Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM - Great Books Series Psychohistorian and phrenologist Lloyd deMause "enters" the public debate with a "penetrating" analysis and "shows how hard it is" . for "laymen" to...
...CURRENT WISDOM - Great Books Series Psychohistorian and phrenologist Lloyd deMause "enters" the public debate with a "penetrating" analysis and "shows how hard it is" . for "laymen" to understand why they should be "soft" on Communism: It was sometimes even possible to find the hidden sexual content in Reagan's speeches on international politics...
...To write that off as a matter of style, ploys and peace offensives is self-deception...
...So when Reagan says that the Russians are having all the fun, playing dominoes and getting into all the "hot spots," he is using the Russians as containers for his own repressed id wishes...
...Joseph R. Biden Jr., earnest striver and leading Democratic presidential candidate, addresses the issues: "It's time we hear the sound of our country singing and soaring in the dawn of a new day," he told the Iowa Democrats last month at their Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner...
...Although the term "hot spots" is sometimes used as a synonym for "trouble spots," during Reagan's formative years in the Midwest it had a more frequent meaning: "hot spots" were sexy places, such as nightclubs or brothels, where one goes for some "action...
...Pete Hamill, novelist and one of New York state's public utilities of tosh: We know one thing that the cold war is not about, and that's freedom...
...If the United States government truly cared about freedom it would not only rail against the colonies of the Soviet Union, but would land the CIA and the Green Berets to over-throw the present governments of South Africa, Chile, Paraguay, South Korea, and the Philippines, among many others...
...If you can't appreciate that kind of integrity, if you can't appreciate the culture that produced Black Elk...
...November 26, 1985] Parade A diplomatic answer to a not-verybright question from Fran of Kansas City: Q. How old is John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, and why was he never awarded a Nobel Prize in economics?—Fran Kay, Kansas City, Mo...
...Our time has come...
...December 19, 1985] New Age Journal The celebrated authoress of The Color Purple, Miss Alice Walker, sends off a gorgeous dithyramb on behalf of a civilization that in its loftiness never did come out with the wheel or, for that matter, a tomahawk-swinging J. S. Bach: She sees a similar envy at the root of relations between the races...
...Apparently the Nobel Memorial Prize committee has not judged his contributions to economics, at least at this point, to be sufficiently original to merit a laureateship...
...With the idea of citizenship all but submerged in appeals to private pursuits, private satisfactions, the private sector, the most Reagan could hope to lead against a real enemy would be a herd of the Gadarene swine...
...December 15, 1985] Harvard Crimson The Pauline Kael of the colossal Crimson weighs the aesthetic worth of Reagan Art: Commando is a movie-industry manifestation of Reagan era jingoism...
...November 3, 1985] New Republic After reflecting nostalgically on the moribund notion of the citizen as servant to the state, Mr...
...Hodding Carter III, dashing playboy and man of letters, manifests the early stages of Franz Schubert's disease: In ways that would have been unthinkable ten years ago, five years of the Reagan Presidency has [sic] given new hope to America's bigots and renewed legitimacy to the sly slogans of white supremacy...
...Carson began by describing with mock solemnity the plight of the whale, then offered his "plan" to save the creature's life: He played a recording of whale mating cries—which, in any other context, would have been haunting and wondrous—then invited the studio audience to imitate those cries "to chase the whale out to sea...
...As-the verdict of public opinion comes in—from Europe, from the Third World, and even from an informed American public—the confusion of style and substance may have a high cost...
...November 25, 1985] Playboy Mr...
...Or you can accept our plan of letting the NGO women move in three to a room, which we have established will free enough rooms for the official delegates and solve both our and your problem'.' In this and countless otherways, women at the conference could see that by organizing, by working together, we can overcome formidable obstacles...
...February 3, 1986/ New York Times The Hon...
...If it is not precisely a return to the time of Redemption, that tragic period in the 1870s when Washington turned...
...November 8, 1985] Washington Post Magazine Philosophical outpourings from the open road fit for the ears of Senator Lowell Weicker: For me, out on the freeway surrounded by dark satanic chemical refineries, I will continue to search my radio dial for the best of a rock 'n' roll that affirms my sensuality in the midst of a consumer and militarist culture bent on destroying it...
...It's time to be on the march again...
