Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT ISDOM New York Times Book Review Chilling evidence that the Attack of the Giant Quota Creatures continues: To the Editor: In her sympathetic review of my book "Intruders: The Incredible...
...It's not like yesteryear when young men died a thousand deaths purchasing the coveted foil packet from their local pharmacist...
...It's always the right...
...It was a sickening trip, to be sure, for what there is of substance about the man is depressing and oily and banal and evil and vengeful and cruel, but I knew I had to know the man inside out—and I knew I had to paint that portrait as carefully as I could...
...Gary Hart's real first name was probably Tom: "I remember one day in the Senate, I'd been there about a year maybe, and Gary didn't show up for work one day...
...It didn't occur to him, and then losing sleep over a cat...
...April 16, 1987] Washington Post An erstwhile Senate aide testifies that Mr...
...Summer 1987] Dallas Morning News Scholarly sociopoliticohistorical insights from Prof...
...Stephen Holden bears the burden of reviewing another grisly drama of toilet amour for the ithyphallic modern male: Robert Chesley's two-character drama, "Jerker, or the Helping Hand," is a cry of anguished solidarity from the heart of San Francisco's homosexual world, a segment of society where the AIDS epidemic has taken an especially devastating toll...
...He would do what he could to influence those events in his country's favor, and his eyes shone inward and outward at the same time, as they always had, while he calculated the chances of Nicaragua against both the gravitational pull of its own underdevelopment and the momentum of the national engine coursing toward it from the north...
...I knew it would turn out to be no more than a minor theme of the book: the faults, dear Brutus, are not in our individuals but in our culture...
...Scott Russell Sanders, belletrist, trots out his most gorgeous prose to investigate a favorite subject—Mr...
...Budd Hopkins New York Bettyann Kevles replies: Perhaps this is an instance in which identification of the racial composition of the victims might have been enlightening...
...But toward women I feel something more confused, a snarl of shame, envy, wary tenderness, and amazement...
...Conversations that begin as intricate, kinky safe-sex fantasies change in mood and quality as rough "playtime" stories metamorphose into tender "bedtime" stories that look back nostalgically to the 1970s...
...April 11, 19871 Arrival Mr...
...He couldn't sleep with the fact that the cat was ill, so he stayed up all night holding the cat, and it eventually died in his arms...
...She tells me that during the night their cat had taken quite ill and Gary couldn't deal with it...
...I am pleased to learn that a number of them were Hispanic-Americans or blacks...
...How do you figure that...
...The state of Reagan's economy in the 1980s is even more troubling than Carter's in the 1970s...
...This country is basically a conservative reactionary type of country...
...I think it's a lot harder for men," she replies...
...It was the Ku Klux Klan that marched up Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1920s...
...CURRENT ISDOM New York Times Book Review Chilling evidence that the Attack of the Giant Quota Creatures continues: To the Editor: In her sympathetic review of my book "Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods" (April 5), Bettyann Kevles makes an assertion I would like to correct...
...To hide my unease I say, "You're right, it's tough being a man these days...
...is a paraplegic Vietnam veteran...
...I search my soul...
...Even a woman...
...I discover guilty feelings aplenty—toward the poor, the Vietnamese, Native Americans, the whales, an endless list of debts—a guilt in each case that is as bright and unambiguous as a neon sign...
...Kevles to assume the subjects were, by default, white...
...So I let Nixon come alive here and there, let readers sympathize with him now and again, let him come through, eventually, as a believable and knowable person...
...His commitment to discipline, accountability and quality control, his tough stance against corruption and drunkenness, a shake-up of the bureaucracy and a weeding out of the Brezhnev old guard, all this has delivered a shock to the system, and to the people who have learned to manipulate it...
...Scott Russell Sanders, belletrist: "This must be a hard time for women," I say to my friend Anneke...
...What we won't go through for our art...
...I could see him get a 16-page brilliantly written paper from one of his aides and forget to say thank you, you know, honest to God forget to say thank you...
...Over the course of the drama, we learn that J.R...
...Like a Dutch morning," Anneke told me earlier...
...In fact, the abductees I've worked with include seven Hispanic victims as well as blacks, Europeans, Native Americans and people of extremely varied ethnic and socioeconomic background...
...Hopkins describes are all pink or gray, from which I inferred that all of their human parents were white...
...Jay Corcoran) and Bert (John Finch), strangers whose anonymous telephone-sex relationship turns into a morale-boosting dialogue on homosexual pride...
...The numbers don't lie: economic growth, investment, productivity, employment, wages, every important indicator of economic vitality has taken a turn for the worse...
...It wasn't the Abraham Lincoln Brigade...
