Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Great Books Series Moral Equivalence, prettily put by the learned Jonathan Porritt-and remember if you will all those astonished Neoliberals who deny that such knavish arguments...
...subscription letter, 1985] Washington Post Homme de lettres Richard Cohen launches into another of his "We-as-a-people" pontifications, this time agglutinating the Nazis' extermination of the Jews with the American bombing of Hiroshima, and again demonstrates that his cerebrum is no more functional than his appendix: It took time for the world to come to grips with these twin horrors...
...It has taken on a momentum all of its own...
...To a Russian Reading List, I would add: The Constitution of the USSR...
...The USA, with its fragmented, 'melting-pot' society, can ensure social discipline only as the 'leader of the Free World...
...Like dirt...
...Liberty...
...I live in a culture in which I am labeled immoral, sick and disreputable because I am a woman who loves other women...
...Right now I'm in another stage, which is chili-burgers and cigarettes and tequila and the desert and old motel rooms with fans on the ceiling and just . . . stuff...
...Maybe our self-image is the last victim of World War II...
...I paid 50 cents for mine...
...August 3, 1985] Common Cause Dr...
...The old romantic view of mankind, a vision of people as essentially good and on the path to getting better, has been vanquished by the data, by the number of victims and the reason for their deaths...
...The Group Psychology Of AIDS Psychiatrist Casper Schmidt breaks new ground in exploring the origins of AIDS...
...The KAL Shootdown Focussing on the downing of KAL flight 007 last fall, psychiatrist George Luhrmann shows the many ways in which this event was unconsciously orchestrated...
...More important, the maturation transforms Henley's entire musical manner, infusing it with tender-but-rough vocal winces that are the pop equivalent of hard-boiled sadness...
...The whole point is that one side is the mirror image of the other...
...He thinks there's an ideological answer to all our problems though it's clear that the ideology of Communism, socialism, and capitalism are all in trouble...
...I write this-appropriately, it seems- by the bottle-rocket's red glare: it is dusk on July 4th in suburban USA, where freedom is celebrated, en masse, by simulated bombings...
...Are my representatives dedicated to my freedom to love and live as I choose...
...CURRENT WISDOM The Great Books Series Moral Equivalence, prettily put by the learned Jonathan Porritt-and remember if you will all those astonished Neoliberals who deny that such knavish arguments are ever propounded by humankind: The Cold War is basically about itself...
...She shows how Reagan's apocalyptic fantasies shape-and are in turn shaped by-deeply repressed group wishes for sacrifice and the danger of collective suicide...
...in the East they are ruthlessly persecuted and suppressed...
...Not one word of this truly newsworthy event appeared in our "free" media...
...Ward Englewood, FL [June/July 1985] Journal of Psychohistory For all New Age intellectualoids, must reading boomed in an advertisement for JP's "Special Reagan issue'-crash, bam, tinkle: The Nuclear Arms Race Mary Coleman, M.D., looks at the collective irrationality behind the current nuclear weapons race...
...He carefully documents how-unlike many other shootdowns in the past-this one was used for current group-fantasy purposes...
...Psychobiographies, Review Essays, and much more will be yours when you subscribe to this Special Reagan issue now...
...And the quickness to judge-the assumption that the Soviets had done this completely in cold blood, that they knew that it was a civilian plane-was just tremendous...
...The Church of England's report, The Church and the Bomb, put it this way: 'Mutually stimulated paranoia is blinding all concerned to the way their opponent is likely to behave...
...The prophecies of aggression are self-fulfilling prophecies.' So who then are the participants in this drama currently being acted out in the theatre of Europe-the directors, producers and cast...
...Historically, the threat of an enemy, of the 'Other', has always provided a pretty useful means of reinforcing social discipline and cohesion...
...He acquired enough capital to start his own magazine the same year he departed grad school...
...So just imagine what it would be like if a Soviet missile accidentally landed in San Francisco...
...Not healthy...
...I am condemned to a social ghetto of bars because I am a lesbian living in America in 1985...
...June 24, 1985] New York Times Old Faithful, James S. Reston, erupts again in Pecksniffian extravagance: Still, there's a problem with this new Buchanan operation in the White House...
...Teenage sensation Nicholas Cage, now 21, on growing up: "A day for me used to be really into, like, health...
...Perhaps the only meaningful acknowledgement of the freedoms we do have would be a close examination of a system that is so clearly not dedicated to the liberty of all its people...
...Bah, humbug...
...We would be so quick to judge, the emotional reaction would be so huge, the public pressure to retaliate so immense, that unless we'd thought out beforehand with the Soviets how we were going to control a crisis like this, I don't know whether we'd have time to control it...
...For the show to go on, there must of course be two adversaries, so that the hawks of NATO can feed off the hawks of the Warsaw Pact, and so on...
