Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM USA Today A congratulatory message from the magazine reviewer of the incomparable USA Today: Many people despise R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.'s The American Spectator. Its...
...He entered a world of shadow and risk, a "double man" to use the title of his novel, operating according to his new ethical standards while judging himself a sinner...
...January 26, 1988] Washington Post Dr...
...He's too weak...
...And the person who determined whether or not it was a hit was a king, a duke, or the church or whoever paid the bill...
...February 9, 1988] Daily Forty Niner The editors...
...Redford...
...Hart said: "We have been married longer than the president in the White House today...
...Who...
...When he left the Church orbit for Yale, and politics, and the world of relative ethics, he crossed at some point from Nazarene to libertine...
...Produced during the great rush of New Frontier idealism, The Manchurian Candidate was designed as a worst possible scenario comic-nightmare of what the progressive Kennedy era presumably had put to rest...
...One resolution of this contradiction is to live dangerously, near the edge of exposure and destruction...
...Carl T. Rowan reveals the condition of our contemporary bonsai civil rights movement: Show me a guy who rides around with a swastika on his bumper, and I'll show you someone who hates Jews...
...Think they'd do that...
...Big war hero, too...
...Gary's values and worldview were formed in the Church of the Nazarene, a very moralistic and guilt-driven denomination...
...Redford asks...
...He was a pretty good baseball player in college, you know...
...The desire to get a sandwich or something to drink had a lot to do with it...
...I'd love to do that and have the media come over and ask me what I think of him...
...On his marriage, Mr...
...As Redford removes his bags from the car's trunk, one of the ground crew approaches...
...I know what he wants to know...
...I'll give you a racist who thinks that it is only a matter of time before this nation makes white supremacy its official policy and returns to slavery, with black people the God-designated hewers of wood and drawers of water...
...Seriously...
...To survive affairs, in this context, is to be vindicated in the view that the world is tolerant, forgiving, turns its back on commonplace transgressions...
...Show me a governor who insists on flying the Confederate flag over his state capitol, and I'll show you a social-intellectual Neanderthal, a person who is dangerously insensitive to the feelings of black Americans both inside his state and across the country...
...And the content of what they wrote was to a degree determined by the musical predilections of the guy who was paying the bill...
...Excuse me...
...And so, even as he experimented with the new world of free relationships, the voice of his past reminded him that he was wrong...
...Colman McCarthy puts the kibosh to the author's mythical vision of Holy Russia, a land Colson also believes is teeming with Communists, KGB agents, and other mythical creatures: Colson crams together these platitudes like a warden overcrowding a cell block...
...an electorate so numbed by media that it can no longer distinguish between how a candidate looks and what, if anything, he stands for...
...Hart and his wife, Lee, met with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register during a campaign swing in Iowa...
...His plane, Air Force II, sits on the lonesome runway washed in the fading light of dusk, a silver, red, blue and white canister of power, not necessarily of fame...
...We have kings, dukes, and popes: the A&R guy who spots a group or screens the tape when it comes in...
...Hart said...
...But even if you leave your church, your church doesn't leave you...
...I believe Gary was testing whether he was morally adequate to be the presidential front-runner by acting on the edge of risk...
...Bush...
...You can look it up...
...And Redford signed...
...This autographed picture deal, this posing with the great, the near-great, and those who only dream of getting next to the great, is something Redford takes seriously...
...What time is it now...
...January 11, 1988] New York Times Magazine The author of The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom, Polite Society's latest Senator Joe McCarthy, takes a dreadful stream-of-conscience drubbing in the howls page of a polite weekly: Allan Bloom's book is a pretentious account of his own nostalgia for the days when white-male authority went unquestioned...
...Hartpence indulges in some braggadocio over past triumphs: "If I am elected, I won't be the first adulterer in the White House," Mr...
...Elitism has never been an American value...
...March 19881 Washington Post Whilst reviewing Charles Colson's latest book, the luminous Prof...
...January 19881 City Paper Washington, D.C.'s simulacrum of the Village Voice puts a local Aristotle in charge of explicating a celluloid classic, The Manchurian Candidate, and, lo, the dolt sees contemporary Academe's hallucination of the fiend Reagan and our beloved body politic: What's creepy about this movie, of course, is how closely its creators, by intuition or accident, foresaw what would transpire in the quarter-century between its release and resurrection—the rash of assassinations that shredded the fabric of our national consciousness...
...the picture goes right up on the wall in the office: 'Me and my new friend, Bob.' "Look," he says to the ground-crew guy, "I know it's not your fault...
