The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS oMay passes. It has been one year since the Roman Catholic bishops of America hurled their pastoral letter across the Republic like brat kids floating a paper airplane...
...can anticlericalism with an elegant French bouquet be far off...
...Although perhaps most notable as a trencherman,,his "outbursts on behalf of the world's poor and against the capitalist vice" may be found in virtually any copy of the English edition o f the Journal o f the Moscow Patriarchate...
...Is it Emily Post...
...She believes in reincarnation, ghosts, goblins, and feminism...
...Would not Patriarch Pimen, for his part, be as pleased with a modest trophy...
...According to Tampa police, as two officers accosted him at the urinal the dean "turned to face them while continuing his actions...
...But it is useful sometimes to isolate a topic for discussion without trying to explain the whole universe...
...The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics pulled out of the Olympic Games scheduled to begin this July in Satanic Los Angeles, and in Santa Ana, California, a judge has ruled that Disneyland violated the civil rights of two male teenagers when it ejected them from the Tomorrowland Terrace dance floor where they had insisted on dancing together...
...is a daily dream," and then thrusts in, "the flood of undocumented Mexican workers," etc., and somehow supposes that we are going to agree with his dark hint that there is some sort of connection between the two...
...The phrase quoted from the Fathers had nothing to do with free Negroes...
...I grant that the moral arguments for capital punishment are not so unanswerable as demonstrations in geometry...
...Bradford replies: Mr...
...For Mr...
...Steve Garman, whose entry was: "The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarian tribe now stacking wood at her nubile feet, when the strong clear voice of the poetic and heroic Handsomas roared, 'Hick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my strong steel through your last meal.' " Grand and gaudy stuff that, but it is time for Professor Rice to come up with an award for political oratory...
...Very few blacks resident in the United States are not citizens...
...W. Dickson Franck Belvidere, Illinois M.E...
...Why do you ask...
...It has been one year since the Roman Catholic bishops of America hurled their pastoral letter across the Republic like brat kids floating a paper airplane into a classroom...
...Miss Sonia Johnson, the presidential candidate of what UPI has termed the "moderate left" Citizens Party, is urging fellow moderate leftists to make a citizen's arrest of our debonair President for "war crimes...
...I cannot pretend that they have, even if it would improve my case for the death penalty...
...Last month the famously eloquent Jesse Jackson, while prophesying the consequences of a Reagan re-election, averred this beauty: "When people begin to revolt he will try to use military means to suppress them, which will not work...
...The young woman apparently swooned while giving birth in a local hospital and was shoveled up and carried off in a funeral procession from which she might never have recovered had not the incomparable air of downtown Addis Ababa evoked from her several violent sneezes and a cough, thus notifying the assembled galoots that the corpse was actually a corpus and not yet fit for planting...
...Immigration Arabesque I congratulate the editors of The American Spectator on Mr...
...When asked by the Washington Post if their arrangement is romantic, she sighed, "Yes, I will not say that it is not...
...Bradford compounds two opposites: "voices, South and North American, for whom.., the desire for destruction of the U.S...
...In San Jose, California, Professor Scott Rice awarded the third annual Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton award for the worst possible opening sentence in a 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 novel to Mr...
...However, he makes two comments which I've heard so often that I want to take the opportunity to reply...
...However explained, the claim that a moral argument draws strength from a supporting context o f moral arguments should not be controversial...
...Ernest van den Haag New York, New York Jeremy Rabkin replies: I thank Ernest van den Haag for his compliment, but I do not think my objections any less valid for having been voiced by others in the past...
...Now the word is out that these frauds are planning yet another nonsensical pronunciamento, this time against capitalism, which is to say the economic system that has allowed them to fatten and to distribute largess to the world...
...B., there is a real gap between those two elements you glibly juxtapose...
...Braden, who often travels with the bespectacled 68-year-old Adonis, was even more frank...
...The spirit of the killing of Kennedy is alive and well...
...Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant to Gewirth have not, in my opinion, succeeded in doing what Rabkin (and I) would like...
...During a tony banquet some years ago he saw a guest turn to the woman seated at his right and politely inquire: "Did I get your name correctly...
...A twelve-year-old boy in Akron, Ohio, acting, presumably, upon the property rights theories of John Rawls and all three Democratic presidential contenders, Xvas arrested for robbing his seventh-grade classmates at gunpoint...
...If all the people of the world who would like to enjoy our standard of living and our social services were to define their geographic distance from our borders as a form of oppression, then we might expect that half the population of the world that is not under Communist control would soon pack its knapsack and head in our direction...
...2. Rabkin also blames both my co-author and me for not relating the death penalty to military science, health regulations, abortion, etc...
