Current Wisdom

...For the racist, the black male represents or symbolizes the fundamental biological fear: On the genital level, when a white man hates black men, is he not yielding to a feeling of impotence or of sexual inferiority...

...Byther's family believes he did what he planned to do-leap to his death to call the country's attention to the "real danger" presented by the nation's turn to the right...

...The next kid who comes along and runs into homosexual blackmail will pay for your Uncle Tomism...

...December 4, 1980] The Great Books Scries Standing in the vestibule of this unusual tome, Women Who Kill, Miss Ann Jones, explains her purpose and insight to the generations: And this book is mostly about fear: the fears of men who, even as they shape society, are desperately afraid of women, and so have fashioned a world in which women come and go only in certain rooms...

...So far, the panel in its quest to find the causes of violence has held hearings on childbirth and bonding between mother and infants and on what effects nutrition might have on violent and aggressive behavior...

...March 20, 1981] New York Times Book Review Colossal summertime lucubrations planned by Ann Beattie, legendary author of Falling in Place and paradigmatic New York Times intellect uelle: I'll be writing a screenplay based on a story of mine that appeared in Ms...

...Each is hierarchical in structure, authority oriented, opposed in principle to equal participation, unaccountable to the citizenry, elitist and managerial, and disposed to concentrate increasing power in the hands of the few and to reduce political life to administration...

...Such damage, it says, can be caused by pregnant woman's lack of good nutrition, of alcohol and drugs, stress or the use of anesthetics or forceps during delivery...

...magazine: "Learning to Fall...

...1 political issue: crime...

...Historians often assume that women have not significantly acted, but have been acted upon...

...Black women, however, were held to be naturally lascivious and passionate, and thus were fair game for sexual predation...

...They met three years ago at a Star Trek convention in Los Angeles, where Robert was wearing a Star Trek-style uniform...

...So we have books - accurate and valuable books - on how women have been defrauded and oppressed by capitalism, medicine, psychology, the law, the universities, and our own mothers...

...Poor woman...

...January, 1981] The San Francisco Chronicle Concluding remarks on the life of Robert Byther, patriot and philo-sophe, whose demise came about on December 1, 1981 when he served the commonweal by hauling himself up San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and allons y Byther, who joined the Coast Guard in June, was described by his family as an intense, meticulous idealist...

...This is a crucial moment for young lesbian athletes...

...February 4-February 10, 1981] The Soho News The eloquent Philip Nobile, vivace con sniffles, in an open letter to Billie Jean King, embattled symbol of the Wheaties woman: Anti-homosexuality has become the anti-Semitism of sex...

...He said in his letter he was jumping "because the guiding ideals of my life will not let me serve Ronald Reagan as president...

...She did not live to see the Reagan entourage come to Washington or read Tom Bethell in the American Spectator writing about "radical nuns, one of the prime horrors of our time: They have stopped believing in God and in an afterlife...

...April 8, 1981] The Washington Post Law and order news from the great state of California, birthplace of Modern Presidents: A leading member of the California Assembly says legislators should move to thwart potential criminals while they're still in the womb and suggests that "gentle" approaches to childbirth could curb violent tendencies from developing...

...They had talked enough about death for Pat to know how Robert felt about it...

...Here again, Fanon's commentary is critical...

...Also "The Gasoline Wars" by Jean Thompson, Joy Williams's forthcoming collection of short stories and anything I can get my hands on by Raymond Carver and Steven Millhauser...

...He chose December 1 to leap, he said, because it was the start of the Christmas season-a time when he said people think about peace and love...

...A baby girl born tomorrow stands a chance of growing up to stick a kitchen knife into an assaultive husband...

...The story of women who kill is the story of women...

...May 15, 1981] democracy Sheldon S. Wolin, professor of social science, slams down hard on the alarm to awaken snoozing Americans, even as he raises the curtain on a new swindle, namely, his idiotic new journal: democracy: The reasons for beginning this journal now and calling it democracy come down to what, in our view, is the most significant political fact about contemporary American life: the steady transformation of America into an antidemocratic society...

...I think that sometime the US has to realize that it does not own Central America or any other part of the world, that people have the right to shape their own destinies and choose the type of government they want and make their own choices...

...Cute...

...House of Representatives-presumably after a three-martini lunch: Red-faced and pounding the table, his voice booming, O'Neill described himself as "one of the big spenders of all time" and proudly listed millions of dollars he said he had added to past budgets to aid research on problems of disease and the handicapped...

...Senate...

...Be a credit to your race...

...More women will kill their husbands than will sit in the halls of Congress...

...Researchers, it says, have theorized links between low blood sugar and criminal behavior, between food additives and hyperactivity and between junk food and "disturbing personality characteristics...

...At the root of this cruel punishment, Jordan contends, was the white man's "racking fear and jealousy" of what black men could dp if their relative positions and powers were reversed...

...Every one of the country's primary institutions-the business corporation, the government bureaucracy, the trade union, the research and education industries, the mass propaganda and entertainment media, and the health and welfare system-is antidemocratic in spirit, design, and operation...

...Everyone knows that it is not...

