Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Daily Pennsylvanian Impressive editorial commentary from Mr. Don Manno, a seasoned mainstream humanitarian journalist for the student newspaper at the University of...
...She performs words...
...Montana Gov...
...We may have seen the first example of that change Monday...
...When the news first broke on the AP wire here at the DP with the report that Reagan had not been wounded, my first reaction was "Too bad he (the would-be assassin) missed...
...When Alda at last returned to school, in junior high, he was an outsider...
...I wanted to behave my own way and I was made to know that wasn't acceptable," he told me...
...Reagan wasn't killed...
...Alan Alda not only credits his full recovery to the treatment but traces his strong feminist sympathies to it as well...
...Judging from people's reactions to the news of the president's shooting Monday, you would have thought that it was an attempt at regicide instead of presidential homicide...
...Ted Schwinden was "appalled and angry...
...He's running the country, as he has been for the past 71 days, as he probably will be for the next 1,390...
...Will this madness ever end...
...At a time when a new national climate is raising uncertainty in gay communities across America, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus is bursting forth with an uncompromising message of unity, strength and pride...
...In fact, as the Inquirer wrote, Hinckley is a product of the aristocracy...
...Alda's pacifism, on the other hand, has its origins in the time his pet rabbits came down with ear infections...
...I touched something way out of my control...
...I think I saw what it was like to be a sniper or a killer...
...If the American political system has shifted its emphasis to the point that elections now carry the probability of real ideological change along with change in government, then the system now risks the possibility that the bullet will increasingly be seen as a legitimate means of political expression...
...1 had to be interested in sports and I had to take it for granted that to 'score' with a girl was something positive...
...That way, he reasoned, he would experience whatever thrills had eluded him as an unsuccessful hunter...
...Which to me shows that sexism is not just impolite, it can be lethal...
...People were shocked, distressed, infuriated, saddened, horrified...
...Grease burns, irregular hours, autocratic bosses, sexual harassment, and low wages all come with the quarter-pounder...
...The chorus is conducted by Dick Kramer, a highly skilled specialist in choral music...
...The historic tour undoubtedly will attract the attention of media all along the route...
...He just seems to be someone who could get upset and angry enough about the political system to use a bullet to cancel out the ballot...
...April 1, 1981] Miscellaneous Notification of a gorgeous advance in American kultur in the Department of the Tone Art: After 2 Vi years of delighting audiences and winning critical acclaim throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus this June will carry their musical celebration of gay pride to 9 American cities, from coast to coast...
...Toni Morrison doesn't like to be called a poetic writer, but it is her almost physical relation to language that allows her to tell the old stories she feels are best...
...You've made just enough to pay for car fare to and from work...
...Slogans like "Let's make America great again, let's restore to America the qualities which it's lost," can only mean: "Let's stop feeling guilty about racism, let's get the white power elite confident again...
...Nice quote...
...A lot of people feel that way about the system...
...But you're not the boss's favorite, so your pay will stay at minimum wage-$3.35 an hour...
...No I don't like Ronald Reagan...
...Then, with the news that he had been shot, my reaction had changed to "I hope he dies...
...February 2}-March 3, 1981] The New Republic A brief interlude in an interview with the author Toni Morrison, of whom the interviewer sings, Her love of language was the subtext and constant lesson of her manner...
...Hot grease from the french fry vats leaves blisters on your arms and hands...
...You punch in for a six-hour shift, but the customers are sparse, so the boss clocks you out and sends you home early...
...In paranoid moments, I attribute this rash of ethnic stereotyping to toxic proto-Reaganism...
...It became necessary and possible for me to sort out the past, and the selection process, being disciplined and guided, was genuine thinking as opposed to simple response or problem -solving...
...Told they would have to be destroyed, Alda decided the best way to dispatch them would be with a rifle...
...Whether it's John Lennon or the president, if you've got your name up on a marquee, someone tries to shoot out the lights...
...April, 1981] The Village Voice The estimable, incomparable, and distinguished Carrie Rickey launches thoughts of an aesthetic and ontolog-ical nature from a kitty litter box at the Village Voice: Item: The unconventional thriller Eyewitness has an Irish-American Vietnam vet (William Hurt), a janitor in the Metropolitan Life Building, who stumbles onto the scene of a crime: a Vietnamese-born businessman has been slashed to death...
...That's the result of sending an amateur to do a professional job...
...The businessman's associates, inscrutable Asians to a man, dog Hurt's steps, as do two cops, one Jewish, one black, the latter named Lieutenant Black who jokes, "My name should be easy to remember...
...The 135-man chorus, its members ranging in age from 22 to 56 and representing a broad spectrum of occupations, ethnic backgrounds and hometowns throughout America, will promote a truly inspiring image of the extraordinary talents and resourcefulness of America's gay community...
...Gertrude Stein said poetry was "caressing nouns...
...My most paranoid nightmare: all Americans will someday carry identity cards declaring ethnic heritage, so that when the American Reich begins...
...But let's put things in perspective...
...You ask for a merit raise, hoping the supervisor likes you enough to pay a nickel an hour more...
...And now the poet Morrison: After my first novel, The Bluest Eye, writing became a way to be coherent in the world...
...Reagan's cant often sounds like 1840s Know-Nothing-ism, a Nativist movement preaching "America for the Americans," that is, "No ethnics, please...
...he wasn't even hurt badly...
...I came to realize," he said, "that I probably owe my life-and if not my life, the fact that I'm not crippled-to two women: my mother, who recognized polio's symptoms, and to Elizabeth Kenny, the famous Sister Kenny, an Australian nurse who figured out the treatment...
...March 21, 1981] The New York Times Magazine Seminal event in the intellectual evolution of the prodigious Alan Alda, as noted by Professor Carey Winfred in a leading journal of urban sophistication...
...I wasn't supposed to cry...
...Since you've started reading this column, more people have been killed by criminals throughout the nation than were shot outside the Washington Hilton Monday...
...Don Manno, a seasoned mainstream humanitarian journalist for the student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, whose remarkable president purred from his padded cell about academic freedom...
...The rabbits would flop in the air and I would have to shoot them again to put them out of their pain," Alda remembers...
...Life under the Golden Arches is not all that golden, as any of the million young Americans who work at a fast-food restaurant can tell you...
...I wasn't supposed to giggle...
...While convalescing from polio, Alda spent most of the next two years in a swimming pool (he was even privately tutored while he paddled around), strengthening his weakened muscles...
...You rub on some salve, and go back to the boards...
...The Progressive The esteemed Alex Kotlowits describes the travail and rage that shrouds the life of a modern-day McDonald's hamburger jerk, lugging Happy Meals and McMuffins by the thousands to the Nation's indurated Elites...
...John Hinckley, arrested in the shooting, appears to be frustrated and angry...
...Assimilate or vanish...
...McDonald's alone boasts that by 1985, one-fifth of all American youth will have at one time worked for the company...
...Dick has performed with the Santa Fe Opera, toured with the Roger Wagner Chorale and was a soloist at the Carmel Bach Festival as well as in churches throughout California and New York...
...Unfortunately, the script didn't play the way he had written it...
...It's just gotten to be a game," he told The Associated Press...
...Including me...
...He's no outcast like Oswald, nor a nut like Sara Jane Moore or Squeaky Fromme (he's undergone psychotherapy, but then, so have a lot of people...
...If this isn't enough ethnic typing, there's an additional subplot linking the Asians with an Irgun-bloodthirsty "Save Soviet Jewry" group led by one Joseph, the Aryan-looking Christopher Plummer...
...April 20, 1981...
...I started it with a feeling of exhilaration and ended it sobbing...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
