Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Mainichi Daily News (Tokyo) The little Deckert girl comes of age in the correspondence column of a distinguished Tokyo daily as glycosuria takes hold: I'm scared! Being 16 and...
...Tribute had been properly paid...
...produced his would-be killer...
...July 21, 1985] Washington Post Washingtonians give their pandas the celebrity treatment, and still Poolesville's disgruntled Carolyn Wilson is unappeased: Here we go again with another blow-by-blow account of the mating of the pandas ["F'Lings Make Cub Fans Hsing," Metro, July 2...
...We're real, live humans...
...Anyone who thinks otherwise (The "Dark Continent" myth) has been watching too many Tarzan movies...
...If anything, these Africans, through trade, exported their civilization and culture to other nations through contact with Europe...
...It may be a safe and sterile form of political activism...
...Haven't we, and they, had enough...
...We won't step back from any issue and we recognize bigotry for what it is wherever it's raising its ugly head...
...And then, in the most mature expression of American patriotism that Washingtonians have witnessed in a long time, the flag was dropped...
...Carolyn Wilson Poolesville [July 15, 1985] San Francisco Chronicle Crack columnist and sage Mr...
...it was time for a wholly other happiness...
...We're not statistics...
...With childlike innocence I trusted adults, now some are the very people I fear...
...Since being imprisoned, the male has beaten the female once or twice...
...Can't their tormentors let these poor, unfortunate creatures live out the remainder of their miserable, unnatural lives with some measures of peace and dignity...
...These Africans developed culture, universities, art, science and religion long before it was developed in Europe...
...Some would say that at 16 I'm too young to understand . . . maybe I understand too well...
...Blood pulses through our veins, we have minds, we can think, we can feel...
...Do they really know what they are doing...
...I was at home with a sick child when Reagan was shot in March 1981, and my first, or second, reaction was to worry that his assailant might be black or a member of some other unpopular and easily targeted subgroup∔a homosexual, a Rastafarian, a Hasidic Jew, or a freelance revolutionary of the left...
...Now, I too love my country, as I love my family...
...Reagan and his Democratic opponent, Walter F. Mondale, "the reports were as straightforward and factual as would have been carried by CBS...
...or maybe we sense, unconsciously, that it's a good idea to have an alibi for the most Oedipal of public crimes...
...Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina is considered by many to be one of the truly evil men of our century...
...I have the feeling that we knew all along about some of the spies...
...Gabe Sims Shreveport [August 14, 1985] New Republic Miss Barbara Ehrenreich reveals the kind of profound relief that can only be experienced by a New Age termagant, with a dab of "Hegelian" thrown in to give it that special scholarly sheen: All of us like to talk about what we were doing and how we reacted at the time of a presidential assassination...
...So I was profoundly relieved when it turned out that the would-be assassin was a blond young man with wealthy Republican antecedents and white-supremacist leanings...
...August 9, 1985] New Republic Acceptable patriotism solemnly noted by the Rev...
...I feel that one of the biggest problems we have is we don't take the right-wing fascist opposition seriously enough...
...Gorbachev and Mr...
...Good for Bruce...
...Gabe Sims of progressive Shreveport demonstrates that Afro-American Studies programs are finally spreading Truth and Enlightenment throughout benighted Christendom: I read with interest the letters appearing in your editorial page, Aug...
...Speaking to reporters before addressing the New Jewish Agenda convention here, Asner charged that the Reagan administration manipulated recent reports of U.S...
...September 11, 1985] New York Times CBS is on the receiving end of another cheap shot, this time from an astounding source: Jonathan Sanders, head of the working group on Soviet television at Columbia University's W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, said that Soviet television commentary was often marked by "negative or pejorative adjectives...
...I think the writers got their history backward...
...Leon Wieseltier, New Age aesthete: . . . thus my heart sank at the sight of the stage at RFK Stadium last week, which was set for Bruce Springsteen...
...And we intend to wrap it around the neck of the right wing as we fight for liberty and justice for all...
...They developed into nations and founded empires named Songhay, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kush, Ghinea, Mali, Ghana and many other nations too numerous to name...
