Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Washington Post Book World In the correspondence pages of a learned book review, the grisly sound of a late twentieth-century Renaissance Man and Mr. Samuel Lipman's measured...
...My essential disagreement with his essay is precisely the disagreement with him stated in my book (page 435): he espouses a fruitless attempt to turn back the clock...
...We must show the nobility of our suffering, a nobility so great that finally, now, we have found the reason why we are alive...
...He had the face of a German professor, possibly that of a young Emil Jennings...
...It's so antithetical to intermingling, so antidemocratic, it destroys the integrity and openness achieved by the sexual revolution...
...The Stepfather is good, but it lacks the winged lyrical excitement, the visionary fervor, of something like De Palma's Carrie . . Written by veteran crime writer Donald E. Westlake, the movie harbors a subversive joke...
...The phrase is empty and dangerous...
...Equally predictable was the core assertion of his "review": that replacements for David Sarnoff and Arturo Toscanini are urgently needed...
...or of those reduced to blindness at the age of thirty from bending over a microscope to produce microchips for our computers...
...Emotions alone will not stop the dying," he said...
...May 31, 19871 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987...
...He wants to murder them...
...Gary Shepherd, whose "primary interest is the promotion of a united world government through the philosophy of unitism," adds another unit to his accumulating units of fecal matter: Another myth widespread on both sides of the Iron Curtain is the idea that all conflict today can be reduced, in its simplest terms, to the conflict between communism and capitalism...
...May 25, 19871 Humanist Mr...
...By making their protagonist a man obsessed with having a perfect family, a man who kills that family when some small thing goes wrong, the film-makers get at the murderousness behind the American drive for bland appearances...
...As for the necessities of life, all he needed to survive were cigarettes, strong coffee, and the occasional catfish dinner...
...Stalin was kind of a revolutionary in the seminary," Synarski said...
...It was Krauthammer who came up with the label "the Reagan doctrine" to dignify as "morally defensible" the acts of piracy and terror that he either urged upon the Administration or congratulated it for having undertaken...
...But it is, as we need no reminding these days, clearly not safe...
...His body, however, was strong and lithe and capable of creating wonderfully filthy fantasies in those who got close enough...
...No journalist has called for attacks on Nicaragua more vehemently, and if a war crimes tribunal ever wished to indict a journalist as an accessory to the mutilation and murder of civilians there, it could do no better than Krauthammer...
...Joseph Horowitz New York, NY Samuel Lipman replies: Perhaps Mr...
...It certainly seems to come up to his highest standard...
...Lipman's skewed synopsis of Understanding Toscanini reduces nuanced portraits of Toscanini and Sarnoff to sketches of stage villains...
...People are saying you should sleep only with your own kind...
...Cockapert would like to marry Amy Carter: His columns, both in The Washington Post and The New Republic, are distillations of the contempt for national and international law that has characterized the Reagan Administration...
...This is absurd...
...Minor conflicts tend to become ideological conflicts because the combatants wish to attract the support of one or the other of the two superpowers...
...Jane O'Reilly sweat and lunge: Sex, whether as relaxation, snare, or even reproductive function, is clearly not dead...
...As readers of Understanding Toscanini will be aware, I argue in detail that—for reasons historical, sociological and musical—no Toscanini or Sarnoff could exist today...
...Religiously, he was part atheist, part Zen-master, and part Southern WASP with an enormous case of Jew-envy...
...May 7, 19871 Village Voice High culture at the gates of the sublime and the ridiculous: Nathan Fain was a founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis, serving on its board and as its director of publications...
...playhouse by an energetic reporter on the Los Angeles Times culture patrol: Gene Dynarski has always had a soft spot for Joseph Stalin...
...It's a bad Dorothy Lamour movie: The volcano went off at the height of our fertility rites," .. . Nathan made love like a savage, but was extremely civilized in most other matters...
...The New Yorker had to be read on the day it hit the stands or not at all...
...Nathan's attitude was summed up in a speech he delivered at a Hunter College symposium on AIDS, in June 1985...
...Only hard work and hard-won trust can propel us to real freedom, so that now we can take our place in the world, to give the world what is uniquely ours to give...
...This is, in a way, a tyranny, part of the inexorable return to conservatism...
...It was a horrible responsibility, and it was all his...
...Currently, he's playing the Soviet leader in David Pownall's "Master Class" (at the Odyssey Theatre), a fictional account of a 1948 after-hours confrontation between Stalin, his minister of culture, Andrei Zhdanov, and two leading Russian composers of the day, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich—whose new, "formalist" music horrifies the traditional sensibilities of their leader...
...8, No...
...He ignores my central analysis of music's "new audience," except as fodder for establishing my alleged tendentiousness...
