Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
Washington Post No, she is not pulling our legs—Mary McGrory really believes this; and, perhaps, after her virtuosi have reformed Managua she will dispatch them to Peking, where tough...
...They understand how the system works...
...When he finished, Ginsberg was asked where he wanted the lines of the poem to break...
...The only consolation: The Voice makes the list (he hates us, he really hates us...
...Today's poets wear many different hats and are variously named: Spielberg . . . Simon . . . Lennon . . . Manilow . . . —Stephen R. Fahey Kensington [June 20, 1989] Soviet Life The good news of Soviet industry "on the move" from an advertisement from the Rotary club-minded editors of astonishing Soviet Life: Learn of the Extraordinary Achievements of Modern Soviet industry...
...or, "We're not here to incubate...
...Most Well-Intentioned, Least Intelligible Chant: "Out of my uterus, keep the state...
...No dirty tricks, no character assassination, would be allowed...
...Power radiates from him, emitting acute awareness of his needs—and a realization, as well, of how closely these needs have related to the destiny of his nation...
...It's probably denying one of the most positive, energizing parts of us...
...comes the cry from the West Wing...
...If you respect nature, if you are nature-literate, sustain-ability flows...
...you bring your own potato to a dinner party, "just in case...
...The quote . . . is from W.E.B...
...We haven't landed on Earth yet...
...July 12, 1989] Australian The effect of the Ugly American (circa 1980s) on a polite little antipodean island: WELLINGTON: New Zealand historians are aghast at claims by a visiting woman professor from Hawaii that their hero, Captain James Cook, was a "syphilitic, tubercular racist...
...August 1989] New York Newsday From the correspondence page of a cosmopolitan New York daily, evidence that Miss Carolyn Jones of Manhattan watches too much primetime television: It's about time straight women woke up and stopped dreaming about their wedding day, because marriage is not usually a wonderful thing for women...
...Hypertechnology is not progress but abstraction, monolith, Moloch, species chauvinism, destruction of naturg reduction of life forms Everyone who can afford it should sit down and meditate on our ultimate nature...
...It's a place where a lot of women get beaten up, raped and killed by their husbands, and where children are raped by their fathers and other male relatives...
...September 1989] Vegetarian Times Pathos: A while back we asked readers to finish the sentence "You know you're a vegetarian when...
...Two, four, six, eight, we're the ones who ovulate...
...All the imbalances happen when you lose that very first respect and caring...
...A re-creation of the Dating Game and Newlywed Game in which contestants read from scripts and end up with dream dates will be "a joke, a total spoof," according to Scottland Jacobson, one of the week's organizers...
...The responses—some funny, some sentimental—provided a warm and playful look at a cross-section of vegetariana...
...We Haven't Landed on Earth Yet Fifty-thousand homeless in New York...
...Haunani-Kayl Trask has left audiences quivering with claims that the British explorer who discovered their country and Australia more than 200 years ago sparked diseases that halved the population of Hawaii and spread syphilis among New Zealand's Maoris...
...They take no nonsense from anyone...
...If we educate that out of us, we're stripped of what is probably the most important and most survival-oriented quality...
...July 25, 1989] Christian Science Monitor Fey findings on matters metaphysical in nature and apparently subliterate in exposition by Miss Peridita Huston, director of public affairs of the International Planned Parenthood Federation of London, largest dispenser of condoms in the known universe: "If you're nature-literate," she says, "you respect the nurturing, the earth, the fertility...
...And that, she feels, leads naturally to a greater respect for womanhood...
...That quality, she feels, engenders respect both for human equality and for a natural environment that is sustainable rather than imbalanced...
...April 28, 1989] San Diego Union More evidence that the poetry of Allen Ginsberg is a direct consequence of a lifelong affliction...
...Lillian DiPiazza, Old Bridge, N.J...
...And Best Slogan: "Free Barbara Bush...
...From the new towns of the once-empty Siberian wilderness to astonishing hydro-electric projects on the Dnieper, the Volga and the Don . . . from the bustling steel mills of the Ukraine, to the mighty shipyards of Leningrad and Nikolayev . . . Soviet industry is on the move...
...and, perhaps, after her virtuosi have reformed Managua she will dispatch them to Peking, where tough customers are also needed: If the administration is serious about introducing democracy to Nicaragua, it should dispatch the League of Women Voters to Managua, not the CIA, which is the least democratic of our institutions...
