Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
...
...But by now, musicians and bands all over the world are trying their hands at funk...
...One victim of the great communist hunt, through the Hollywood blacklist, was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo of Grand Junction...
...demonstration of Ku Kluxian pinheads by rampaging and looting local stores, columnist Dorthy Gilliam proffers comforting thoughts and exhilarating visions: The 36 Klansmen who showed up to rally here on Saturday looked impotent when you consider the Klan's vaunted history of lynching and violence...
...We pass by a large junior high school...
...Robert Palmer, modern musicolo gist in residence at the venerable Times, applies the higher intellection to "mutating funk," illuminating cultural jewels too long left unscruti nizedby, superior minds: The word "funk" is difficult to define...
...yet we callously disregard the needs of those unfortunate citizens who are starving for the food of life-love, or its nearest approximation: sexual pleasure...
...a fat and basic backbeat from the drums...
...Perhaps this is one of the most profound lessons archaeology has to teach us...
...The sophistication of the masses was, in the end, a thing to behold...
...The anti-Klan protestors were saying that they have had enough...
...It's the common rhythmic language that allows British new wave rock to fit snugly into the musical formats of black-oriented inner-city radio stations and unites whites and blacks on nightclub dance floors...
...We agree that people today view the world through cynical-colored glasses...
...These were not bedraggled, straggling, drugged-out potheads...
...The message to the, powers that be is they will have to deal with a more sophisticated mass than they did in the '60s...
...Awful...
...Far from being a group of bloody savages bent on sadistic torture, they were a civilized, fatalistic and reverent people...
...It would be a shame if conservativesparticularly the people in power who have created the climate in which the Klan rally could take place-don't get the message of the masses...
...But it should be remembered that the crowd was orderly until its members were denied what they considered was their right to confront the Klan...
...The "invisible hand" that supposedly governs the sexual marketplace is simply no longer working, and our totally unregulated free enterprise system for meeting and mating has become as antiquated as the unchecked industrialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...
...The roots of funk are in Latin music, in New Orleans rhythm-and-blues, and above all in the stripped-down, ferociously rhythmic music of the mid-1960's James Brown band...
...It is a testimony to our sanity that Hiss is able to travel through the country today, telling students about what happened to him...
...They were in tight leotards, and a few seemed to have on padded bras...
...November21, 1982] Daily Camera A visit to the University of Colorado at historic Boulder by the American Dreyfus occasions a purple editorial in the illustrious Daily Camera composed by a victim of the local History Department: Joe McCarthy and his ilk were willing to leave a battlefield strewn with the bodies, of accused communists in order...
...The looting did no credit to the antiKlan movement...
...We should now realize that love is "sex in action," and that our society is very far indeed from realizing the promise of universal sexual fulfillment that has always been an integral part of the American Dream...
...It is comforting to know that Hiss believes that Americans today aren't so easily led as they were 30 years ago...
...For on Saturday, in the speeches and banners, it rang out loud and clear: The KKK is part of a level of obscenity we won't tolerate...
...We have become a nation divided into "haves" and "have-nots...
...November 14, 1982] Harper's The views of Dr...
...Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncracy...
...November 7.1982] 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983...
...Today, when the western world professes such respect for individual life, it seems incredible to us that a culture would condone the sacrificing of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people annually...
...Jimmy Carter once described justice as "love in action...
...Before that time, the protest was carried out in the orderly mode of the '60s civitrights movement, with speeches and singing and banners...
...Patricia R. Ana walt, a leading authority on "Middle American costumes and textiles" From whatever ideological camp Aztec human sacrifice is viewed, the important point is that this fascinating culture must be understood within its own framework...
...No civilized country in the world today assumes that those who can't fend for themselves should starve to death on the street...
...January 19831 The New York Times Dr...
...Arthur S. Levine, Ph.D., satirist or typical American reformer...
...We would spot a Joe McCarthy a mile away...
...Elise T. Chisolm recounts a stupendous moment of bliss spent with a genius and the shock that followed thanks to Ronald W. Reagan and his brutes: We are walking beside a lake in Cleveland Heights, Ohio...
...To get what they wanted, they had to count on a gullible public with a lynch-mob mentality...
...It was a strong racial and cultural mix: Latinos, blacks, whites, and Palestinians...
...September/October 1982] San Jose Mercury News Mrs...
...I dunno," he says, "I think there is a local cheerleading clinic, and they start about 9 years old with lessons...
