The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS •April has passed into the history books, though in America few even know what a history book might be. Certainly on college campuses the history book is liber incognitus,...
...Mrs...
...In New Albany, Indiana, Mrs...
...In the category of getting the facts straight, those who know me would be puzzled by Mr...
...trade deficit...
...Khalil al-Wazir, who allegedly had masterminded the continuing 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 uprisings on the West Bank and the bloody hijacking of an Israeli civilian bus, died of natural causes-natural, that is, for the Middle East-in Tunis...
...Maxine Swaine have all but one of her twenty-two dogs surgically "debarked" to quiet the racket...
...Zumwalt's tour in South Vietnam, he patrolled rivers that had been sprayed by Agent Orange...
...AIDS researchers writing in the Journal of the American Medical As sociation disclosed that the best way to avoid the disease is to copulate only with those in low risk groups, but Mr...
...But the MLA long ago caved into eroding standards and left-wing politicization...
...At the an nual Academy Awards orgies, Mr...
...Neither should she gripe about my sources, which were as authentic as the repeated, though refused, requests for an interview with Ms...
...New Zealand's Mrs...
...James C. Simmons San Diego, California (continued on page 51) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 9...
...Tragically, these amazing creatures are being imperiled by local farmers unmindful of the fact that their extinction would not only deny Australians a national treasure but that the town of Korumburra would lose what has become its major industry since the local butter plant folded...
...So what...
...While I do not pretend to know the cause of the Zumwalts' medical conditions, I must say I find strange the assertion that accidental deaths caused by one's own side in a war somehow compromise the morality of fighting in an otherwise just war, impugn the motives of this nation or of Admiral Zumwalt specifically in Vietnam, or have a damned thing to do with an article on CDI...
...But Michael Fumento's piece rivals anything I have ever seen for sheer malice...
...He believes that AIDS can be contracted by a simple handshake and has duly admonished 5,500 of his followers at a commune in Pune, India, that "When you come across a friend, raise your hands to the sky and scream 'yaa hoo.' " The guru has recently become an inveterate watcher of America's Sunday morning political talk shows...
...Ah, sir, now there's your story...
...As one of the founding members of Young Americans for Freedom, I can only be amused when Mr...
...Funky...
...Every group has a slant...
...The hoofed profs insist that Western thought includes simply too many white males...
...Clara Blankenburg was released unharmed after trapping herself for nearly twelve hours in her bird cage to the consternation of her feathered friends, two of whom perished within hours of Mrs...
...RET...
...In Peking a reporter was beaten by security guards who caught him filming a flower show without permission...
...No, because I recognize that in a democracy they are permitted to put out a point of view, regardless of its relevance, or in the case of the above groups, irrelevance...
...Funky casually suggests that I support traditionally Democratic positions...
...Rai had repeatedly irked members of the Gurkha National Liberation Front, and it will not happen again...
...A pause.] Now I would like all of you to ponder the followingwhen does the dropping of feces become writing...
...In progressive Lagos, those two Nigerian police officers convicted of shooting four lawyers at random have been freed without penalty by an enlightened Nigerian judge who recognized that to do otherwise would imperil police morale...
...Presland insists that her only intention is to show the womb to her two sisters before following a family tradition of burying it on Te Kaha, a remote beach where the umbilical cords of her nine brothers and sisters now repose...
...Isenberg is also correct in asserting that a lobbying group having a bias is hardly a news item...
...There's nothing one can really say about Mr...
...Allen Funky replies: It's good to see that Ms...
...Funky's characterization of my credentials...
...Question: Who are those unnamed individuals impersonating the Chairman's aides quoted so extensively by the unidentified author...
...American touchiness continues...
...Dawson was a founding member of YAF way back when, but my story was on the current situation at her agency...
...Ana Presland, an artist, continues to campaign for her womb...
...Then Mrs...
...Thus the profs can return to their scholarly perusals of comic books and sex manuals and cease worrying that these old Greeks and their peers from the Renaissance are a threat to campus morons...
...In the wild, certain species mark their territories by the dropping of feces and urinating...
...Yet the Chairman asserts that no one on his staff talked to Mr...
...On April 10 a mammoth ammunition - dump exploded under mysterious circumstances in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing more than seventy people and injuring approximately 800...
...Is this the same Admiral Zumwalt who gave the orders to spray that Agent Orange...
...He even went to Stanford University, the Heart of Darkness, to reprove the faculty's bovine intelligentsia for scrubbing its great books course of such neoconservatives as Homer and Plato...
...Do I get mad because the press fails to identify these groups as right-wing, national security sycophants...
...Quite possibly Nigeria has surpassed South Africa as the Dark Continent's most civilized country...
