Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Progressive What ensues when the Marxist-SocialistLeninist canon falls into the hands of a librarian with an apparent anal fixation, Mr. Sidney Lens: One hundred thirty years...
...Conditions demand, as the perceptive Rumanian sociologist Silviu Brucan puts it, a dissolution of power and especially of national power...
...It's easy to make money...
...February 1978] The Progressive Concomitant with their recent fund-raising campaign, the Progressive publishes a dithyramb from another of the crybabies who keep it afloat: This has been a lousy day, and all for ten dollars, enclosed...
...It can be dreadfully limiting...
...December 18, 1977] The Washington Star Senator Richard Stone, the lion of the Senate, defends the Washington cocktail party against the philistines: It's the most informative, educational experience you can get...
...All that the gay community, as I understand it, is asking are the things we recognize as people—that they (gays) have a personality, a humanhood that is necessary to be recognized in the community...
...Throughout the country, community gardens are sprouting...
...You're having difficulty...
...It's part of our survival equipment—until certain situations arise and the word 'noble' comes in...
...It is a model of how our revolution will come, as gently, relentlessly and inevitably as a spring rain...
...I'd like to spend an evening in Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis...
...Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum of the American Jewish Committee, sitting on the same panel, said that he shared "the bishop's conviction about the obligation to assure the civil rights of homosexuals as well as all other people...
...It provides a vision of human activity untouched by imperialism, classism, sexism, racism, agism, careerism and all the other demented ways in which people have devastated themselves and their environment...
...February 9, 1978] The Nation Midst an otherwise tranquil review of Roger Starr's new book, America's Housing Challenge, a Mr...
...Vietnam was not...
...The whole thing will make the corporations tremble...
...They have a right to the dignity of a human person...
...That can be pretty frustrating...
...However, he noted that "in authentic, normative Jewish tradition, homosexuality is frowned upon and in fact the Bible itself calls it an abomination...
...It has no role in a capitalist system, except a subversive one...
...Marx's grand vision of a united international community liberated from war and exploitation should be at hand...
...Lenin saved it in 1917 by brushing aside the cobwebs of dogma...
...It means, among other things, that we can't help The Progressive as much as we'd like...
...Mel Brooks, an American Voltaire: "It [Blazing Saddles] was my first surreal movie," says Brooks...
...Like many of his conservative colleagues, Starr has written the latter off, and is determined to frame social policy toward the containment of what he regards as hopeless elements: "For the hard truth is that some people are incapable of meeting minimum standards of housekeeping or neighborly behavior...
...Spend it well...
...but our own country is so great and strong and, I hope, in its attitudes, is enlightened, progressive and also beneficial...
...You have to be stupid, illiterate, or stubbornly infatuated with something that has nothing to do with making money in order to be poor...
...The very essence of the city is its social life, where the political doings of the day are nightly questioned, commented on and assessed in the tolerant air enforced by politeness...
...Ten dollars is one of the limitations...
...On the latter issue, Bishop Carroll T. Dozier said: "It's a human rights problem and it's one that the community at large must face...
...We work hard to earn our independence...
...Well, World War II was worth it up to the bomb...
...We are voluntarily poor...
...Marx saved the utopian socialist movement of the 1840s by giving it a scientific basis—a rational ideology...
...CURRENT SDOM The Progressive What ensues when the Marxist-SocialistLeninist canon falls into the hands of a librarian with an apparent anal fixation, Mr...
...We don't have any snow in Georgia and this is her first experience...
...January 26, 1978] 42 The American Spectator April 1978...
...The force of nationalism will probably remain with us forever, emphasizing valued cultural and historical differences, but the essence of internationalism lies in mechanisms to dilute the power of the nation-state...
...Today's socialist movement awaits a program of true internationalism—one that can not only reunite the various socialist, communist, and dissident movements of the Left, but can fashion a program for socialist integration and, above all, for peace...
...It may just be, that our need for The Progressive is just a little bit special....It would be lonely without you...
...Chester Hartman, urban planner, suffers an unexpected seizure for the amusement of all of us who read the Nation purely for recreational purposes: A central theme of Starr's approach to urban problems is the distinction between the "working" and "nonworking" poor (working class vs...
...She happens to be in Colorado now, skiing for the first time...
...When my wife sees the checkbook she won't say anything, although we did talk today about the difficulty we're going to have this month meeting our obligations...
...I'd like to be able to phone my sons and am embarrassed that they are always the ones who phone us and delight us with their extravagance, carrying on for sometimes an hour about their adventures...
...What I did when the gunfight spilled over onto the Busby Berkeley set with fifty dancers was what Picasso did when he painted two eyes on the same side of the head...
...and backing the civil rights of homosexuals...
...We are capable of giving of ourselves, but it has to be worth it...
...allowing it was "conceivable': that women will one day be ordained into the Catholic priesthood...
...There are some books I would like to buy...
...December 18, 1977] Rolling Stone Artistic and philosophical eruptions from Mr...
...It's a highly concentrated group of red-blooded achievers....Moving in it is broadening...
...We are tired...
...The regurgitation of old slogans, the recourse to Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Che Guevara, are no substitute for a modern concept of socialist internationalism...
...We pay a price in limitations...
...As much as we should...
...And I see nothing that is wrong in their position...
...Bishop Dozier countered: "You're really over-playing what is the ordinary sense of sin into a more general right and that therefore does cause confusion...
...And in a more frightening version, which truly evokes possibilities of Buchenwald to me, he remarks, "In short, until society has found a way to make its members live within what might be called a code of tolerable urban behavior, large cities can provide a measure of safety for the majority of their residents only by including a semi-permanent slum within their boundaries...
...That was in questionable taste...
...Sidney Lens: One hundred thirty years after Marx and Engels published their historic manifesto about the "specter" that was haunting capitalist Europe (and America), more than half of humanity lives under governments that call themselves socialist—in Britain, Germany, India, China, Albania, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and eleven other communist states, as well as in Algeria, Somalia, Iraq, Ethiopia, Guyana, Syria, Jamaica, Tanzania, Angola, Mozambique, and more...
...He expressed an opposition to the possibility that homosexuality "would become a norm for society and you can look forward to the end of family life...
...Socialism is clearly an idea whose time has come...
...World War II was worth it...
...We are by nature selfish...
...December 1977] The Washington Star Miss Betty Beale, reporter and Washington, D.C., booster, sheds light on the arcane ways of her fellow Washingtonians in an alarming report on the Carter administration's ignorance of the higher politics of the cocktail party: Washington is the most professional city in the world, and taking a stand against it is the mark of an amateur...
...lumpen...
...February /March 1978] The New York Times Impressive evidence of our President's mastery of the oratorical arts: We are homesick for Amy...
...February 17, 1978] Mother Jones A perspicacious revision of the Marxist-Leninist Gospel, brought forth by Mother Jones, revolutionary organ of the suburban proletariat: Gardening is an enterprise whose product has a use value rather than an exchange one...
...Society here is no aggregate of wealthy blue bloods...
...January 28, 1978]Commonweal Devoted as we are to the spiritual growth of our readers and, of course, to the life of the mind, we rejoice in the opportunity to lift from the incomparable Commonweal a colloquy between a moss-backed rabbi and the suavely sophisticated Bishop of Memphis whose final retort is a monument to sheer intellectual brawn: The Bishop of Memphis lived up to his reputation as a provocative prelate on a local television talk show, condemning property as a major cause of human-rights denials...
Vol. 11 • April 1978 • No. 6