...James David Barber, monitor of presidential rectitude and erstwhile champion of Carterism without corn pone: If President Reagan's performance so far is any index, we are in for a long slide away from democratic deliberation as we mosey toward 1984...
...Funk rhythms are put together by stacking various rhythmic patterns together', and while the details of the patterns have changed somewhat, the way in which they are stacked,, the roles of the various instruments in the funk rhythm section, and even the ideal balance of the instruments have changed surprisingly little in the past 15 years...
...Why are the cheerleaders so much younger than the football players...
...February 17...
...In the rain the school's football team is playing a big game...
...But recently, some of the leading figures in, black popular music have been radically mutating funk formulas in a number of fresh and provocative ways...
...But they couldn't have been more than 9 or 10...
...Fifteen years into the New Age make it very difficult to decide: The anguish, disaffection, and loneliness surrounding our sexual lives are a growing national scandal...
...Short hot pants clung to skinny little thighs...
...In his opinion it couldn't happen again...
...Pompons were everywhere in sync with the pre-adolescent maneuvers...
...1982] The New York Times Lugubrious ruminations from Dr...
...The parents are shouting on the sidelines and running up and down with the coaches...
...But now funk is changing...
...to lay claim to political popularity...
...And on a smaller scale, multiple human sacrifices also occurred in the ancient Old World...
...But what marred my day and galvanized me to the spot were the 25 little girls, twisting their bodies in perfect unison, leaping into the air and emulating something between the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and the Ziegfeld Follies...
...How much longer can this sexual inequity continue without fundamentally threatening the national polity...
...November29, 1982] Archaeology Unexpected praise for religious ob servances from Dr...
...Part of the impetus for this change must have come from the experiments of various avant-gardists...
...Such customs demonstrate the wide range of behavior that has been socially acceptable during human time on earth, which underscores again what a malleable creature Homo sapiens is...
...The crowd also understood that today's Rightwing Revival had given the Klan the nerve to come to the capital...
...I ask...
...The hairstyles were mini-Miss Americas, and their makeup was in place and ready for action...
...I am having one of those beautiful talks you have with a son whom you don't see very often...
...But in today's pop music, funk is generally understood as a rhythmic language that involves chattering, tele-, graphic percussion...
...After being hauled through the mud in public, Hiss eventually did more than three years in prison for perjury...
...But the counterprotesters, many times the minuscule numbers of the Klan, sent a message of strong resolve: certain vulgarities, such as the appearance of the KKK, just won't be tolerated in the nation's capital...
...Hiss was accused of handing over secrets to the commies by a shrieking Whittaker Chambers, then an editor at Time Magazine...
...The Aztecs represent the final flowering of one of the great high cultures of the New World...
...C U R R E N T W I S D O M The Washington Post Forty-eight hours after 500 counter demonstrators responded to a Washington, D.C...
...The information collected by the Spanish missionaries repeatedly stresses that there was no intent of cruelty, punishment or blood lust connected with the offering of a human life...
...A typical fall Cleveland day...
...that they were going to "stand up, and were ready to battle in the streets...
...But in any war, no matter how heroic are the soldiers, there will be some among them who will rape, rob and plunder...
...My son says, "Isn't that sick...
...So despite the violence and looting, Saturday represented a kind of limited progress and a healthy sign.- The antiKlan demonstrators were angered because they did not want a hollow victory, they wanted to face the Klan and win by letting the Klan see their numbers and that they were not afraid...
...It always took place in the most reverent circumstances, the supreme religious act of a deeply devout people...
...Another victim of the same mentality, a visitor to Boulder last week, was Alger Hiss, a former member of the Roosevelt administration, who was persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee and a young Richard Nixon...
...Trumbo was such a powerful writer that he went on to win an academy award even while his name was banned by the film industry...
...He had his law career taken away from him until only recently...
...We drew closer to the cheering section...
...the Reagan administration has brought that on, this swing back to conservatism...
...The fallen leaves are still golden, the Japanese maples are still bright red, the lake is green and a light rain is falling...
...Yet this did indeed happen in Mexico...
...It was a memorable message...
...It is unfortunate that the anti-Klan demonstrators became angry when they were denied a confrontation with the white-sheeted purveyors of hate and subsequently vented their fury on the most available symbol-police authority...
...and melodic bass patterns that tend to lope or stutter...
...And whenever you have a large crowd where you don't check credentials at the door, a certain criminal element may be drawn as well...
...And lo, the girls were really little girls, not even close to women yet...
Vol. 16 • February 1983 • No. 2