...But dying in this manner is no way for Elmo Jr.'s children to "live out their lives in freedom...
...The parts of his story not based on old news clips are attributed to anonymous aides of the Chairman...
...But one of the central points of my article was that CDI is being treated by the media as if it were without bias...
...Finally, considering the far greater number of groups who support the national security orthodoxy, CDI's work is proof of the Pentagon aphorism that in a target-rich environment one can always have an impact...
...And in Long Beach, California, Mr...
...Of course, it has a slant...
...A typical moment came during a symposium on language and literature when a panelist, a bright young man from a large East Coast university, insisted: "Writing is a series of marks that conveys meaning...
...Jesse Jackson and 22 percent want to go all out for Governor Mary Lou Dukakis of Guam, thus assuring the Democrats of at least 58 percent of a most important swing vote...
...If any of your readers are really curious about the goings-on at the CPSC, please let them know that voting records are available to the public, as are speeches, opinions, and dissents...
...MLA Marxists' Malaise As a former university English professor, I would like to endorse D. G. Myers's conclusions in "MLA Malaise" (TAS, March 1988...
...On April 11, the American Catholic bishops promulgated the first draft of a diktat urging more female participation in sacerdotal activities while apprising the faithful of "the sin of sexism," by which these unhappy men seem to mean any systematic thought about sexual differences, or perhaps they mean nothing at all...
...Two days later burglars pilfered the mummified remains of Pope Celestine V, who passed away in the thirteenth century, from the Basilica of Our Lady of Collemaggio in L,Aquila...
...Fumento's reckless disregard for the truth (except, maybe, "Yccch...
...Fumento's main criticism of CDI was that it has an "ideological slant...
...On April 12, the Dow Jones Industrial average hit 2100 for the first time since that October 19th of unhappy memory, but two days later it dropped 101.46 points on news of an expansion in the U.S...
...She points out no factual inaccuracies in the portrayal of her voting record because there were none...
...Last March she had it removed in Sydney, Australia, during a very humdrum hysterectomy...
...Baltimore, Maryland's health authorities are approaching the disease more scientifically...
...Instead, he uses the letters section as a forum for pot shots at Admiral Zumwalt, at the use of Agent Orange defoliant, and, apparently, at war in general...
...Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the wellknown guru, is even more conservative...
...Late in the month the head of Mr...
...asserting that if Admiral La Rocque's ideas prevail, "my children will not live out their lives in freedom...
...Among the plenitude of others to be exalted was the cousin of Governor Dukakis, Olympia Dukakis, who interrupted her otherwise conventional peroration to declare, inscrutably, "Let's go do it Mike...
...There, researchers using long-handled fish nets are counting used condoms found floating in the city's sewage-treatment pools to ascertain the number of Baltimoreans who actually practice safe sex...
...But what if one discovered that a player on one team was doing everything in his power to help the other team win...
...As a journalist of some thirty years (for Time, CBS, and the New York Times), I have seen a good many hatchet jobs...
...Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media...
...How fitting that Mr...
...Blankenburg's release...
...The PLO's second in command, Mr...
...There is another respectable body of American opinion: that in doing so we have already given ourselves a degree of unfreedom...
...With this issue, Dr...
...CORRESPONDENCE...
...Dawson...
...Thomas Demski has been ordered by the city to haul down the American flag that he flies round the clock owing to neighbors' complaints that its nocturnal flapping constitutes "noise pollution...
...Presland, inspired no doubt by her long-standing interest in the historical preservation movement, decided to keep her womb and sued New South Wales health authorities for the right to preserve it in a glass jar...
...I would point out to Admiral Zumwalt, to Government Lawyer Fumento, and to the editors of The American Spectator that as Elmo III is fighting a cancer that is caused by one of our own instruments of war, he may be dying proof of his own patriotism (I will not say here what kind) and proof of the patriotism that has been forced upon little Elmo IV...
...According to an AIDS surveillance supervisor, Mr...
...Yaa hoo...
...Might be worth checking...
...Everyone in the room sat there seriously pondering the question...
...Nirmal Rai, a news reporter for a Hindi newspaper, was placed on display in a public square, though his body was nowhere to be found...
...A vampire was slain in Orljan, Yugoslavia by her mother...
...And six days later the old Pope was discovered in perfect condition in a cemetery in Amatirce, Italy, where he should have been in the first place...
...Yet how do they know that Homer and Plato were white...
...Funky could have done better than to rewrite inaccurate stories about the Consumer Product Safety Commission which long ago appeared in other publications...
...For Shame It's easy to see why the author of the article "One Flew Into the Cuckoo's Nest" (TAS, April 1988) wishes to remain anonymous...
...Is this the same Admiral Zumwalt whose son Elmo III and grandson Elmo IV are dying slow, premature deaths because, during Lt...