...That will be the basis for some real ugly polarization in our country...
...Two thousand students, faculty, and alumni showed up at the University of Chicago's Ida Noyes Hall for the university's biennial Lascivious Costume Ball where they rubbed skin and leather while stepping over puddles of vomit...
...Robert McNamara's revelation that, yes, he and Mrs...
...One last complaint...
...So I still wish Professor van den Haag had given us more moral argument and context for it...
...Nowhere did I hint at literary or any other kind of lying...
...oThe fabled efficiency of Addis Ababa's morticians almost cost an Ethiopian woman her life...
...oMr...
...she replied...
...Because," said he, "you have just eaten my salad...
...Empress Zita, who lives in Zizer, Switzerland, was "reported in very good form," still keeping up with international affairs through assiduous readings of the French, German, and English press, and always wearing those legendary black mourning gowns...
...Authorities in Palm Beach County, Florida, announced that Mr...
...Franck's response to my essay on the question of illegal immigration is an example of the officially benevolent passions against which my remarks were intended as a warning...
...Is your name Post...
...This hardly justifies van den Haag's exclusive reliance on statistical arguments about the death penalty's deterrent value, however, when--as he himself concedes--these arguments are also "inconclusive...
...The voices, South and North American" which I mention are not by me equated with the illegal Mexican immigrants...
...He selects a phrase from the American Convention of 1787--"foreigners resident in the United States, deserving our citizenship but not yet one with us in spirit...
...To the editors of The American Spectator, I suggest: Following the words in your masthead, "Published remarkably without regard to sex, lifestyle, race, color . . . . or national origin," you may now add, "and indeed really without much regard to good sense...
...The dean of a major Midwestern journalism school turned up in hospital with a hand that was actually fractured after vice officers in Tampa, Florida caught him in a beachfront comfort station masturbating in'to a urinal...
...Tom Braden, are embarked on what modern sophisticates call "a relationship...
...While Bradford sits at a comfortable desk, fuming about "eighteenthcentury weeping comedy," Beowulf, Vergil's Dido and Spartan hosts, Menelaus, etc., ad nauseam, there are some five millions of poor human beings who have very justly fled, as refugees, from oppressive sociopolitical conditions, as in Mexico, to come to our country, work very hard, raise their children, pay our taxes, and conduct themselves as kind-hearted, genial people...
...David Kennedy expired from the "multiple ingestion" of a trinity of drugs, and two men were arrested for allegedly supplying them to the young Kennedy...
...Bradford's presentation is so involved in the cute little arabesques typical o f "English-professor" productions, that by becoming ludicrous he defeats his own purpose...
...I agree that would have added force to the widely shared intuition...
...And congratulations to Clark M. Clifford, chairman of the Truman Centennial Committee...
...James Gordon, that Caravaggio of rock drummers whose melodious bashings accompanied such legendary artists as John Lennon, Joan Baez, and the Everly Brothers, has been convicted of the second-degree murder of his mother--no mama's boy he...
...Fat Bishop Found I think I have a clear winner for you in the "Find the Fattest Bishop" event ("The Continuing Crisis," TAS, April 1984...
...Nor is there any justification for suggesting that the article treats respectability with irony...
...Its double talk is high jesuitry...
...I never understood wherein the execution of convicted murderers could be thought inconsistent with preserving the intrauterine--therefore certainly innocent--life of babies...
...Washingtonians enjoyed a delicious eye-roll over Mr...
...Joan Braden, wife of syndicated columnist Mr...
...It is distressing to have attempted a (continued on page 44) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 7...
...But the fault is not mine...
...What intolerance is to be found in America, it seems it can well be found in Texas...
...F...
...During recent Washington ceremonies commemorating the centennial of President Harry Truman's birth, the ex-secretary of Defense told an unusually good story...
...Immigration Policy," in their April issue...
...Miss French is a nine-year veteran of the local police force...
...RET C O R R E S P O N D E N C E Debating the Death Penalty I'm grateful to Jeremy Rabkin for a fair and penetrating review of The Death Penalty: A Debate (TAS, May 1984...
...They apparently remain very proud of it...
...Forward-looking penologists in Vancouver, British Columbia, announced their plan to allow the inmates of a local prison to watch kiddie porn and other explicit sexual materials of an off-beat nature so as to satiate their desires for the stuff and possibly to return them to lives of constructive heterosexual enthusiasm...
...He thinks that my view would have gained force if I had presented the feeling that the death penalty is deserved as more than just that--as, I suppose, a moral judgment objectively grounded...
...They belong instead to people who would make use of such immigration in effecting a political and social t r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f the Southwestern United States...