...I am legally discriminated against by employers and landlords, I am harassed by self-righteous bigots...
...Though some prefer to stay in the wings, the others are easily recognizable, and if I base my review on what happens in the West, that's because I happen to be watching the show in the West, not because I think the Russians are necessarily any better...
...It was not a pretty picture...
...Moreover, such Cold War posturing, which could and in the past often did end in actual war, is still being acted out on the basis of the rival ideologies of the 1940s...
...Well, it could have been worse...
...Note...
...Janet Jacobson [July 15, 1985] Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Rock critic Mikal Gilmour spots the kind of emotional and artistic growth that makes so many rock warblers potential suicides: Don Henley, "Building the Perfect Beast" (Geffen)-Compelling and disarming for the singer's growth from the proud misogyny and misanthropy of his Eagles period into a hard-earned compassion and gentle melancholy...
...Jack Newfield, aging scrivener of the shanty intelligentsia, researches the legendary life of Generalissimo R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., only to discover that Tyrrell is but another "War Wimp," a non-peacenik who failed to serve in Vietnam...
...I cannot concur with the arrogant simplicity of this statement...
...The smoke of Auschwitz and the smoke of Hiroshima, so different in their causes and their justifications, were nevertheless the smoke of mass murder...
...One speaks to the other...
...August 2, 1985] Atlanta Journal-Constitution Neoconservatism continues to make its mark on pop kultur...
...July 23, 1985] Albuquerque Tribune A New Age Venus presses her knees together and intones patriotic gore: You state in your "Independence Day" editorial that this is a country "explicitly dedicated to the liberty of its people...
...In its place has been substituted a sickening reality...
...Little wonder that we turned away from what we saw, from what the bomb and the Holocaust told us about ourselves...
...July/August 1985] Village Voice Desperation on the Left: Dr...
...Such a suggestion is not entirely irrational, for in a very interesting passage, E. P. Thompson goes on to consider the extent to which societies have always been bonded together by a threat from outside...
...The Soviet Union, with its ramshackle empire of very different cultures, achieves the same only as the 'heartland of socialism...
...Newfield might have discovered that Tyrrell did serve in' Vietnam, and with distinction: So what did this jingoistic popinjay do during the Vietnam War...
...In the West, dissidents are successfully relegated to the margins of politics by such a process...
...He traces Reagan's personal agenda back to unhap-piness (an alcoholic father and distancing mother) and deep-seated castration fears (Where's the Rest of Me...
...After all, it is only relatively recently that we have faced up to the Holocaust, only recently that names such as Mengele have become widely known and then, too late, the search for them launched...
...We are only now beginning to assimilate these events because we are not talking about technical breakthroughs, intellectual achievements, gizmos in secret laboratories, but, instead, a new image of ourselves...
...it is entirely self-reproducing...
...What makes the Cold War entirely irrational is that it has now become a permanent and necessary part of the internal politics of both sides...
...He ducked it...
...Copies are available at most Progressive bookstores...
...June 19, 1985...
...I urge you to reconsider your meaning of liberty...
...Independence Day...
...ReaD...
...This personal agenda, he argues, has been responsible for much of Reagan's economic policies and their punitive consequences...
...The Man Behind The Face In this psychobiography, Lloyd deMause lays bare the psychology of the person behind the presidential facade...
...Born in 1943, Tyrrell graduated from the University of Indiana in 1965...
...William Ury, seasoned director of Harvard's Nuclear Negotiation Project and author of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, makes some common sense observations a propos a couple of typical Russian snafus and Yankee efficiency: The interesting thing about the Korean airliner (whatever its actual purpose in crossing the Soviet border) is the emotional outrage it generated in this country...
...It is a remarkable document adopted by popular referendum after two years of country-wide discussion and often heated debate...
...It is an area so infected by misperceptions that "solutions" only lead to further misperceptions...
...I used to get up and spend all the time at the gym and eat well and all that stuff, and I got bored with that...
...With the support of massive documentation, he argues that the disease is an integral part of the Reagan years and has all the earmarks of an outbreak of epidemic hysteria, whereby a scapegoat group has been chosen and is now suffering for America's imagined "sins...
...from Seeing Green, by Jonathan Porritt, Basil Blackwell, 1985] Utne Reader One of the age's most momentous philosophical discoveries, observed by Rea D. Ward, shamelessly bilked out of 50 cents: I am delighted that you devoted so much space to the area of Soviet-American relations (Feb./March 1985...
...With our present weapons this can only lead to disaster, for as the military establishments grow, the adversary postures become more irrational...
...the greater the threat, the greater the bonding...
...Then he hid in graduate school libraries until he got his master's in American history in 1967...
Vol. 18 • October 1985 • No. 10
