Current Wisdom

...In jail, I was surrounded by alcoholics, drug addicts, violence—coming from a WASP background, this was heavy stuff...

...We are told of the huge Soviet military buildup of the 1970s—no mention is made of the huge American buildups of the 1950s and 1980s...

...She was a student at a local community college, and I had enjoyed talking with her during dinner, but nothing she had said about life in a coal camp had impressed me as much as the eloquence of her elbow, wielded on a suicide-squad kickoff return...

...Every so often she has an urge "to invent a perfectly incredible story" to make everyone laugh, even when she herself feels like crying "like a sad, frightened rabbit...

...Great Books Series That enduring feminist maenad, Miss Marilyn French, heaves up still more feminist metaphysics, which, were this a just world, would surely make her a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize: Men do not attempt to establish control over women because they hate and fear them...

...It's over now...

...rather, men hate and fear women because they must control them, because control over women is essential to their self-definition...

...Thinking through the events of those days week after week had to bring a dramatic shift in one's ideas of freedom and democracy...

...Who exploits the work ethic, and family values, and individual responsibility, and school prayer, and abortion...

...I fear that when he died, he took what was left of it with him...

...October 11, 19851 Report on Business Dudgeon and angst from a concerned reader of Canada's answer to Forbes: I would like to congratulate you and your staff on your June issue...

...June 29, 19851 Washington Post Lloyd Grove, belletrist, writes of Rosario Murillo, revolutionary wife of President Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista jailer: The first lady of the Republic of Nicaragua likes to walk aimlessly in the marketplace, talk with her mouth full, forget what time it is and be half crazy...

...In a single week, social conditioning had broken down enough to allow me to steal lunch meat from a neighborhood Safeway store...

...October 31, 19851 Public Interest The eminent Daniel Bell repines for a liberalism that hardly exists and - bellows against the bully boys and National Review, as though that venerable organ were about to banish the Republic's regnant ideologues from their mandarin redoubts: The Public Interest began as a journal that was anti-ideological, with the hope that a public philosophy would emerge out of reasoned discourse...

...There is no such event in history...

...Michael Kinsley, the Journal's resident bomb-thrower: The idea that the vast majority of Americans who are comfortably off ought to contribute a bit of money to prevent our less fortunate fellow citizens from starving in the streets is a good one...

...Such men are in the deepest sense deprived, dehumanized: for they cannot find significance within nature, within their bodies and emotions, as part of a human-natural context...

...Come now...

...Forced to demonstrate superiority, they can do so only by cheating, stacking the deck, by imposing on women deprivations which imprison them in a condition seen as inferior by the male culture...

...Black even has the gall to trot out the ridiculous assertion that, were it not for the selfless and noble efforts of the United States, the evil and greedy Russians would take over the cowering and helpless four billion other people in the world and subject them to rule from Moscow...

...Vecsey would be so loaded with admiration if that surreptitious elbow had come from the male of the species: I don't remember her name but I do remember her elbow...

...Putting ideas down on a printed page week after week, however, is quite different from fashioning a new republic of justice during a university cafeteria "rap session...

...So they necessarily hate and fear the one creature who could disprove their claim, and attempt to put her in a position of such dependency that she will fear to do so...

...Experience shows, I think, that when morality acquires salience in politics, the hour has come round for hypocrisy...

...But in between serving time, I helped feed, clothe and shelter people on the bottom—with or without homes...

...I'm presently in jail for Plowshares-style anti-nuclear activism...

...This was early education for my present incarceration...

...The only first-strike scenario presented was a Soviet one—interesting considering that it is the United States that refuses to declare a "no-first-strike" policy...

...But it did have its magnificence...

...For them, significance is located only in that which transcends the natural context and offers something more enduring than life...

...Despite all the current rhetoric about hard work, the true message of the present administration is Get Rich...

...Luck was with me...

...There are men who acknowledge this, yet cannot change...

...jail and the vicious cycle of the "criminal justice system" did not take over my life...