...In China, where Western ways are making a comeback, authorities are apparently not ready to accept the role of the investigative reporter either...
...More interesting than Mr...
...So does the American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hudson Institute, National Strategy Information Center, Center for International Security, Committee on the Present Danger, American Security Council, High Frontier, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Heritage Foundation, National Institute for Public Policy, Foreign Policy Research Institute, etc...
...Presland's womb...
...David Isenberg Washington, D.C...
...From India comes word that the Gurkha tribesmen of Darjeeling have devised a remedy for dealing with biased press coverage that transcends any remedy ever envisaged even by the resourceful Mr...
...But I was disap pointed that The American Spectator, which has a fine reputation and which I generally enjoy, would publish an article so biased, misleading, and full of error...
...Kaiser apprises us of my "reckless disregard for the truth" without attempting to cite a single such transgression...
...New Age Democrats saw their hopes of capturing the White House soar when it was reported by the surviving members of the National Gay and Lesbian Thsk Force that only 2 percent of its members favor Vice President Bush's candidacy while 36 percent favor the Rev...
...And there is more antipodean news...
...Carol G. Dawson Vice Chairman U.S...
...Pacifists Strike Back Thanks for the vastly amusing article on the Center for Defense Information by Michael Fumento ("The Center for Defense Misinformation," TAS, April 1988...
...Surely, Mr...
...Isenberg does a better job at criticizing my veracity, and I shall never be able to look William Lind (coauthor of America Can Win) in the eye again...
...The American Catholic Church-hitherto a staunch opponent of fleshly thoughts about womennow opposes any thoughts about women whatsoever, except perhaps the thought that women should mix more actively with the Church's celibate priests-odd...
...Fumento ends with a mean quote from Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr...
...Now she intends to return it to New Zealand despite protests from Health Department officials, who classify it as a "restricted import...
...Product Safety Commission Washington, D.C...
...The belief in vampires is widespread in parts of Yugoslavia, though Yugoslavians still doubt the reports of the English author, Evelyn Waugh, who while serving as a British intelligence officer in Yugoslavia during World War II insisted that Tito, the Communist leader, was in truth a woman...
...As far back as the 1979 MLA convention in San Francisco, the last I will ever attend, nonsense reigned supreme in the Alice-in-Wonderland anti-intellectual climate generated by the thousands of milling academics...
...Irwin Stelzer of the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard begins a regular column on matters economic so that we will be better informed about the great economic peril the liberals have been telling us about since January 20, 1981...
...The fact that Fumento is in a snit over CDI and none of the others shows us his bias but fails to establish CDI's guilt over alleged "misinformation...
...While Fumento might find Bill Gertz's derogatory comments about CDI noteworthy, others, who are aware of the Washington Times's own marked bias on defense issues, are unimpressed...
...Courtland Storck, "It's certainly not a very pleasant job, but it is important...
...Further, were one to hear that a Little League umpire was favoring the team his son was on, that would not be news...
...Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor received ten Oscars...
...Half of the Iranian navy was eliminated on April 17 after firing upon American naval vessels in the Persian Gulf, according to a memorable headline in the moderately conservative Washington Times...
...An objective observer of the Commission's record would have no difficulty in identifying who among us adheres to conservative principle...
...Excluding the last, however, perhaps the ghost of Stonewall Jackson might have something to say on the subject...
...But the authorities are standing by their original judgment that the government of New Zealand will not countenance Mrs...
...Certainly on college campuses the history book is liber incognitus, even for historians, and so during the month Secretary of Education William J. Bennett continued his lonely campaign to interest college presidents in the mystery and glory of higher education...
...The enormous worms, some of whom reach twelve feet, attract thousands of Australian tourists to Korumburra annually with their amazing mundane feats, gurgling melodiously while burrowing through the colorful Korumburra muck...
...Similarly, anyone who helped coauthor such a vacuous piece of fluff as America Can Winnot America Can Reform, get your facts straight, Mike-can also be dismissed...
...I haven't seen anything so comical since Republicans started asserting George Bush's televised temper tantrum with Dan Rather demonstrated his virility...
...Robert Blair Kaiser Mammoth Lakes, California Michael Fumento replies...
...Yes, Michael, and the sun rises in the east also...
...In Charles County, Maryland, Circuit Judge Graydon S. McKee III upheld the animal control board's edict that Mrs...
...The Australian government has appropriated $11,000 to save the famed gurgling worms of Korumburra from likely extinction...
...Fumento's errors of fact and perverse interpretations: his unspoken assumption that our continuing to run in the arms race will guarantee "freedom...
...Based on my researches throughout the Peloponnesus, the old boys were probably of an olive hue...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