...Manning Marable, professor of Afro-American flapdoodle at Cornell University, and the resident Hinky Dink Kenna of the National Black Independent Political Party: A major force behind all antiblack restrictions and regulations has always been the irrational yet very real anxiety white males have expressed concerning black sexuality...

...The prelogical thought of the phobic has decided that such is the case...

...It is apparent that white men projected their own desires onto Negroes: their own passion for black women was not fully acceptable to society or the self and hence not readily admissible...

...In order to get our attention, he killed himself, just as the Buddhist monks did in Vietnam," his father said in a telephone interview from the family's Anaheim home...

...I will be based in Provo, Utah, at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute for June and July to do this...

...May 31, 1981] The Nation Bathroom sociology of unusual sapience from Dr...

...The 25-member panel suggested that "gentle" or "natural" approaches to birth could curb tendencies toward violence...

...In colony after colony, from Quaker Pennsylvania to the Carolinas, castration became a form of legal punishment for a whole set of black male offenses...

...If you betray yourself, you betray them...

...The notion existed that black men were particularly virile, promiscuous and lusted after white women...

...The civilized white man retains an irrational longing for unusual eras of sexual license, of orgiastic scenes, of unpunished rapes, of unrepressed incest...

...Vasconcellos and five panel members held a news conference to release the panel's 1980 report to the legislature, based on two hearings...

...We don't lqse anything . . . we don't lose Cuba, we don't lose Nicaragua, because they were never ours to lose...

...He thought that when we die here we go on to a second level, a better way of being, where there aren't all the bad things and you're less inhibited," his wife recalled in a telephone interview from her apartment in Newport News, VA "I believe he feels he has given his life for his country...

...The panel next week will hold hearings in Sacramento at which a number of experts will discuss relationships between violence and personality...

...Is the Negro's superiority real...

...It also said that theories speculating that nutrition can prevent or treat violent or antisocial behavior are "cautiously positive and worthy of attention...

...The sexual pathology of whites was enshrined as public policy in laws permitting castration of blacks...

...Go for it, Billie Jean...

...But that is not what matters...

...The report was prepared by the California commission on Crime Control and Violence Prevention, created this year by a Vasconcellos bill to pinpoint what makes people violent...

...and about the fears of those women who, finding the rooms too narrow and the door still locked, lie in wait or set the place afire...

...The report says "neurological abnormalities in the infant . . . may result in a subsequent predisposition to violent behavior...

...They joined a Star Trek club, had Star Trek posters on their walls and read a lot of science fiction...

...He pointed out that there are 150,000 dwarfs in the United States and said another 6,000 are born every year...

...Yet our great women are few...

...John Vasconcellos, chairman ofthe Ways and Means Committee, Wednesday released a report that offers an unconventional approach to dealing with this year's No...

...He also lamented the defeat of several liberals in the U.S...

...Silence oniy adds to your shame...

...You are their hero too...

...In the process they have transformed themselves into bullcfike socialists who will spend the rest of their lives attempting to destroy in others the loyalties and beliefs that they destroyed in themselves...

...Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980] The Los Angeles Times High-grade oratory from the illustrious Speaker of the U.S...

...I'll be reading poetry by Michael Ryan, Sydney Lea, Jay Parini, Gregory Orr and Louise Gluck...

...but her chances of becoming President are too slim to be statistically significant...

...You could help cut the comedy...

...Reagan is a tool of the rich, ofthe secret power brokers that will have access to the machinery of government as never before, and is supported by many of the most anti-progressive elements of our society," Byther wrote in the neatly typed, mimeographed letter...

...If you admitted your sexual preference without tears and challenged all comers-the WTA, the sponsors, the players and the fans-you would win in straight sets...

...But are such women a fit subject for serious historical (or herstorical) study...

...Other historians, believing that some women did act, and from enlightened self-interest at that, have given us women in the antislavery movement, in the suffrage movement, in the labor movement: women like the Grimkes, Anthony, Cady Stanton, Goldman, Eastman, Mother Jones, who have said and done great things on behalf of themselves and others...

...Robert and Pat Byther both grew up in Southern California...

...Since his ideal is an infinite virility, is there not a phenomenon of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as a penis symbol...

...This year more women will kill their children than will be appointed to the judicial bench...

...CURRENT WISDOM The Village Voice In another of his grand and gorgeous pratfalls, the ill-starred Alexander Cockburn lends evidence to one of Tom Bethell's more piquant observations, though Cockburn's intention is, alas, quite different: It was Ita Ford, one of the murdered Maryknoll nuns who said just before her death, "The US is now going to train Salvadoran troops in Panama . . . it's reprehensible...

...Their mastery in the world of economics and politics meant little if the very black man they belittled and abused "performed his nocturnal offices better than the white man...

...Women are history's great blob of putty...

...Projecting his own desires onto the Negro," Fanon noted, "the white man behaves 'as if the Negro really had them...

...Perhaps, indeed, the white man's woman really wanted the Negro man more than she wanted him...

...He listed $160 million in funds for breast cancer research and $45 million to aid the growth of dwarfs, a research program that made it possible for dwarfs, who normally grow to an average size of 26 inches, to grow as tall as 52 inches...

...In The White Man's Burden, historian Winthrop Jordan argues that the threat of black slave revolts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was usually perceived in sexual terms...