...September 1989] Santa Cruz Sentinel A major intellectual event in progressive Santa Cruz occasions the emergence of the English-speaking world's next Somerset Maugham, Mr...
...Government murder in Lhasa and Beijing...
...It turns out the mean, know-nothing racist Bush of last year's presidential campaign was just a phase he had to go through...
...Asked if the money, time and effort spent on the Apollo project were worth the result, Ginsberg composed a free-verse reply over the phone...
...op-ed, June 4]: They haven't disappeared, but they have changed their clothes...
...Scottland Jacobson, organizer: A variety of workshops, seminars and special events are planned as part of Gay Lesbian Bisexual Awareness Week at UCSC, which will begin Saturday night at Merrill Dining Hall with the Talent Show and Lip Sync contest at 8:30 p.m...
...US.-trained death squads in Salvador...
...1989] 51...
...Barbara Grandolfo, Naples, Maine...
...I'll show you who's a liberal...
...And while the Cruising and Flirting Workshop isn't really intended to be instructional, participants will be "discussing different ways that people have picked up people in the past," Jacobson says...
...The events range from the downright silly to the serious...
...In daily television appearances, Dr...
...August 2, 1989] Mother Jones Orgasmic revelations from Saul Landau, available only in M.J: As Fidel talked, I allowed myself to listen closely and feel that peculiar sensation that I experience in his presence, as if I am meeting with a force of nature, a man so filled with the energy of historical mission that he is almost of a different species...
...Maybe someday," a disappointed friend of his said, "George'll just haul off and slug somebody...
...June 13, 19891 Spy More knee-slapping yuppie humor of the kind that cracks up Uncle Will and Aunt Agatha over tea: Thank goodness George Bush has reverted to his old WASPy, silly, pre-1988 self, admitting he couldn't get through to a fellow world leader ("The line was busy," Bush said) and writing dumbbell reminiscences of undergraduate life ("One of my very favorite courses was History of Art 36 [pots and pans] . . . a great course in American furniture and silver") for Yale's newspaper...
...A quarter-million died in Sudan of starvation in 1988...
...Just run it together in one big paragraph," he said...
...It's about trust," he explains...
...and to maintain this privilege, men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race...
...The S & M Workshop is "not really about whips and chains and junk like that," says Jacobson...
...July 4, 1989] Ms...
...They are meticulously neutral...
...DuBois...
...They are old hands at arranging debates...
...Zipper's favorites: Best Cheer...
...Here are a few we'd like to share with you...
...I think that's all part of the whole dependency and interdependency of beings and species and genders," she adds...
...If you don't care for that which sustains you, how can you care for that which is equal to you...
...you catch household insects and put them outside, rather than kill them...
...July/August 1989] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 CURRENT WISDOM Village Voice A frightening report on the schemes of the Radical Right: Unfunniest Read of the Week: P. J. O'Rourke's "A Call for a New McCarthyism" in the current American Spectator, which features an endless enemies list including Sting, Salman Rushdie, and "anybody whose last name is Cockburn...
...reading gives him motion-sickness: Poet Allen Ginsberg was among those contacted for a story on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing...
...Proof that 200 years after the fall of the Bastille the spirit of Revolution survives: While antiabortion zealots are stuck on the 917th verse of "Amazing Grace," prochoicers at rallies around the nation are coming up with unique ditties of their own to stir the faithful...
...Tricia Hoffman, Santa Monica, Calif...
...You know you're a vegetarian when .. . . . . the food on your dinner plate no longer interests your cat...
...Best Song (to the tune of "It's My Party"): "It's my body and I'll breed if I want to/and if I don't want to/don't tell me I have to/you'd want the Choice if it happened to you...
...Planet Earth itself suffering AIDS, its immune system unable to repair the damage done by the human virus Will we set up slave camps on Saturn...
...Trask has compounded the outrage by saying that she was proud that Hawaiians beat and stabbed Cook to death...
...We not only killed him, we carved him into little pieces, and though we did not eat him, for Hawaiians are not cannibals, we did return part of him to the British—which horrified them, because we returned his hind-quarters," she said...
...Civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen...
...she asks...
...the wimp is back...
...July 16, 1989] Washington Post Another product of American higher education makes bold to speak out on the correspondence pedestal of a great American daily: Poets in Different Hats In response to Amy Schwartz's thoughtful "Why Are Our Poets Invisible...
...We'll just learn a bunch of weird stuff...
...Why, Dan, what the heck do you mean I'm a liberal...
Vol. 22 • October 1989 • No. 10
