Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Nation When an anti-abortion zealot appears complete with anti-abortion literature in front of the offices of our favorite asylum, Miss Katha Pollitt, a Nation hireling,...
...Consider also the language used by the Reagan Administration with respect to Latin American presidents, especially Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, who has received the brunt of President Reagan's scorn...
...If we mention Reaganism at all in the same breath as the New Deal, it's because of these new institutions, which were never available to Nixon and Republicans of long ago...
...Gifted women have to manage their brightness and creativity but also play accepted female roles...
...I don't know what it meant.' You can see things for what they are," says Bateman, "or read things into them...
...An ordinary right-wing politician could never have led the new organizations to spectacular double landslide triumphs...
...There are many things I found repellent about Ramon, but what outraged me most was that he felt entitled to see women's bodies—my body, which by the way, he did not consider pamphlet material when I walked by as a stranger—as reproductive objects, wombs on legs...
...January 24, 1987]New Republic Further chaotic ejecta from the mind of Henry Fairlie, who according to statisticians at the American Society of Clinical Pathologists has been soundly sozzled for the past 13 years without respite: Every European points out that Americans are the most round-shouldered people in the world...
...That's the way I am...
...Five...
...Although she does that, too...
...the learned neoliberal fabulist, Professor Doktor Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University, asseverates: Jimmy Carter, where are you now that we need you...
...What we need now is a re-rendering of your "malaise" speech...
...What we need most is public leaders who will not lull us with soothing but baseless optimism, but who instead will be capable of seeing the world the way it is so we can learn to cope with it...
...Fifteen...
...Michael Kinsley combines high intelligence with high spirits...
...Victor Navasky's patients: The Reagan Administration's invention of a Soviet threat to Iran as part of its disinformation campaign to maintain the Persian Gulf war at a high level of mutual destruction is typical of what has been U.S...
...On its own it could never have captured Washington...
...The result is more than just readable, it is required reading," says George Will...
...Kinsley's impending Curse of the Giant Muffins and Other Washington Maladies, a beleaguered copywriter at Simon and Schuster yokes the pish to the posh and the flap to the doodle with Herculean skill: Here comes the hottest young columnist in Washington, Michael Kinsley, editor of the New Republic and author of its celebrated TRB column...
...January 20, 1987] Washington Post A glimpse into the fevered mind of that monumental New Age pietist and nincompoop, Colman McCarthy: What if the Mayflower Madam, the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan or the KGB wanted a chance to recruit students at a university run by a chancellor who says he does "not defend or justify" their records...
...Richard Reeves says Kinsley "writes common sense uncommonly well...
...He's one of the best...
...Everyone goes up to David Lynch and says, 'What was Eraserhead, and what did it mean?' And he says, 'Nothing, I don't know...
...Carter back, but how about some of his speeches...
...But the right-wing counter-establishment is strangely limited...
...You are what you are...
...You know what I mean, mind versus physical...
...I think the answer is one...
...The fear that Communist hordes with Chinese faces could hop across the Pacific to San Diego if allowed to conquer South Vietnam provided the rationale for America's Twenty Years' War in Asia...
...With pieces that are clever, knife-edged, and right on course, Kinsley has earned a reputation, says New York magazine, as "perhaps the best current practitioner of Washington political writing as hip essay...
...Mario Cuomo serves up more of that eerie whimwham with which New Age politicos wow the press: I have been accused of spending too much time at the desk...
...Jan/Feb 1987] State University of New York Press From a recent brochure of the venerable State University of New York Press, Professor W. B. Patwarden (present whereabouts unknown) speaks of the wild thrills awaiting all who would pursue Jnaneshvari, about which more in due course: The Jnaneshvari is so exquisite, so beautiful, so highly poetic in its metaphors and similes, so lucid in style, so rich in fantasy, so delightful in its imagery, so sublime in tone, and so pure in taste that, not withstanding the profundity and the inevitable limitations forced upon the author whose object was to make The Bhagavad Gita intelligible rather than to add anything new, the reader is simply fascinated and floats rapturously on the crest of flow until all is thanks-giving and there is no thought...
...January 29, 1987] U.S...
...It may be too early to bring Mr...
...Would he provide space and tell students "to inquire about careers of their own choosing...
...Estrich received the appointment...
...January 4, 1987] Rolling Stone Aristotle on uppers, and after several shots of fire water: [Justine Bateman] discourses on everything from nuclear disaster ("Let's say we're the eighth civilization . . .") to designer Donna Karan ("She has the right idea, but I'm not about to buy a $300 leotard") to Betty White ("She once said acting really isn't hard work—I mean, it's the greatest job...