...Henry Fairlie, mentor to Hitchens and Cockburn, delivers some bad news for the Joint Chiefs of Staff: In contrast, the current administration has drained, drop by drop, almost all dignitas and gravitas and pietas from the public discourse in America...
...Thus, the emerging genre of movies that are cinematic representations of the ultra-conservative Id...
...They saw that they were not only wealthy in terms of land—which they didn't consider themselves as owning anyway-but also that they were rich in honor, in truth, and integrity...
...If they weren't engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world...
...As Abzug told the Kenyan government representative in a dramatic midnight showdown, following a meeting of the NGO women at the New Stanley Hotel, "If you try to get us out of these hotel rooms we've paid for, you'll have to drag us . out, which will make world headlines and give Kenya a million dollars worth of bad publicity...
...in-stead, the cold war has allowed Reagan and Co...
...She smiles...
...It's time to get America on the move again...
...And then when he asks Americans to join him in a crusade to wipe out these "Russian hot spots," he is using the language of his puritanical mother, who taught him always to control his emotions and never, never give in to them lest he become like his alcoholic father...
...to debase the word "freedom" by using it to describe the old Somoza cutthroats who are now leading the contras with the help of the CIA...
...Commando is such a byproduct of political isolationism and flat-out hate...
...From Reagan's America, by Lloyd de Mouse, Creative Roots, 1984] The Humanist At the legendary Nairobi conference ending the United Nations' Decade of Women, the lovely Riane Eisler beholds the dawn of Pax Femina: A striking example of this new leadership style at work was in the manner in which former U.S...
...A. Galbraith, 77, emeritus professor of economics at Harvard, is a learned and witty writer on many subjects, including economics...
...Crazy Horse, and Dennis Banks, then you have to say they're savages...
...This new genre usually features an actor such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone or some other symbol of the American y-chromosome bounding about blasting anyone with an accent or a darker skin tone...
...Then there was Dennis, with his long braids, his red cloak, and of course his Nikes—cause he just loves to run, right...
...Freedom is to a freedom fighter what fire is to a fire fighter...
...It's time to restore America's soul...
...Similarly, the use of the "domino" metaphor is an image right out of childhood, for though Russians don't play-dominoes, most Americans did in their childhood...
...its back on the black South and allowed white Southerners to reconstruct slavery in a new guise called Jim Crow, it is not because the President and his men have not tried...
...After nine years on the run he'd finally turned himself in...
...Anyway, on one side of the court-room there were all these straight white men, sitting there like grey concrete blocks...
...The audience, probably in town from Iowa and eager to join in the big-city fun, responded with an astonishing display of callous buffoonery, howling and clapping...
...He and the other Indians in that room, though they were only dressed in old blankets and stuff, were so beautiful and dignified compared with the people judging them...
...Just as earlier he saw "sexual orgies and communism" linked at Berkeley, so, too, as President he imagined that "The Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on...
...I was out at the hearing in South Dakota for Dennis Banks, the Native American activist who was wanted for rioting, you know...
...Congresswoman Bella Abzug stood up to and faced down a Kenyan government official, who was backed by sub-machine-gun-bearing police, at a mid-night, confrontation in the New Stanley Hotel...
...The subject was the hump-back whale who was then still stranded in the Sacramento River, his life hanging on the attempts of volunteer rescuers to herd him back out to sea...
...The capitalists in Tinsletown [sic] want to cash in on the rising tide of cultural bias...
...Even the greediest among them wouldn't do to the land a tenth of what has been done by white men...
...November/December 1985]Los Angeles Times More cruel anti-Iowa stereotyping, this time from sensitive Steven Zak, Friend of the Whale: "The Tonight Show" has never been a wellspring of sensitivity, but a recent show (Oct...
...24) reached new depths...
...So I can see why the white people who came to this land were envious of the Native Americans...
...Steven Zak Los Angeles [November 10, 1985] Boston Globe Sixty-eight years down the totalitarian pike with the Bolsheviki and Kremlinologist Randolph Ryan indefatigably heaves up ever more hopeful sonorities for Ivan's statecraft: His growing power is that his country, which used to behave as an outsider and a thug and still has a bad record in some respects, is now regularly out-pointing the United States, not in propaganda but in diplomacy, especially in the crucial matter of arms control...
...January 1986] Village voice Still more incogitant deceits from Mr...
...The Russians are now offering substance that many find more attractive than the substance offered from Washington...
...May 1985] 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
