Current Wisdom

...The environmental crisis is basically the result of industries going about their work and throwing their garbage into the air or water, assuming someone will pick up after them...

...Then pull your hand out of your wallet, reach for the telephone and dial (415) 956-5744, where a MINT volunteer will try to argue you out of the purchase...

...He now lives in Berkeley, California, and devours mounds of bean sprouts: "I matter...

...In order to conquer the acquisitiveness of the consumer teetering on the brink of disaster, MINT volunteers adopt the eminently practical strategy of calmly, logically pointing out feasible alternatives...

...They give us the tools to lead the world out of ignorance and misery...

...Leo Ryan and those killed with him...

...and lastly, appealing to the tiny vestige of Thoreau in all of us, that you just keep on chopping...

...Americans have the capacity to rebuild their local communities, their regions, and indeed their country, with tools no more formidable than transistors and television tubes...

...As exporters of sensationalism and salaciousness...

...January 1979] Saturday Review An auspicious report on yet one more noble attempt to-thwart the Kapitalist miasma: Do you feel a twinge of conscience when you buy that food processor...

...The basic explanation is social and political...

...To speak them is to assert the luxuriant potentiality of human nature, our capacity for unpredictable growth and originality...

...The San Francisco-based group, named after the wild herb, is to low growth what Alcoholics Anonymous is to sobriety...

...The awful tragedy is that they didn't know how to fight the evils of capitalism, and fell victim to the warped vision of a cult leader...

...December 8, 1978] Playboy A disappointing report from Miss Sally Quinn, Simone de Beauvoir of the Washington Post, after having attempted to engage a " Senator and a famous columnist" in mature, sophisticated colloquy...

...It is neither an exaggeration nor an oversimplification to say that capitalism is responsible for what happened in Guyana, including the assassination, of Rep...

...Do you think, I could make do with a blender...

...Present traumas have evolved despite or perhaps because of the all-pervasive methods by which Americans communicate with one another in the commercial media...

...Mom was always there to pick up the shirts and socks after school, and now a good wife dutifully handles the clean up...

...They were alienated from this society...

...then, that you share it with said friends...

...In the ease of the food processor, they would suggest, first, that you try calling friends who have one and are sure to be bored with it, and swipe it from them...

...The Environmental Protection Agency is relaxing the air pollution standards for urban areas even though cancer rates are...

...The minute a person understands that there is a link between private enterprise and frigidity, that person will begin to understand what we mean by the word 'revolution.' " [January 10, 1979] The New York Times Proof that the pitiless wheel of history grinds all who stagger before it-even renowned Neti) York Times columnists...

...He was a worker, a yearner, and a builder to the end...

...They were trying to escape the exploitation, the racism, and.the pervasive brutality which are the indelible features of the capitalist society in which we live...

...Given their socialization as garbage throwers,, I doubt if they can adjust to the changes that are necessary...

...special...

...February 1979] Pittsburgh Post-Gazette An insightful and exigent epistle from an intellectual female, corresponding with the "Letters to the Editor" column of the famed Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Most of us can see that the world is heading into an ecological crisis...

...The people who followed Rev...

...Plenty of people see the crisis as I have just described it, but I haven't seen anyone relate, this problem to sexism...

...Or better still, I could chop...

...He was not working when he died on the struggles, achievements and disappointments of his political lifet but on the consoling influences of art, beauty and love in personal life...

...The effects are already obvious when rivers start burning and fish that can bear to live in the rivers are dangerous to eat...

...Person/Planet by Theodore Roszak [Anchor Press/Doubleday] The Militant The truth about the Jonestown Mishap as reported in the Militant, a worthy Trotsky-ite publication whose wisdom is rarely allowed a fair hearing in this Jaycee-dominated Republic: When -hundreds of human beings together commit suicide, taking their children along with them, it begs the question to simply say that these people were dupes of a crazed cult leader...

...In the office the secretary cleans it all up, just as the nurse does for the doctor, or the waitress docs at the restaurant...

...At a recent dinner party, I sat between a Senator and a famous columnist, and neither asked me a single question about myself or talked to me at all...

...Rosalynn Carter made a campaign appearance, at the People's Temple, and Jones sent several hundred of his members to Washington for Garter's inauguration...

...Jones was a Democrat, not a socialist...

...Or as builders of magical electronic tabernacles that can in an instant erase the limitations of time and geography, and make us into one people...

...How shall Americans...

...We have momentarily lost touch with one another as we react to a decade of terrorism, guerrilla war, racial discontent and economic danger...

...They will do so because we are, irrepressibly, a meaning-seeking species, creatures who must have a purposeful identity in the universe as urgently as we must have air to breathe, food to eat...

...the corporations have been socialized, what else could we expect...

...They need only to want to do so intensely enough to create a public telecommunications system that will bring it about...

...January 28, 1979] the Great Books Series Flatulence, sonorous and profound, from Theodore Roszak, Ph.D., Guggenheim Fellow, and the man who was twice nominated for the National Book Award for such abstruse masterpieces as The Making of a Counter Culture and Where the Wasteland Ends...

...Its ultimate goal, according to founder Michael Phillips, "is to get people to voluntarily lower their incomes," and thus decrease consumption-an un-American idea if there ever was one...

...Virginia Carter, Pittsburgh [January 24, 1979] The New Haven Advocate From the celebrated New Haven Advocate , awesome news of a prodigious new movie, Promethea t plus a helpful bull from the movie's director, Mr...

...The opportunity is at hand to bring us together through the teaching and inspiration possible in a noncommercial telecommunications alternative...

...The record is ample enough...

...This from a dispatch filed by the magisterial James Reston on January 27, short hours before the world was made aware of the nocturnal labors of Miss Megan Marshack: It should probably be remembered that Nelson Hockefeller died at his desk late on a Friday night after almost everybody else had gone home for the weekend...

...In order to reverse the process before it is too late we have to replace all the men at the top with women...

...There is more in me to-be discovered:" These are mighty words...

...next, if your friends don't take the hint, that you find a Substitute, like the blender...

...December 25, 1978...

...Jim Jones to Guyana were in blind flight...

...CURRENT WISDOM Report of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Television Lovely poesy lifted from the Carnegie Commission's latest attempt to fleece the lowly American taxpayer, this time by tripling the handout to National Public Television: The electronic media provide an immediacy and intimacy that can bring Americans together, teach us and inspire us...

...Men are simply conditioned to go about their business and assume that some woman will'clean up their garbage...

...Alas and goddamn...

...directly correlated to the amount of industrialization and pollution in an area...

...Considering how the males in...

...And rightly so...

...De Laurot believes...

...In the course of the film, Promethea also struggles towards self-realization as a revolutionary woman in the face of male stereotyping of her as both a leftist' 'Madonna'' and as a sexless, disembodied voice on short-wave radio transmissions...

...Yves De Laurot: Described by the filmmaker as "the authentic drama of a militant woman," Promethea ex plores the attempts of the title character, a Latin American guerrilla, to contact and co ordinate revolutionary forces in the United States...

...We remember the Egyptians for the pyramids and the Greeks for their graceful stone temples...

...As a necessary contribution to the nation's need for self-knowledge and healing, public broadcasters-and soon, public telecommuni-cators--have the obligation and opportunity to bring together a fragmented and wounded society...

...And learning that, people will persevere in the adventure of self-discovery, even in the face of the most grueling forms of self-examination...

...be remembered...

...These magnificent electronic extensions of ourselves can teach, and heal and inspire, if we use them not for the ruthless pursuit of the least common denominator but for their highest human potential...