plus interest and are now living off other taxpayers just as much as the welfare mother is, with a lot less moral right than she usually has...
...Reagan was quick to take credit for this development...
...Inspired, quick thinking...
...We were training junior diplomats...
...In Florida, the doctors and the trial lawyers, two groups that richly deserve each other, are locked in combat over a proposed state constitutional amendment that would limit recovery in personal injury cases to $100,000...
...I believe the future belongs to leaders who will ask these questions...
...Under a Transit Authority regulation, New York City's subway cars that experience three switch-box failures in two months are supposed to be taken out of service...
...On the front page of the Business section, that is—just where the average parent would be sure to see it because of his keen interest in the adjoining stories— "Holiday Inn, Comsat Plan Satellite Deal" and "Regan Outlines Study On Banking Reform...
...With dedicated hunting—this usually meant a Saturday afternoon devoted to waiting anxiously at the newsstand nearest to The New York Times building for the first copy of the real estate section, which was distributed in advance of the rest of the Sunday paper— decent apartments could be found in the $60-to-$100-amonth range...
...Second, there was the president's assertion that the alternative to Marcos in the Philippines "is a large communist movement...
...By quietly working as an intermediary between the Salvadoran army and its guerrilla opponents, he helped create, according to The Washington Post's Robert McCartney, "a climate that allowed President Jose Napoleon Duarte to offer the peace initiative that led to the face-to-face meeting between Duarte and guerrilla leaders...
...The fourth beer was still "bounced"—meaning it was free—at the Irish bars I frequented along Amsterdam . Avenue...
...But there has also been a change in attitude...
...What I don't like about them is captured in a television commercial sponsored by the Washington, D.C., lottery in which a woman looks into the camera and cajolingly confides, "The more you play, the higher the jackpot goes...
...Now that the train gets you from midtown Washington to midtown Manhattan in three hours, why do so many businessmen still make the trip by air—even though the flight, transportation to and from airports, and frequent takeoff and landing delays usually consume more than three hours...
...The latest example, called to my attention by Phillip Weiss, is the Infant Formula Action Coalition...
...Julie's widely publicized romance with David Eisenhower, the apple of his grandfather's eye, made Ike's 1968 endorsement of Nixon seem heartfelt instead of pro forma...
...If he was that kind of volunteer—and that's what we quickly learned he should be trained to be—he could make far more friends for himself and his country than he would by propagandizing...
...he secret of success in a presidential debate seems to be avoiding a lie so obvious that even the television commentators will recognize it quickly enough to include it in their post-debate analyses...
...Why did this happen...
...People are less tolerant of crime, less willing to take the criminal's side against society's...
...If the truth takes research, it's going to be buried in the back columns of the newspapers and magazines...
...When guilt is clear, why don't we rebuke or penalize the offending official but keep the criminal in jail where he belongs...
...A thought about neoliberalism that's been lurking in my mind for years has finally surfaced: It is this: If one great strain in the American character is idealism, the other is, "I don't want to be a sucker...
...When are liberals in New York and elsewhere going to rise up against the outrages inflicted upon them by public employees like these...
...Now the anthropological view of organizations we were trying to encourage has become common and, with it, much greater insight into the problems of our corporate and government bureaucracies...
...According to an emergency room physician, the surgeon refused to operate and told the physician to summon a surgeon who handled patients with the victim's type of insurance plan...
...A friend writes with this story: On Saturday, my wife and I were sitting against the railing of the south fence at the White House waiting to take the fall tour of the gardens and grounds...
...Are the rich willing to perform their share of military service or are they going to continue to bribe the poor to do it for them...
...On another front, Tsongas is fighting the ideology lectures being given Peace Corps volunteers by the Reagan administration...
...The second surgeon finally arrives, about one and a half hours after the victim was admitted, and tries to save the man's life...
...When Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill authorizing higher spending for public broadcasting, Bruce Christensen, the president of the Public Broadcasting Service, charged, according to a report in The Washington Post, that "the veto discriminates against the poor, children, and the elderly...
...The ship might have been like new but the Navy had forgotten the ammunition...
...Our Least Astounding Headline of the Year Award goes to The New York Times for this one, which stretched across three columns on October 28: "Study Says Income in Inner Cities Trails Suburbs...
...Finally the neoliberal indictment of Fritz Mondale as the candidate of the liberal special interests became the accepted view of what was wrong with him...
...This is the second time recently that I've seen a consumer safety story placed in the Post's Business section...
...Two examples: First, Reagan's statement that there were only a dozen copies of the CIA's Nicaragua assassination manual...
...Dinner was obtainable at good, if modest, Italian and French restaurants like Barbetta's and the Brittany for $2 or $3...
...Are people willing to translate their flag-waving into acts of sacrifice for the common good...
...That's how my brother got his and look at him now, he's cruising," replied Cartier...
...When President Reagan said the CIA's Nicaragua manual, that handy assassination guide, was being investigated, who do you think was assigned to do the investigating...
...The people hurt by bad service and unsafe cars are those who liberals have traditionally defended...
...Reagan has been part of that movement...
...I need hardly ask readers of this magazine, who of course know that the organization doesn't fold, it finds a new purpose...
...Does this explain why it uses United Parcel Service...
...The 1968 election fascinates me, because I think it was decided by two factors that were totally unrecognized at the time...
...What is wrong with the Democratic party is concisely explained by The Washington Post's Mike Causey in an article about the party platform: "The federal employee portion of the Democratic document was written in large part by representatives of federal and postal worker unions...
...The FBI reports that serious crime is decreasing, falling by 3.3 percent in 1982 and 6.7 percent in 1983...
...How many cowards are there in the House of Representatives...
...Thus if Mom and Dad were self-made millionaires, their devoted daughter would find a husband who would give her family the social standing money had not bought...
...It was not taken out of service...
...It was a 1948 film called State of the Union...
...He understood the auto workers' fear that management would profit from labor sacrifice and said we'll give you stock so that if your sacrifice makes money you get some of it...
...Sitting next to us were two male juniors from Haverford College, outside Philadelphia...
...Yet it overturned his conviction...
...The issue is a gem...
...Are we willing to give up the tax breaks that benefit us or do we want the other fellow to do the sacrificing...
...After we had spent a billion or so refurbishing the battleship New Jersey you would have thought it could shoot straight...
...The fact is there were 2,000...
...My favorite example of the marriage that helped Daddy is Julie Nixon's...
...The answer must be that flying reeks of important men on urgent missions while the train suggests the unhurried life of people who are not really busy...
...This may seem an arcane matter, but those of us who have been associated with the Peace Corps know that it repeats a serious error it made in its early years...

Vol. 16 • December 1984 • No. 11


 
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