Presswatch/Crashing Boars
Ledeen, Michael
PRESSWATCH CRASHING BOARS by Michael Ledeen W e are all indebted to the Philadelphia Inquirer for publishing, on January 3, the story of the month. Its significance is such that I quote it in its...
...An estimated 115,000 Soviet soldiers are in Afghanistan to help the communist government fight Muslim guerrillas...
...So, gentle reader, if the committee staffers can't even read their own notes, how can the journalists—who generally get this information in garbled form—possibly get it right...
...I found a good congressional source who told me that Meese couldn't exactly remember the name of the Israeli cited by North...
...The Americans on the other side also snap their cameras wildly...
...If I had been the headline writer Michael Ledeen is senior fellow in international affairs at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies...
...Take the question that has occupied so many of our investigative heroes of late: who thought up the idea of diverting money from Iranian arms sales to the contras...
...According to Anderson and Van Atta, "the poll accurately reflects the views of reading, thinking, participating Americans, the people most likely to join in the public dialogue and participate in the democratic process . . ." Another Story that I Bet You All Missed On January 5, in the Los Angeles Times, Georgie Anne Geyer wrote a column about Castro...
...This story—which continues with all sorts of important information from Portuguese officials about contacts with the Angolan government and Soviet policy shifts on southern Africa is clearly one of the most significant to appear on a subject of fundamental importance to the United States...
...They can't, and so we get myths in print.sidewalk...
...They spell it "Amiran...
...The issue before us is whether we can survive with the one we currently have...
...And we cover the full range of issues of concern to today's reflective and believing Christian...
...Then the Washington Post reported that Meese had told congressional investigators that North had told him that the idea had come from Aviram Nir, the Israeli Prime Minister's adviser on terrorism...
...The headline, "Angry pig kills warplane on a runway in Pakistan," is really not up to the quality of this UPI story...
...The $30 million U.S.-made jet scraped along the runway and turned "into a fireball," and the two pilots ejected safely, the Nation newspaper said...
...And why not...
...One of the most famous of these was a television report on the "pasta harvest" in Italy, showing pretty girls in peasant costumes walking through the fields picking spaghetti, fettucini, and other succulent strands of pasta from trees and bushes...
...At a time when Protestant fundamentalism is making inroads among Catholics, here is a counter-movement proclaiming that you don't have to leave the Church to find a meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ...
...Write your favorite editor and demand that it be followed up...
...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 6 1069 Kains Ave...
...14 (regularly $19) ^ One-year student, unemployed, or retired person's subscription $12 (regularly $16) ^ Two-year subscription $23 (regularly $35) NAME (Please print or type) STREET ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP CODE l:] One-year Canadian or foreign subscription . . . US$17 (regularly $22) Payment must be drawn in US Dollars ^ Sample copy $3.50 Send coupon or letter...
...The few automobiles in the country are reserved for high functionaries and guests of the state...
...Only in the direction of the South, of course...
...Its significance is such that I quote it in its entirety: United Press International Islamabad, Pakistan—A Pakistan Air Force F-16 fighter burst into flames after a charging wild boar knocked its front wheel off during takeoff, an English-language newspaper said yesterday...
...17 at Sargodha Air Base, about 120 miles south of Islamabad, the capital, the newspaper said...
...Everything is clean in Pyongyang...
...Behind me there is loud applause...
...Kimche violently denied it...
...Most of our writers are cradle Catholics and a significant minority belongs to various other churches...
...Good, straightforward reportage...
...Pastoral Renewal says we're "sharply written...
...Amazingly, while the REVIEW is .a lightning rod for "papist" pilgrims, it is also ecumenical in spirit, affirming all that is good and true in other Christian traditions...
...The voice-over went something like, "It hasbeen an unusually good harvest this year, and the first tender shoots of spaghettini are now being harvested and delivered to the tables of eager gourmets in Rome, Florence, and Milan...
...Pakistan has acquired 40 F-16s from the United States in response to the Soviet military presence in neighboring Afghanistan...
...But the REVIEW isn't just for converts...
...He now is saying that the 45,000 Cuban troops will stay in Angola not only to protect the Marxist government there, as previously said, but "until apartheid is dismantled in South Africa...
...Just the sort of stuff that is in such short supply over here...
...Among them, it may be hoped, is another Chesterton, another Maritain, another Newman, another Ronald Knox, another Dorothy Day, another Gerard Manley Hopkins, another Walker Percy — converts all...
...What's more, contrary to the myth that Catholicism is a superstitious religion for the befuddled, an unusually high proportion of the new Catholics consists of writers and intellectuals...
...An interesting footnote to this is that the Post just cannot manage to spell Nir's first name...
...But this seems impossible...
...You have earned the praise of the revolution...
...You have driven the imperialist Americans a little step awayfrom our fatherland...
...and the Library Journal predicts we will "doubtless command increasing attention...
...Virtually everything in there about me was wrong, even though I had spent several hours going over those very same details...
