The Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Washington Post Dr. Carl T. Rowan'speaks from the heart: These are times when I want to ask the Lord to deliver us back to the days of Stepin Fetchit, Aunt Jemima and...
...I decided to do something about it, and considered several possibilities, from cold turkey to overindulgence...
...The result is painful division among human beings and subsequent powerlessness...
...Ward Purdue Chapter United Nations Association West Lafayette, Indiana [October 2, 1981...
...Through research in this and other nations, the UN is striving to solve one of the world's greatest problems...
...Another out of many instances is Guy Trebay, writing about Minnie Mouse in the August 5-11 issue of the Voice: "The girlfriend...
...This is crazy...
...The UN also.declared the 1980s the "World Water Decade...
...This manipulation of human intelligence and the debasement of our bodily selves is the essence of domination-race, sex, and class...
...These recurrences have found different names: Nativism, Know-Nothingism, America First, the Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism...
...By making the correction process into a contest where the prizes are clearly intended to be undesirable because of their politics, the overt implication is that these prizes are undesirable, not only politically, but sexually, an important dimension of this attempt at gross disempowerment, and surely occasioned as backlashed to Willis's reasoned insistence on sexual autonomy for women...
...Through this worldwide recognition, numerous myths about the handicapped have been dispelled and many disabled persons who have been aided by this international education are now able to enjoy life as accepted members of their communities...
...Our whole lives...
...Yuck...
...A nightmarish image appears of hard-hearted, White House white men in pin-stripe suits-an American flag pinned on one lapel and a "never" button on the other-chanting old-time segregationist prattle: "Five, six, seven, eight, we're not going to integrate...
...Timothy S. Healy, president of Georgetown University: It would be considerably easier to live with America's "new righteousness" if it did not evoke a national mood of rancor...
...Carl T. Rowan'speaks from the heart: These are times when I want to ask the Lord to deliver us back to the days of Stepin Fetchit, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom...
...She wasn't a mouse...
...Mark Allen, revolutionary: During one period in my life when I was meditating a lot and attempting to do without a sustained romantic relationship, I got passionately into white sugar...
...Apparently Kilpatrick does not find this news worthy of front-page coverage...
...The name doesn't matter, since the new righteousness is really very old, and since, mercifully, it is seldom the majority it claims to be...
...With this unintentional attempt at total disempow-erment and control, some stunning contradictions are coming home to roost...
...She was dog...
...Then I decided to try a tantric experiment...
...While his attack on the General Assembly's actions is open for debate, depending on one's political ideology, Kilpatrick asks the question, "Why the UN...
...The president thinks the Russians are still openly preaching world domination," the reporter said...
...I started into the second batch, when suddenly my body started screaming (inwardly, to myself-not outwardly, fortunately) "Stop...
...He doesn't want to be awakened for anything less than World War III," Donaldson said...
...The old-style black, illiterate, obsequious "handkerchief heads" were an embarrassment, but they were harmless compared with the "educated" blacks who are now the darlings of the far right...
...Enough...
...DanielS...
...The UN has declared 1981 the "Inter national Year of the Disabled Person...
...Every afternoon, I would go to my favorite donut shop and have a huge, gloppy, sugary mess...
...But my sugar fetish persisted, to the point where I was spending a lot of time and going out of my way to feed my sugar habit...
...I ate every one of them, and ordered three more, and another cup of coffee...
...Sowell is giving aid and comfort to America's racists and to those who, in the name of conservatism and frugality, are taking food out of the mouths of black children, consigning hundreds of thousands of black teenagers to joblessness and hopelessness . . . [September 29, 1981] The Progressive Another horripilation passed to the readers of the Progressive while their countrymen sleep: That is the problem with our incorrigible CIA: It is a terrorist organization in design, purpose, and execution, and if the American people ever decide that they don't want their Government engaging in the business of terrorism, they will have to begjn by dismantling the CIA...
...In her $10 Baker's shoes, her spotted hair-ribbon, her Ruth Gordon smacker...
...This is outrage...
...But I must exercise my right to say that Vidkun Quisling, in his collaboration with the Nazis, surely did not do as much damage to the Norwegians as Sowell is doing to the most helpless of black Americans...
...So I left, feeling somewhat nauseous and buzzy from all that sugar and coffee...
...Sam Donaldson, aspiring Cron-kite: President Ronald Reagan is living in the past and is deathly afraid that "the Russians are coming," ABC-TV White House Correspondent Sam Donaldson says...
...We deny our generosity, we constrict what used to be called in church rhetoric the "bowels of compassion," we duck the imperatives of our history...