...John Clark Donahue, who served for twenty years as the artistic director of the MinneapoliJr Children's Theater Company, resigned three weeks after being charged with sexually abusing three young male students...
...Their collective personality is an astonishing contrast to Bradford's Puritan-Texan model for another painting by Grant Wood, for Bradford makes of himself a symbol of the wooden elements in Texan Anglo-American society...
...On the other hand, moral arguments gain in credibility the more they are shown to be consistent with prior moral intuitions and lose credibility in proportion to the conflicts they generate with other moral beliefs...
...Finally, those hoary admonitions linking masturbation to warts on the hands can be derided no longer...
...Iraq and Iran began blasting neutral shipping in the Persian Gulf...
...Are you the worldrenowned authority on manners...
...Then things got out of hand...
...he asked...
...People are not going to keep freezing in the wintertime in this country and remain malnourished without revolting...
...oAmid tears and a profusion of solemnities about her commitment to good government and the commonweal, 1960s Wunderkind Miss Kathy Boudin was given 20 years to life for her role in the 1981 Brink's holdup that left a guard and two policemen dead...
...Mrs...
...Although I suppose Patriarch Pimen the clear winner, I do not know his weight or see any practical way to get him on a NLGA certified s c a l e . . . And does Mr...
...In campus news, Hunter College conferred an honorary doctorate of humane letters upon Miss Shirley MacLaine for her " . . . lifelong quest into philosophy and metaphysics...
...McCarthyism Redivivus...
...Bradford, how many black people of your South do you include in that quote...
...Its pious piffles make them swell with gluttonous satisfaction...
...Anyway, nearly everything in this world is indeed connected or can be so perceived...
...Burr really want to "accompany the winner" around Indianapolis...
...Everyone had a good laugh...
...I, of course, say nothing against the motives of most illegal immigrants who have broken our laws to come and live among us...
...On May 22, that Soviet General, Col...
...But cautions the dashing and retired head of the World Bank, "she has eight kids and she loves her husband very much and she's not about to leave him for me or any other man and beyond that I wouldn't marry her because I'm not a homewrecker...
...There you have it from the Daniel Webster of Campaign '84...
...One can explain this by reference to the "coherence theory" in modern philosophy, by the findings of psychologists regarding "cognitive dissonance," or indeed by the method and example of Aristotle's Rhetoric...
...In our case I think the gains exceeded the losses...
...Mr...
...A splendid article--all that is left now is to reprint it, and let the masses of American people attempt to chew on, and regurgitate, that d o t of self-satisfied dregs of a decaying mind...
...can't all be blamed on the 'little despots' of neoconservatism" (TAS, June 1984)--misrepresented both the argument and the tone of my article...
...This article shows it...
...the man asked...
...Franck to insist on his own definition of "refugee" is to beg the question...
...Yes," Emily Post responded...
...Bradford's article, "Sentiment and U.S...
...Semyon R. Romanov, who brought honor to himself and the entire Red Army when he oversaw the downing of Korean Air Lines' treacherous Flight 007, died suddenly in East Germany apparently without benefit of clergy...
...Ever since his 1922 death in Madeira, she has worn black, yet to no effect...
...The limits of art have again been narrowed, this time in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Mr...
...In Garden Grove, California, an obscene caller who repeatedly dialed Miss Pam French's telephone number found himself en route to the hoosegow after Miss French, 29, got herself invited over to his villa...
...The Empress, as trim and winsome as ever, is the widow of Charles I, the last AustroHungarian emperor...
...Southerners do not like to be called Puritans with a capital " P . " We have never embraced that spirit which would erect among our countrymen a New Jerusalem and have never claimed a special intimacy with the will of the Deity on political questions...
...oEbullient conservatives and neoconservatives all over the Republic observed the ninety-second birthday of Empress Zita of Austria...
...It is, appropriately, Patriarch Pimen of Moscow . . . Enclosed photos only begin to give an idea of the fellow's bulk since he is also very tail...
...America now produces some very fine Chardonnays...
...Perhaps a brass pirozhok . . . --A Tokyo Spectator Tokyo, Japan Bad Title The title and kicker supplied by the editors of The American Spectator - - "Literary Lies of Respectable Liberals: The problems faced by Irving Howe & Co...
...oThe Department of Labor announced that unemployment for May dropped to 7.4 percent, and the Commerce Department reported that in the first quarter the economy roared onward at 8.8 percent...
...That mistake is made more frequently in Illinois...
...I, of course, deny that my discussion has anything to do with the entry of refugees as that term is used in our law...
...Furthermore, I discussed the views of a few prominent individuals, not "Irving Howe & Co...
...Yes," responded Post...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
