The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS •August, temperatures remained steamy, and Mikhail Dukakis (though he prefers to go by "Mike") developed a tropical case of sex fever. First, in Laguna Beach, California, he...
...Martin Scorsese's new film, The Last Temptation of Christ, opened to mixed reviews and a religious revival...
...In return, Mr...
...Finally, death took 74-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., who was said to have found it difficult to live in Dad's shadow...
...Death also claimed short-story master Raymond Carver, at 50, an appropriate time for a minimalist to go, and in Washington, D.C., legal mogul Edward Bennett Williams died at 68, the last of the tough and mean Democrats...
...In Houston, Texas, a judge went easy on convicted bus thief Patrick Carl Johnson, 23, who told the court his love for buses stems from age 11 when his mother dated a bus driver, and in Brisbane, Australia, Justice John McPherson laid out the kind of logic that has balanced ten consecutive Massachusetts budgets when he advised convicted bank robber Patrick Burke that his take would be greater if he applied for unemployment insurance...
...Leonard Bernstein, and the Washington Post was worrying Dukakis is dead...
...GOP Strategists Skeptical...
...Next, in Bismarck, Missouri, he alarmed locals when he stretched the state's "Show Me" guidelines with graphic descriptions of what he, Kitty, and like-minded Democrats do when the lights go out: "We sound like cats fighting in the night, except when you wake up in the morning all we've been doing is making more Democrats...
...Probably among the skeptical was Indiana's senior senator, Richard Lugar, a vice-presidential aspirant for the last dozen years who this summer fell into an oxymoronic trap when, typically, he described himself as "an enlightened conservative" on the jacket of his new book, Letters to the Next President (Simon and Schuster, $19.95...
...Senator Symms got the party of Reagan in trouble on August 24 when he told radio listeners in Blackfoot, Idaho, that he'd heard photos exist from the 1960s depicting Mrs...
...Robert Redford for his recent trip to Havana where he participated in a scriptwriting workshop for women...
...On August 24 he won the coveted endorsement of Lane Kirkland's AFL-CIO, this in the wake of endorsements from Sandinista President Daniel Ortega and Nigerian civil engineer Laywola Shoyinka, Dukakis's former classmate at Swarthmore...
...First, in Laguna Beach, California, he said George Bush "doesn't have what it takes," and I don't think he was talking about body surfing...
...Redford has dismissed as "quaildroppings" any talk that he bears a resemblance to the new Republican vice-presidential nominee...
...In Scranton, Pennsylvania, John Ribando has changed his name to Janice Ribando, when Jane would have done as nicely...
...Adolph Hitler Clark, and now he's wanted for murder in Jacksonville, Florida...
...One defender of the flick was Mr...
...By the time he got to Cleveland, Ohio, he was spreading lurid tales of "an Administration that's in bed with one of the biggest thugs on the continent...
...Dukakis burning an American flag at an anti-Vietnam demonstration...
...He will be missed, though not by his party...
...Two music lovers were crushed to death at the annual "Monsters of Rock" festival at England's Donington Park racetrack, and a London family on a drive in the country experienced some unpleasantness when a 1,000-pound Holstein-Friesian cow jumped a five-foot hedge and landed on the bonnet of their passing car...
...Fifty-five years after TVA, electricity has come to Post Mountain, California, and in Los Angeles, an unidentified drunk who was "tired" of walking stole a steamroller and took police on a five-milean-hour chase...
...John Denver has asked the Soviets for permission to ride on their Mir space station...
...WP THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 7...
...Finally, and perhaps most appropriately, after six Medflies were spotted in California's San Fernando Valley, officials released four million "amorous but sterile" male Mediterranean fruit flies "tinted shocking pink" over the area with instructions to breed fertile Medflies out of existence...
...But the ultimate revenge of the herds was played out in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where a zoo caretaker fell headfirst into an elephant dung pit...
...Dukakis's deviant behavior soon rubbed off on others in his campaign, most notably Miss Susan Estrich, who implied Mr...
...Shoyinka should not be confused with Nigerian playwright, author, and sometime Soviet apologist Wole Soyinka, though Senator Steve Symms probably will find a way to do just that...
...In other developments in the animal world, longstanding French-German animosities resurfaced when a twoyear-old cat abandoned its adoptive home in Stuttgart, West Germany, and in a journey worthy of Jean Gabin in La Grande Illusion trekked 600 miles to its birthplace in Tannay in central France...
...We can be thankful the press has had fewer reservations about Mr...
...The town of Hotchkiss, Colorado, has banned crime on the two days each week its marshal is off duty...
...was more than a match for his father...
...Bush is someone she'd never go out with: "America's been on a date with George Bush for seven and a half years, and he hasn't made a move yet"—stunningly insensitive talk, this, from the nation's leading authority on date rape...
...But if you allow the concept of comparable worth to affect your calculations, FDR, Jr...
...Quayle...
...Meanwhile, one fellow who should have softened his name but never got around to it is Mr...
...Not that the month was a total wash for the diminutive Duke...
...For instance, the Washington Post's headlines for August 17 read: "Senator Selected In Effort to Woo Younger Voters," "A Reagan Conservative," "Hoosier Scrappy, Rich, Telegenic," "Conservatives Laud Choice...
...Or you might try to reach him at the San Francisco Press Club, where a month after a judge ordered the club to provide female 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 members with equal access to its indoor pool, male members are resisting the ruling by continuing to swim in the nude...
...To a Dukakis supporter, small is beautiful, even in large amounts...
...The government of Cuba is defending Mr...
...Whereas the old man was elected to four presidential terms, his son was divorced from four different women—and working on a fifth marriage at the time of his death...
...Fortunately, the Lord still works in mysterious ways of his own, and a week later Mr...
...It will cost him $10 million, but since when has peace come cheap...
...As we all know, those photographs did not survive the fire that consumed the flag...
...Clint Eastwood, who elaborated: "Freedom of expression is the American way...
...Next thing you know someone will be trying to turn us into "a kinder, gentler nation...
...Scortatory artiste Mr...
...There were also signs that domestic policies, the justice system, and criminal behavior were all living up tothe little Duke's expectations...
...Like Poland, where Jaruzelski's goons have responded to the latest round of strikes by releasing a new government-sponsored pornographic magazinecum-manual entitled Body-SexPornography...
...East-wood's Hog's Breath Inn restaurant in Carmel, California, was shut down by Monterey County health inspectors for violations "too numerous to list...
...The first edition sold out within hours, but I'm sure extras can be obtained by writing to the press attache at the Polish embassy or consulate nearest you...
...Evidently the place serves meat, and there was blood and spittle on the floor...
...By month's end, Dukakis was in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, cavorting with Mr...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