...Students from the United States and the Soviet Union could go to learn the language, social customs and cultural contributions of each other's society...
...What do we do with the building...
...Theodore Jones Waltham, Massachusetts [May 14, 1987] Esquire A correspondent from the rag "for man at his best" gives Daniel Ortega the standard once-over and is mesmerized in the standard way—those eyes...
...Today there are racks and racks of the things sitting right there in the open for anyone to buy...
...February 15, 19871 New York Times In the kultur pages of the venerable Times of New York Mr...
...And in a stridently angry and simplistic diatribe, he contrasts the evil morality of war to the "really, truly basically good" promiscuous way of life that the epidemic has cut short...
...The men I know are eaten up with guilt...
...So I called his home and Lee said, 'Oh, we've had this tragedy.' I ask what's the tragedy...
...And, if the school is bugged, listening to one another's youth might prove enlightening...
...bug: And even when what's on your plate is nothing so simple as a profile or an autobiography, it makes good sense to go out of your way to find a character here, an individual there, a personification, an embodiment, that will make your themes live for the reader...
...Yes, we make progress in some areas that are thought to be areas of liberalism...
...June 4, 1987] New York Times A sensible suggestion from Friendly Ted, apparently the village idiot of booming Waltham: To the Editor: The new $200 million United States Embassy in Moscow has been bugged, and it clearly cannot be used as an embassy...
...By fits and starts, human rights is one of them...
...Both countries could provide teachers and financial upkeep...
...Kirkpatrick Sale reveals the tricks of the trade for hysterics bit by the Lit...
...May 8, 1987] Chicago Sun Times Sophisticated badinage from Judy Markey, columnist and Aristotelian for the Windy City's Number Two: But the real point of National Condom week is to educate, encourage and absolutely demolish any last vestiges of embarrassment...
...They have so many paths to choose from, and so many voices calling them...
...Inflation was eliminated—but all this proved was that inflation was not the source of the underlying problems...
...We are sitting at the kitchen table drinking sassafras tea, our hands wrapped around the mugs because this April morning is cool and drizzly...
...Knocking down the new building would be a waste of taxpayer money, and the loss of an opportunity for the superpowers to create something positive instead of leaving it as a negative mess...
...I once vowed that I would never read a word about Richard Nixon's background or career—this was sometime around 1959—and I kept that vow until I undertook a book on Watergate and the sleazy world of the Sunbelt it opened up for us...
...But it's always going to be the right wing that is going to make the most noise...
...After all, what's to be embarrassed about...
...In fact, vast areas of the economy were much better off with inflation than without it...
...The Gipper laid out a program that, he said, would restore prosperity and boost incomes...
...The women I know feel excited, innocent, like crusaders in a just cause...
...abductions and enforced genetic experiments my book describes, she states that all the victims of these experiences are white Americans...
...She leans over to sniff a sprig of lilac, pale lavender, that rises from a vase of cobalt blue...
...Since I had not felt the obligation to disclose the race of anyone I dealt with in my book, I am dismayed that the absence of this information led Ms...
...May 1, 1987] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 51...
...This muddle troubles me...
...Jerker" accurately bills itself as "a pornographic elegy with redeeming social value," and its gamy language and continual simulated autoeroticism are definitely not for squeamish tastes...
...I disagree with those who say it must be torn down...
...He was crushed...
...After carefully outlining the admittedly bizarre U.F.O...
...The play consists of 20 telephone calls between J.R...
...The guy is just a very, very tough nut...
...She is Dutch herself, a writer and midwife and peacemaker, with the round face and sad eyes of a woman in a Vermeer painting who might be waiting for the rain to stop, for a door to open...
...May 3, 1987] Writer Dr...
...But it would prove to be vital, and a vital way of presenting the distant truths...
...Sam Donaldson: "The left wing has never been in the ascendancy in this country...
...She wonders, then, if this constitutes a racial bias...
...this time performing amazing tricks: So it was natural for the junta coordinator, in the midst of a cheering crowd at a great religious festival, to remain almost somber...
...The turn of events that had brought him to Purisima could hardly be said to have stopped revolving...
...Why not turn the building into a school, a college or a cultural center...
...April 1987]Rolling Stone The Stone's incomparable William Greider sings for his supper: Liberals are making a comeback because Reagan failed to deliver on his economic promises...
...Okay, the nation gave it a shot, and it didn't work...
...March 1987] Boston Globe Little Steven Erlanger of the Globe's Moscow staff falls in love: The fresh, purist wind of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary, has caused extraordinary soul-searching throughout Soviet society...
...And then I knew I would have to delve into Richard Nixon's character completely...
...The half-alien, half-human hybrids Mr...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