...We've all been through that terror crawl before, in countless B movies...
...Vol...
...Tribal warriors eschewed connubial relations before a battle, and modern men in public life may soon be required to demonstrate an immunity from women far greater than anything vulcanized rubber can provide...
...But his faith isn't my faith...
...Samuel Lipman's measured reply: Samuel Lipman is a neoconservative ideologue...
...Such superpower conflict is a common scenario from history, such as Athens and Sparta after the defeat of Persia or Rome and Carthage after the defeat of Pyrrhus...
...Yet it conceals the reality of victimization and despair among the exploited, poor, starving, and dying peoples whose lives sustain that rhetoric...
...This horror thriller never quite transcends the ineluctable, grinding violence of its genre: At the end, the psychotic killer, having acquired a new family, crawls bloodily up another staircase, caught between his wife, holding a gun, and his daughter, who has a shard of glass...
...June 9, 19871 New Republic In the New Republic, citadel of clearheaded liberalism, the rich imaginations of Miss Barbara Ehrenreiclfand Mr...
...One thinks for instance of those killed, raped, and brutally separated from husbands and children in war...
...Underneath the electronic brouhaha there is a faint beat of drums, an unconscious echo of puberty rites and purification huts, an anxious reclassification of women as Woman, the polluter of clear masculine minds...
...Alexander Cockapert, in his incomparable column "Beat the Devil," coolly comments on the greatest writer who ever lived, Charles Krauthammer...
...Once Germany was defeated, the two strongest remaining world powers were destined to turn on each other because, as the two remaining powers, they each constituted the chief threat to the other...
...We stand at a high moment in our history, actually in all of history," he said...
...March/April 19871 New York Times Magazine The perfidies of the heinous Heritage Foundation continue to spread as revealed by Samantha, philosophe of the bedroom: "I'm a lot more careful now about sleeping with someone I think is bisexual," says Samantha...
...He read books he wasn't supposed to be reading, played music he wasn't supposed to play...
...June 1, 19871 New York Movie critic David Denby reviews a masterpiece by a modern-day Walt Disney: Joseph Ruben's The Stepfather really isn't my kind of movie...
...It was not necessary to feed him my Understanding Toscanini (Book World, March 1) in order to ascertain that he dislikes the writings of Dwight Macdonald and Theodor Adorno...
...of those driven to prostitution in order to feed their families...
...No matter what you think of his methods—and, sure, some ugly things went on—there was a lot of justification for what he did, allowing for his givens and what he had to do...
...I do not question that his essay was written in good faith...
...Perhaps that ominous fact explains, the primitive subtextual imagery underlying the present overblown coverage of what are, after all, sex scandals of a fairly routine sort...
...February 11, 19871 Los Angeles Times Lillian Hellman's ghost discovered in an L.A...
...Among this group of those exploited by political messianism are the women who are the poor of the poor, the minjung of the minjung, the oppressed of the oppressed...
...For those who hold different positions about music and intellectual life the existence of publications willing to print independent reviews can only be welcome...
...We must tell the world of more than our grief and our rage...
...It is between two national powers, each competing for the dominant role in world affairs...
...Magic mantras will not stop it...
...May 2, 19871 Princeton Seminary Bulletin The Yale Divinity School's Professor Letty M. Russell launches one of those richly inter-disciplinarian asseverations that make her the Dogberry of our time: The language of war, conquest, and development is couched in the offer of national power, pride, and prosperity...
...The major conflict today is not between two ideological systems...
...Horowitz (at least on his personal estimation) is indeed the best reviewer of his own book...
...they have to kill him...
...He leaves behind a lover, Claus, in Berlin and joins another, Arthur Bennett, who had died of AIDS...
...April 19, 19871 Nation The Nation's sagacious Dr...
...All policies claiming to promote national security against the Soviet Union (or any other budding superpower) must be presumed to be false, pending a careful weighing of their cost and benefits...
...We have been stricken by a renegade germ at our most vulnerable point, our newly freed sexuality...
...The Times had to be read in the evening, usually over a spinach pie at the Tiffany...
...Nathan died in a hospital room in Houston, diagnosed with renal failure, AIDS-related dementia, and pneumocystis carinii...
...Lipman's essay belonged in The New Criterion, not The Washington Post...
...There's no coincidence in Pownall's references to Christ: the idea that Stalin takes on the guilt of those 20 million dead, as Christ took on the cumulative guilt of mankind...
...He recklessly simplifies what I have to say about Toscanini's purely musical accomplishments...
...1, 19871 New York Newsday Professor William G. Shepherd of the University of Massachusetts proffers one of those "We Must" bulls that is the hallmark of the brain-dead progressive: We must erase the phrase "national security" from all serious discourse...
Vol. 20 • August 1987 • No. 8