...September 16, 1981] The Washington Post The buzz between the ears of an American holy man, the Rev...
...But I would leave with a feeling of not being fulfilled-and so I knew something was going on...
...The next day I felt absolutely no desire for sweets of any kind...
...I went to my favorite donut shop and ordered four huge gloppy sweet things, and a cup of coffee...
...It is yet another joke at the excruciating expense of women, which women internalize, and which keeps the patterned male ego where it feels it has to be, presenting control and domination as power, hating its needy, terrified, [etc., etc., etc.] [September 16-22, 1981} The Washington Post A philosophical ramble with a modern campus sophisticate: A DREAM DEFERRED: What happens to a dream deferred...
...the state of Texas finds that all its oil won't buy schooling for 11,000 children of illegal immigrants...
...It wasn't the sugar I was craving, it was something else-like love and affection...
...I awake and realize this image is an exaggeration but my fear lingers...
...It is also not an isolated occurrence...
...September 1981] The Indianapolis Star The eminent Daniel S. Ward, Grand Kleagle of Purdue University's United Nations' Chapter, notifies the citizens of greater Indianapolis of the heroics of that esteemed international body and of the benighted condition of one James Jackson Kilpatrick: James J. Kilpatrick's column of Sept...
...and for the last few years the Coast Guard has turned back the "huddled masses yearning to be free.'' Such narrowing moods and bouts of meanness have been recurrent in our history...
...I listened to my mother confess hesitantly and painfully a few weeks ago about how she decided to become "a good leaning post" because she didn't look like Greta Garbo...
...And it is supposed to be funny and we are supposed to laugh at our powerless degraded selves, and if we don't we are of course told that we have no sense of humor and worse, much worse...
...The statement acknowledges a hefty typographical error in Willis's piece, states that by collective decision it has been decided to let readers put it back together, and then goes on to say that whoever first sends in the corrected article will receive a copy of the Hite Report on Male Sexuality, and the runner-up will receive a nude photograph of Margaret Thatcher...
...Spanish-speaking welfare mothers are hooted down in Miami...
...October 7, 1981] Vegetarian Times Autobiographical pensees from Mr...
...The woman behind the counter looked at me as if I were totally crazy...
...Okay, Sowell has a right to be a conservative and to articulate far-right views...
...In one fell swoop, the statement, with ghastly flippancy, patronizes readers by insidiously manipulating their feelings about their intelligence- "You're smart because you're our readers, but you're not as smart as we are because we're going to suck you into this contest where the prizes are a couple of off-the-wall women who think they're smart which keeps you scared to take risks and keeps you competing among each other to be smart in the way we are, and besides the prizes are so dumb that even if you win, you lose, and what schmucks you are to take the article that seriously in the first place"-and then goes on to further degrade Willis, Hite, and Thatcher as women...
...September 1981} The Village Voice The advanced condition of feminist analysis and elocution as manifest radiantly in an elegantly crafted critique of some past Voice: In the June 17-23 issue of the Voice, Ellen Willis writes powerfully about sexuality...
...It is estimated that as much as 80 percent of all disease is caused by or related to impure water...
...I looked forward to it intensely, and enjoyed it immensely...
...This has no place in a paper which proposes to be a voice for me, or anyone else...
...And, in a way, she was right - but there was a method to my madness...
...22 suggesting that news of the United Nations be .put "back on the comic pages" shows a blatant lack of knowledge concerning the activities of the UN...
...Alvin F. Poussaint Associate Professor of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School Cambridge, Massachusetts [September 28, 1981] Today (Westchester County, New York) Somewhere in the wilds of Westchester County, New York, the low-down on our genial president from Mr...
...1 don't know when I've been as disgusted as I was recently watching Thomas Sowell on a TV interview dishing out bull under the label of scholarship...
...Donaldson said that Reagan does not involve himself in the day-to-day decision-making processes...
...The future looks black (white...
...And then she looked at me and said, "but you wouldn't understand that, you were always the pretty one...
...It was therefore with outrage and grief that I encountered the errata statement concerning the article in the next edition of the paper-so outraged and griefstricken that it has taken me this long to write this response...
...Do you have any sense at all how terrifying and isolating it is to constantly feel that someone can control your whole life because you are thoroughly coerced into competition and survival...
...And are you aware that millions of women can only afford $10 shoes at Baker's and what that feels like, day in and day out...
...This is absolute savagery...
...This question demonstrates his ignorance of the organization's importance...
...Not "reforming" it, or regulating it, or subjecting it to "guidelines," or investigating it, but putting it out of business...
Vol. 14 • December 1981 • No. 12
