Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Los Angeles Times A soap box rises on the correspondence page of the Times of the Golden State, and behold the beauty: We are not numbers. We are not projections. We are not...
...And as for strength through the military...
...Perhaps 100 people grouped in front of the U-M Graduate Library-most chanting slogans, some waving red flags...
...Krauthammer is jealous of the strides that have been made by the people of the Soviet Union who were at least 50 percent, and in some republics 95 percent, illiterate in 1917...
...Shouldn't they be outraged by what big money can get done in Washington...
...This is a contribution to American civilization that should not be overlooked...
...I don't see how in the world you can deny the situation...
...Yeah, I've been lucky...
...There is no doubt, though, that together they are perfect nonsense...
...You can't teach democracy through the sights of a helicopter gun ship...
...businessmen good, environmentalists bad...
...The first one may very well...
...It's always up there, he says...
...And any one of these can destroy the world...
...I asked a fringe member of the crowd...
...The attitude of both your President and Pentagon is so markedly reminiscent of the fascist threat that led to World War II, it is just not funny...
...Jonathan Starr Santa Monica [March 18, 1985] Toronto Sun The American Constitution as interpreted by an eight-year-old Canadian girl and her mother, Eve McBride, guest columnist and apparent psychotic: Her perception was that all Americans, young or old, favor war...
...March 23, 1985] New York In reviewing Heartbreakers, "a sweet comedy of erotic bafflement," the venerable film critic David Denby remembers the lengths to which he had to drive his Volkswagen beetle just for one more embrace: The picture made me recall the most pleasurable sensation of my own time in the sun (in the San Francisco Bay area)-the feeling that if you wanted to do something you could just go out and do it...
...An experience like mine-living with four women like Meredith and our three teenage daughters...
...1 married Meredith-smart, independent, talented and she even laughs at my jokes...
...For example, having established to his satisfaction that Vietnam was "the Liberals' war," he stumbles into a serious doctrinal error: "Ultimately, the Vietnam War led to the reign of Pol Pot and the third major holocaust of this century...
...I am very lucky...
...March 28, 1985] New York Times Still more reasons why intelligent Americans have such affection for TV news-herewith we reprint one of the most popular clippings ever sent to our offices: to wit, Mr...
...Otto A. Kral Hudson, Wis...
...A friend of mine refers to the Brokaw Lucky Star...
...Twenty-three years ago I found one way to guarantee that would never happen to me...
...That's the most instructive part of any man's life...
...she grinned back...
...I was raised by hard working, honest parents who shared with me the traditional values of this society...
...Not an angry gathering, but rather a gleeful, triumphant one...
...March 24, 1985] Ann Arbor News A graying staff member of the Ann Arbor News recalls the good old days: The noontime crowd wasn't large, but it was notably boisterous...
...It rivals the United States in advocating peace, coexistence and independence for all peoples of the world...
...Or perhaps Mr...
...We are civilization...
...After having lost 20 million people and two-thirds of its industrial, agricultural and living assets in World War II, the Soviet Union is a superpower with space explorations, military equality with the United States, no unemployment, free medical care for all, free education through college, no poverty, adequate housing for all, adequate food, no significant crime and no street people...
...You hear only 'good news.' Our great strength is the courage to hear all sides...
...He's right...
...Tom Brokaw's searching, probing thoughts on himself, as printed in a full page advertisement in the New York Times and paid for by NBC, or what Tom would call "big money": "Sometimes what we report is painful and people say 'You guys only tell us the bad news.' Well, check any totalitarian country...
...Scamp" suggests an impish, lovable youngster, of the sort who might be played by Gary Coleman, while "mountebank" connotes a jovial, middle-aged medicine-show type-a W.C...
...Paul Dispatch Mr...
...Have a nice war...
...That Canadians do not, and are therefore superior, was evident in the disdain in her voice, and it occurred to me, notwithstanding her bad Manners and prejudice, that I was pleased by her outspokenness...
...April 8, 1985] Washington Post Columnist Colman McCarthy, in a scholarly review of Richard M. Nixon's latest monograph, spots RN's libertarian drift: "No More Vietnams" is a call for no more laws, no more media, no more peace movement...
...defense" good, "peace" bad...
...Sample two also offers an instance of another Tyrrellian tic, his practice of pairing words in an apparently random fashion...
...Theologians will recognize this as the deplorable Shawcross Heresy, a cardinal "blame America first" sin...
...And, boy, nothing bothered them more than someone faking it or trying to be a big shot...