...January 5-12, 1987] New York Times In bowing out of the race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, the Hon...
...Maybe a whole series of them...
...Lately we have heard that if the contras do not overthrow the government of Nicaragua, Sandinistas will soon be in Harlingen, Texas...
...February 16, 1987] Center Magazine The visionary Dr...
...In this marvelous book we get to see Kinsley at his comic and perceptive best...
...Bateman considers herself what she calls a "mind person," as opposed to a "physical person...
...The right-wing movement was able to conquer only one way: by attaching itself to a miracle candidate, a once-in-history vote-getter...
...Professor W B. Patwarden [undated] Nation More Bolshevik flumdiddle for Dr...
...CURRENT WISDOM Nation When an anti-abortion zealot appears complete with anti-abortion literature in front of the offices of our favorite asylum, Miss Katha Pollitt, a Nation hireling, confronts the scoundrel and lives to tell about it: Although Ramon is uncomfortable when asked personal questions, the invasiveness of his own behavior is lost on him...
...February 21, 1987] Simon and Schuster In booming Dr...
...Whether he's puncturing Lee Iacocca, Peter Ueberroth, and Ralph Nader or dissecting William Safire, Michael Jackson, and Mary Cunningham . . . whether he's lamenting the proliferation of state lotteries ("all the genius of American marketing applied to tempting previously sane citizens into wasting their money...
...Few of them carry themselves with an upright stance, although a correct stance and gait is the first precondition of letting your lungs breathe naturally and deeply...
...That's not to say all women shy away from career risks and challenges...
...or commenting wryly on the flowering of reverse reverse discrimination ("Compassion, Reagan Style: affirmative action for the rich"), he demonstrates an angle of vision that is unlike any other...
...Right-wing thought hardly dominates the 1980s the way left-wing thought dominated the 1930s...
...Harvard Law School Prof...
...Margarita Melville, Professor of Chicano Studies at the University of California's Berkeley campus, tantalizes with suggestions of the cosmic good sure to come if only our President would take a walk with a Nicaraguan bank robber: Melville: I sometimes wonder if there could ever be a summit at which all the presidents of the Americas could meet on an equal basis with mutual respect...
...If you think more than you work out...
...policy and practice throughout the world during the entire history of the cold war...
...The nightmare of Soviet tanks clanking through the Brandenburg Gate and overrunning Western Europe is the myth on which NATO was built...
...Smart, scintillating, and simply hilarious, Kinsley, who was editor of Harper's when it won the National Magazine Award, establishes here bona fide credentials as the H. L. Mencken of our day . . [Spring/Summer Catalogue, 1987] 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987...
...January 26, 1987] New York Times In the very week that former president Jimmy Carter asked an increasingly uneasy Houston audience "How many of those little black kids does it take to equal one Amy...
...Then it's Shakespeare and Picasso, who weren't always as profound as they led people to believe and "screwed up people's heads...
...Each of us carries his own life form, an indeterminable form that cannot be superseded by any other...
...Do we ever see President Reagan walking side-by-side with Latin American leaders...
...But it's hard for me to believe this," Carter said...
...January 24, 1987] Village Voice Trying to make sense of the Reagan 1980s, a Village Voice egghead posits all over again the efficacy of a miracle: They are think tanks and foundations and they account for Reaganism's heft and deft, the economic ideas (such as they've been), the strategic initiatives, the administration's ability to find ideologically suitable staffers...
...Someone who thinks he is saving lives can, of course, persuade himself to overlook just about anything, but there is something voyeuristic and creepy about the way he sizes women up, approaching this young, fertile, dark-skinned one, ignoring that middle-aged, menopausal, white one...
...No, he would tell them what, with more spine and less fake liberalism, he should tell the CIA: Go to the newspaper classifieds, your help-wanted ads, and don't dare forget that a university is where we develop minds, not spies and assassins...
...News & World Report Real-life happenings in the groves of Academe: "Women have to play both sides of the street," notes psychologist James Webb at Ohio's Wright State University...
...And director David Lynch, who doesn't screw up people's heads...
...We are always seeing news pictures of President Reagan walking side-by-side with French President Francois Mitterrand, or with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, or with prime ministers of other nations...
...Twenty...
...Susan Estrich, 34, took a big intellectual gamble when she staked her chances for receiving tenure on a scholarly article on rape law that began with a description of her own rape...
Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