...Now, quite aside from the question of what North said—and the more important question of what is true—it would seem that it ought to be possible for the congressional folks at least to get straight what Meese said...
...Anyone reading the American press these days would come to the conclusion that our own journalists get much of their material from witchdoctors and shamans, too...
...Bravo...
...And it made the papers...
...The new converts are not attracted to the watered-down Catholicism of the Hans Kiings, the Charles Currans, or those who sign ads favoring legal abortion...
...More, more," my hosts spur me on...
...Back in the days when people in what has unfortunately come to be called the "news business" still carried out practical jokes, this would undoubtedly have been one of them...
...In all of Pyongyang there is not a single traffic light .. . At the [South Korean] border, on the 38th parallel to which all guests of thegovernment must pay an obligatory visit, I am positively required to take pictures...
...I found myself pondering this while reading the New York Times's account of a draft report by the 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence...
...Yet to my knowledge it has only appeared in a single place...
...When an ordinary comrade needs a bicycle he can rent one, but only after he has submitted a written request to his work brigade...
...No, they are attracted by the Catholicism of the ages — by the Magisterium, as well as the inspiring leadership of the current Pope...
...The incident took place Dec...
...Please allow 2 to 8 weeks for delivery of first issue) SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES FOR FIRST-TIME SUBSCRIBERS O One-year subscription...
...Eternity (the evangelical monthly) finds us "influential...
...There is a new Oxford Movement afoot in America today which is witnessing numerous people discover the "high," liturgical churches in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular...
...Among the converts to the "Roman Obedience" who write for the REVIEW are Paul C. Vitz, George William Rutler, Sheldon Vanauken, John C. Cort, Thomas Howard, L. Brent Bozell, James J. Thompson Jr., and Peter Kreeft...
...Here's what others are saying about us: Newsweek praises our "childlike exuberance...
...But now, a new wave of converts is entering the Church — including people like Malcolm Muggeridge, Lewis Lehrman, and singer John Michael Talbot...
...Frighteningly clean . . . . . . North Koreans are not allowed to own even a bicycle, let alone a car...
...In the capital city of Pyongyang, when an autumn leaf falls from a tree, people rush to the scene of the crime and remove the alien object from the lawn or Here Come The New Catholics Over the last quarter century, the number of converts to Roman Catholicism slowed to a trickle...
...There was no report on the boar's condition...
...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 31...
...And it tells us the way it really is, out there in the real world...
...If you feel inundated by "bad news" about the Church, if you are tired of all the dissension within her portals, if you want to recapture the excitement of when you first really believed, or if you are searching for a "face" of Catholicism that is spiritually vibrant, intellectually incisive, doctrinally sound, and socially engaged, it's time for you to subscribe to the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Most Americans don't know, for example, that the BBC—radio and television alike—used to specialize in witty spoofs...
...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Story that I Bet You All Missed On January 12, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, in a rare departure for them inasmuch as they cited a public document instead of classified material, reported on a poll showing that the readers of their column felt, by a fiveto-three margin, that Reagan's secret dealings with Iran were justified...
...Democracy can't survive without a free press...
...I give you the lead paragraph: Virtually unnoticed by the world, Cuban President Fidel Castro has in the last few months radically changed his position on southern Africa...
...Some fellow in Islamabad dreamed that a demi-god, in the form of a boar, came to protect traditional values from the onslaught of modernity...
...But more seriously, what is one to make of this story...
...But this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore unless it is carefully labeled—undoubtedly the result of an overemphasis on consumer protection at the expense of entrepreneurial creativity—and so we must look elsewhere for the explanation...
...The New York Times reported that Meese had told congressional investigators that North had told him that the idea had come from David Kimche, the former director of the Israeli Foreign Ministry...
...Taking pictures like a madman, I move step by step up to the concrete threshold that marks the cease-fire line...
...I prefer to believe that this is the product of local culture rebelling against modern technology, a kind of modern fairy tale in the wraps of newsagency-speak...
...The forum for the new generation of converts is the NEW OXFORD REVIEW, a monthly magazine that takes its name from the 19th-century Oxford Movement in England...
...According to Boston's Cardinal Law, "What is fascinating about the NEW OXFORD REVIEW is that it is a sign of contradiction": At a time when, cheered on by the mass media, so many Catholics are grumbling about Catholic teaching and discipline, even leaving the Church, here is a counter-tendency celebrating the fullness of the Truth (without falling victim to the fanaticism that has characterized some converts in the past...
...I would have insisted upon something involving a "crashing boar," since if this was not a crashing boar, what ever will be...
...The American photographers have retreated...
...A Pakistan military spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the report was "incorrect," but refused to elaborate...
...shout my hosts...
...And Last, but not Least The German weekly Stern, which is generally one of the most biased, leftwing publications in Europe, recently published an article on North Korea by someone called Yann Layma, which takes us inside the "Land of the 'Great Leader' " in a way that few others have done: Everything in North Korea is under control, even nature...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