...Yes, the event did seem cause for rejoicing back in April 1975...
...We were beginning to make some headway, but President Reagan is just turning his back on pollution and we're not doing anything...
...They believed in the American dream but they believed it would be realized only if you worked hard and played fair...
...Because he accepts the credo in its most primitive form, he commits absurdities...
...February 2, 1985] Chicago Tribune An antipodian Herodotus sends Chicago Tribune readers an amiable missive abounding with original observations and slogans: Christ Church, New Zealand-Here is a rare opportunity to present to your readers the majority attitude of New Zealanders who resent being pushed around by Uncle Sam...
...We are not profits...
...February 16, 1985] Retirement Living In a leading journal of the new radicalism, Walter Cronkite adduces still more evidence that the mind that enlightened vespertime America could with equal ease have composed ad copy for the backs of children's cereal boxes, though educators might have objected: A great deal worries me, but that's a subject for a book...
...The book has one asset: an alert to the nation that it needs no more Nixons...
...Sex can be easy, soft, and dreamily irresponsible in California-surely if New York is the place where you go to get serious about your life, Los Angeles is the place, for women as well as men, where you go to get laid...
...He insists repeatedly, for example, that appeasement "always" leads to war (on the contrary, appeasement sometimes works quite satisfactorily, as it has in America's courting of China...
...Fields...
...She keeps me focused on what's really important in this life...
...contrary to the theory, Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, India, and California did not...
...This smacks of irresponsible journalism...
...it's not in keeping with the banner and beacon of hope and the Statue of Liberty...
...Otto A. Kral iterates what doubtless would have been the reaction of millions of his countrymen when this idiot Krauthammer piped up on the pages of the St...
...In spite of all the American junk that influences her: the imbecilic "Knight Riders" and inane "Three's Company's," all the fatuous movies, somehow, a valuable insight has made it through...
...well it's not what has given America its appeal in the world...
...They can do anything...
...Paul Dispatch: The venom spewing forth from Charles Krauthammer's March 19 column, "Soviet funeral displays belief in nothing," shows that either he is totally ignorant of both atheism and the Soviet way of life or he is deliberately hate-mongering...
...You know what 1 wish could happen to every man in America...
...We've given up that battle...
...They just announced it...
...And I don't like what you stand for...
...Maybe that is the book...
...What she was asserting to that visiting American was: "We're different...
...And I am very grateful...
...1 think we face four major mega-problems that are really so gross that we have trouble even conceiving of them, let alone tackling them...
...Cambodia just fell to the Khmer Rouge...
...We've only got this one ship of ours floating out there in space in a closed environment and using up the fresh air and fresh water and not doing anything to return it to the environment...
...I call it The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding down on the population: 1) pollution, 2) population, 3) depletion of natural resources-including fresh air and water-and 4) proliferation of nuclear devices...
...Neither seems especially apt for the purpose of ridiculing Carter, though perhaps a case could be made...
...Don't talk to me about what women can't do...
...One day, though, America will climb out of this muddy place in which we are temporarily stuck and lead the world again on a noble journey toward truth and fairness...
...March 1985] St...
...Arthur May [March 13, 1985] The New Republic A fully accredited member of the shanty intelligentsia is given a modern masterpiece to esteem, and, alas, he resorts to the drool method: His basic ideological tool, though, is the simple credo of a candidate member of the conservative Outer Party: nukes good, anti-nukes bad...
...Another thing pleased me...
...He also asserts that the fall of Laos and Cambodia along with Vietnam demonstrated the validity of the domino theory (it was Indochina that fell...
...Tyrrell's grasp of the creed's subtleties is not always sure...
...Unlike Grenada, we do not pose a threat on your doorstep...
...We simply have no wish to be "democratically forced" into your trigger-happy nuclear club...
...People love the United States because of the dream of democracy and freedom...
...April 1, 1985...
...Sure, we want people to be excited by achievement-space shots or triumphs of justice or medical breakthroughs...
...But shouldn't they also hear about malnutrition in America...
...What's the occasion...
...Throughout history it has always been the non-believers who have made social and scientific progress possible in spite of setbacks such as the Inquisitions, the Dark Ages, religious wars and persecutions, and the 20th century god-fearing Nazis led by Adolf Hitler...
...When we suffer needlessly, cruelly, wastefully, through base ignorance, the world shudders in despair...
...housewives good, feminists bad...
Vol. 18 • June 1985 • No. 6