...we are told of the enormous tank imbalance in Europe which favors the War-saw Pact—do tanks really matter anymore...

...from Beyond Power...

...Dismantling the Constitution to pave the way for freedom seemed a good idea in that ivy-covered season, but a few years later it was the Constitution that rescued the country from Watergate...

...Black has written a vociferous attack onthe USSR...

...is not really a very overbearing neighbor...

...Caught me right about where my lungs and my heart try to function, and sent me tumbling down the Appalachian hillside like some left-over slag from a strip mine...

...Fall 19851 Washington Post In response to James Q. Wilson's suggestion that good character of a citizen is not to be sniffed at, Archbishop Joseph Kraft offers some learned observations: What Wilson does not probe, what most neo-cons refuse to face, is the cui bono question...

...it is now enlisted in an ideological campaign against liberalism— though without the sometime scurrilous tone of the National Review, which (in its use of such characterizations of liberalism as "the hive") is almost ready to drive liberalism beyond the pale and deny it as a legitimate voice within political discourse...

...Deluded by the notion that power offers what endures, they ignore the fact that nothing endures, not even art, except culture itself—the children we make, and the world each generation in turn makes...

...Many a placard and red arm band fell in between...

...I became a walking advocate of the Bill of Rights, convinced that all men and all women were created equal, at least in their right to knock somebody off his feet in a touch football game...

...That is an easy thing to say in comfortable Canada, but how about looking south to Central America...

...November 3, 19851 In These Times In the pages of a worthy New Age journal, another reductio ad absurdum of the Democratic platform: Two years before entering the peace movement in 1982, I was a confused, desperate 20-year-old bumbling my way through survival in the darkside of Houston, limas...

...It was, after all, the age of Aquarius...

...But read further—the article states: "Even the Soviet Union—which has never hesitated to brutalize unoffending and helpless neighboring countries...

...by Marilyn French, Summit Books, 19851 Washington Post Inconsolable after the demise of the colossal Orson Welles, TV critic Tom Shales relieves himself of one more pronouncement before slumping off his bar stool: He was the 20th-century really...

...Searching for meaning in what is superhuman, men have ignored their humanity, the only possible ground for human meaning...

...In hubris, bravado, and self-aggrandizement, men have declared themselves superior to other creatures...

...My one objection is to the discussion of arms control and Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) by Conrad Black...

...Alan McGinty Montreal [September 19851 Wall Street Journal More questionable recommendations from Mr...

...That moment of truth made a feminist out of me...

...November 17, 1985) America My Life, as lived by Mr...

...Richard A. Blake through fourteen years of obvious imbecility: In 1971, when I first came to America, I was as oldline a liberal as one could be...

...Graduate school began with Humanae Vitae and ended with Kent State...

...I was homeless, penniless, subject to exploitation by high-profit-making day labor corporations...

...October 25, 1985] 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...

...October 23-29, 19851 The Progressive More senescent complaints from Professor Doktor Noam Chomsky, friend of the now-defunct Viet Cong and the now-triumphant North Vietnamese: For the past twenty-two years, I have been searching for some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina—without success...

...What he gave us was a cleverly worded but unabashed pledge of allegiance to the Reagan administration's view of the world...

...October 19851 New York Times Sports writer George Vecsey recounts a Pauline conversion during a far-away game of touch football, and one wonders whether Mr...

...Their entire human identity rests on a manhood that is defined as control...

...I got off the streets...

...Law and order, a phrase that seemed a prelude to fascism during the darkest days of Vietnam protest, gradually became a reassuring guarantee of freedom on the lips of the late Senator Sam Ervin...

...Rather, there is an American defense of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from outside (namely, from Vietnam...

...Who creams off the political prizes when issues of character become dominant...

...The spiritual and moral destruction of poverty worked its way on me, as it did on my colleagues...

...Black's parallel statement on America: "The United States...

...She also likes the president of Nicaragua—particularly his hair, his eyes and his "hands, always occupied with many large and important matters...

...It was a time of enthusiasm and revolt against many forms of authority...