...We waited for years, but they were not regarded as a danger until it came time to use them...
...domestic spy rings to build justification for repressive, police-state measures later...
...He said the translation of actual news clips of American officials were generally accurate, and that last year, during the debates between Mr...
...The two pandas have been the subject of detailed accounts of their mating, right down to the exact hour and minute of the day, complete with photographs of the act...
...Progress's review of Arthur Bressan, Jr.'s homosexual movie, Buddies: Bressan has also given us one of the great film moments of human passion, and compassion, when David gently rubs Robert's shoulders as he masturbates while watching a gay porno movie in his hospital room...
...Not a man on earth has the right to darken our future with the cloud of uncertainty...
...Sallianne Deckert [August 26, 1985] The Patent Trader Some common sense axiological observations from the celebrated Virginia Franklin: Pope John Paul II is accounted, by general acclamation and almost by definition, a very good man...
...But I infinitely prefer it to a self-deluding chief executive who seems bent on pretending that the only Evil Empire on the globe is headquartered in Moscow...
...And what I see frightens me...
...They consider us as something to be thrown into the fiery hell they're planning...
...Power is a game world leaders are playing with human lives...
...September 2, 1985] New Statesman Another sex-starved English gal travels to fabulous America and applies herself to political commentary for the venerable New Statesman, voice of the United Kingdom's shanty intelligentsia: One of the characteristics of the macho style in American politics has always been a paranoid fear of being penetrated in the rear...
...She has been subjected to multiple surgery and probings, given birth to a stillborn cub and to another cub that died shortly after birth, been subjected to hormone injections to force ovulation...
...August 16, 1985] The Times (Shreveport, Louisiana) Mr...
...Africa was long populated by blacks going back billions of years...
...So we're going to be in there in Vermont, dealing with every issue of our day, and dealing with it straight-on, hard-on, square-on...
...There's another one...
...Maybe we like to feel implicated in the great dramas of public life...
...I fear this administration," said Asner, ripping into Reagan's policy of seeking the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government...
...In all of the letters, the writers stated that the United States should support South Africa and that South Africa is anti-communistic...
...Being 16 and living in a foreign country, has given me a perspective on life...
...When Mr...
...August 5, 1985] Ann Arbor News The distinguished News of greater Ann Arbor marks the felicitous visit of one of the Republic's foremost chauffeurs of left-wing bugaboos: Television actor Ed Asner came to town Saturday, taking on the right wing as bluntly as he once handled reporters for the mythical Los Angeles Tribune when he played editor "Lou Grant...
...Reagan accuse and threaten each other, they're threatening to shatter our right to live...
...September 4, 1985] National Public Radio Rapture once again seizes the Grand Kleagle of the National Organization of Wimmin, this time during a National Press Club luncheon: Yesterday in Washington Eleanor Smeal had another answer for her more conservative critics: "It is time that we stop thinking about what is fashionable and what is not fashionable in this city∔what's in and what is not in...
...There may be millions of us, but we each have lives∔golden lives stretched out before us...
...We want to use terms like Equal Opportunity Employer, but we don't want them to mean anything...
...7, 1985...
...September 6, 1985] 49...
...There, as the backdrop, was the largest American flag I have ever seen...
...We've deprived them of their freedom and their natural home for our own perverse entertainment...
...The same culture that had given us President Reagan had, with Hegelian wit...
...They are trying to create the impression that we are besieged with spies," said Asner...
...This usually surfaces during the nuttier episodes of right-wing government...
...Jon Carroll, enflamed and philosophical on the subject of comparative diablerie: A lot of media fun has been had lately at the expense of those who demonstrate against South Africa, get arrested and are still home in time for supper...
...August 23, 1985] San Francisco Progress The spirit of the late Senator Robert M. LaFollette and so many other progressive reformers lives on in the venerable S.F...
...we all share the shame in being its citizens...
...Springsteen appeared and sang "Born in the USA," or rather, 55,000 people sang it to the accompaniment of his band...
...but I don't take my family everywhere...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