...That I think he's a jerk...
...So basically, the people who are recognized as the geniuses of classical music had hits...
...Well, why isn't he talking about that...
...One could argue—I wouldn't—that Ronald Reagan walked away from a marriage...
...What would you say...
...Three-fifteen," he is told...
...February 7, 1988] Village Voice The cosmic gibbering of Tom Hayden contained in a "Last Thoughts" memorandum sent by him to fellow Gary Hart supporters during last spring's post-coitus crisis: Recognizing that it may be pop psychology, I think I understand now part of the reason for this identity problem...
...We have kept our marriage together...
...Frank Zappa makes a memorable attempt to become arts critic for National Public Radio: There is a book called Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with thousands of names in it...
...He couldn't have been...
...Today, the film's vision of a corrupt, paranoid body politic is virtually a photographic likeness of our political reality...
...He hasn't written a book as much as repackaged a few pet mullings, most of which are unstirringly conventional...
...God, wouldn't it be great to go out to the airport and be there when Bush comes in...
...No," Redford says...
...University education, Bloom suggested, should operate on this model...
...If that's true, why are Westerners regularly taken to monasteries and churches when they visit the Soviet Union, and why has Mother Teresa been invited to open a convent in Moscow...
...February 19-25, 1988] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 51...
...You're just doing your job coming out and asking me, but tell him I'm sorry, no...
...Today, we have a similar situation in rock 'n' roll...
...Anyone who has read Plato knows that the very raison d'etre of the Socratic confraternity was its deliberate exclusion of slaves and women...
...Then, almost to himself: "I know what it is all about...
...If that stuff is true, then that's what he should be talking about...
...That doesn't mean they wrote awful music, it means they didn't have hits...
...Tell him no," Redford says...
...Come on, cut it out," he says...
...If you'd have a picture taken with him...
...Show me a guy who rides around with Confederate flags flying on his front fenders, and I'll show you someone who thinks the Civil War still goes on...
...She did...
...It's part of who he is...
...a society so demoralized and cynical that its few perceptive, altruistic members are forced, like Marco, to become outcasts...
...the radio station programmers who choose what records get air play...
...Excuse me, Mr...
...Winter 1988] Washington Times Washington's Good Times reports it all as the Hon...
...The Soviet system is committed to the eradication of any vital practice of religion," he writes...
...To be caught, on the other hand, is confirmation that the world is ruled by an iron moral law, and admission that one cannot meet the standard...
...I may be the first one to have publicly confessed, but I won't be the first...
...I'll point out a sicko who still worships Adolf Hitler's notions of "Aryan supremacy" and his vow to exterminate the Jewish people...
...Natania Rosenfeld Princeton, NJ...
...Our country has a history of struggle for freedom and equality, in which the civil-rights movement, the women's movement and many of the new scholarly trends being embraced by humanities departments are the most recent developments...
...the business affairs guy who writes the contract...
...Professor Bloom recently gave a talk at Oberlin College, the first co-ed college in this country as well as one of the first to admit blacks...
...Redford wants to know...
...Really...
...The governor of Florida is inside and he wants to know . . ." "Yeah," Redford says...
...Such yearnings are the standard litany of extreme conservatism...
...What time is he coming in...
...Its conservative politics and contempt for liberal concerns repel those of a more compassionate bent...
...When Redford gets to the airport, Bush has already departed for town...
...Three o'clock...
...February 12, 1988] Esquire CAT scan of the brain of a hamster, whose first name is Robert: At the house, he is informed that all air traffic has been halted for an hour because the Vice-President's plane is due in at the airport...
...He spoke longingly of Plato and Socrates, who spent their days debating "Great Ideas" with a group of like-minded friends in ancient Athens...
...of Cal-State Long Beach's paper of record come down smartly on the side of progress: Ignoring the rhetoric that both sides conveyed before, during and after the summit, it becomes apparent that only one leader may have been sincere when it came to making promises for world peace: Mikhail Gorbachev...
...You have never heard of most of the people in that book, nor have you heard their music...
...Not just Ronald Reagan but a lot of people...
...That would be great...
...That says something about him...
...Once, before giving a woman his autograph, he insisted that she remove a BUSH FOR PRESIDENT button from her jacket...
...the kid asks...
...Come on...
...December 19871 New Perspectives Quarterly Mr...
...I tell him...
...Mr...
...the emergence and, indeed, longterm presidency of a dullard Red-baiter manipulated by a tough, ambitious wife and right-wing interests...
Vol. 21 • April 1988 • No. 4
