Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Gainesville Sun The sad somniloquy of James A. Michener the same night some cad put garlic in his tapioca pudding: This year's election scared me. It was conducted with a brutality...
...December 8, 1988] In These Times The condition of America's moral and intellectual superiors on the evening of George Bush's triumph and their renewed befuddlement: Faced with a speaker who couldn't speak and who didn't seem too happy about being there, people started filing out...
...It was a perfect way to spend that evening, after all...
...A man who loved women would not blow up the world...
...the country has gone from Ralph Lauren clothes, to Ralph Lauren home furnishings, to Ralph Laurenesque architecture, design, and art...
...That is one of the reasons he was here...
...Breathtaking...
...To others, who had once been genuinely moved by his insights, Thompson's self-destruction was evocative of the American political process careening out of their control...
...Naive...
...A diet based on animal protein is cruel to the animal, bad for one's health and ecologically devastating...
...There was nothing to see that night, perhaps because of my own naive incompetence as a reporter, or because I was joined in my vigil by another dozen reporters and about 100 fans who wanted a glimpse of John F. Kennedy...
...Just as Dukakis had failed to articulate his message to the people, their hero was having a hard time getting a complete sentence out...
...I saw men beat a pig that was lying in a puddle of diesel fuel, obviously in great pain...
...The pig finally dragged himself out of the ditch and pulled himself (his hip was apparently broken) to the trailer that was to take him to the slaughter-house...
...The tactics that proved so effective were those which Joseph Goebbels found useful in destroying the German Republic in the 1930s...
...and for economic as well as political freedoms...
...Unlike them, he promised to lead the way unilaterally, by reducing Soviet military forces and converting defense industries to peaceful uses...
...Ah, youth...
...Bold...
...Indeed, the names of Stalin and other communist leaders have been sandblasted from the facades of all sorts of buildings and erased from the map...
...Heroic...
...That's not because Stalin was without his accomplishments, but because there is no honoring them without also honoring his incredible excesses and abuse of power...
...When the house lights dimmed and the talking head of George Bush appeared on the screens above the stage and said, "This is a moving night for all of us, and you can't help but be moved," the senselessness made perfect sense at last...
...The Soviet leader unfurled a blueprint for saving the planet and democratizing the world...
...They shot pigs that were trying to cross the northbound lanes of Route 95, while allowing uninjured animals to be severely beaten and cruelly treated by highway workers...
...December 8, 1988] New Republic Sociological science as practiced on the cut-the-crap pages of the revolutionary New Republic: Without Ralph Lauren and his expert molding of American taste, George Bush, Andover '42, Yale '48, a.k.a...
...Michael Dukakis was not defeated, he was destroyed, and that kind of victory does not serve the republic well...
...Never mind that back home his grand plans for efficiency and honesty are making snail's progress...
...But I remember thinking this was the best news I'd ever heard about a president of the United States...
...No "thousand points of light," no "I'm on your side," no one-liners, no sound bites...
...Diversionary...
...So sweeping is his agenda that it will require weeks to sort out...
...Like the others, the Soviet leader called for the basic restructuring of international politics—for the rule of law, not force...
...His speech before the United Nations was an experience in political oratory that our recent campaign in no way prepared us for...
...He had been elected but had not yet taken office...
...Risky...
...Most likely, Kennedy was asleep in his suite while we camped outside the hotel's doors...
...Get ready for the Ralph Lauren presidency...
...Like them, he used occasion and oratory to command the global stage...
...Joking about this accident was obviously easy, unless you were witness to the carnage...
...They began to say at once that they would have won with a candidate less maladroit than Michael Dukakis...
...But most stayed, disappointed perhaps by the lack of content but satisfied in another more visceral way: here was someone who was having a harder time coping with the vision of President Bush than they were...
...Some had internal organs hanging outside their bodies, some had broken bones, many were in shock...
...For more than a decade, Lauren has been hooking middle-class and lower-class Americans on WASP aesthetics and pseudo-English gentility...
...Brad Wellinghouse Silver Spring [December 14, 1988] Washington Post Magazine Dr...
...the grapefruit-splattered spectacle of Thompson's incompetence was a fine metaphor for the American electoral system...
...It was as if the good doctor, in his own speechless, mutant way, was asking for absolution...
...November 6, 1988] New York Review of Books On the occasion of Governor Michael Dukakis's sacrifice to vox populi the venerable NYRB asks its resident H. L. Mencken to confect another puree of modern Mencken, and Murray Kemp-ton dutifully runs his blah once again through the Cuisinart and presents it to the flies: Even now they were reduced to a heavy lidded night of flickering hope that they might have held George Bush to fewer than 400 of 535 electoral votes...
...We hear he brings the broads in two at a time," the editor said...
...Some tried—and failed—to get their money back...
...The state police, who are responsible for administering Maryland's anti-cruelty statutes, did not do so...
...All sense of order left the show...
...Though some pigs survived the accidentwith no apparent injuries, several were severely injured...
...See what you can see...
...November 28, 1988] Washington Post A budding New Age Orwell speaks out on the correspondence page of the laudable Post just before 50 mg of Valium are administered: The Post's coverage of the pig truck accident on Route 95 north of Baltimore was inappropriate and unprofessional ("Pig Roundup Near Baltimore," Metro, Dec...
...This accident is really only the final cruel step in the pork production process...
...Stalingrad, site of an epic World War II battle, is once again Volgograd...
...Hunter S.] Thompson swayed on the edge of the stage, bent double, holding his microphone to the mouths in the crowd, a grapefruit shard dripping from his other hand...
...December 11, 1988] New York Times Soap opera atop the editorial column of the esteemed Times: Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points in 1918 or since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941 has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed yesterday at the United Nations...
...What frightened me...
...At times the best he could do was to make sounds like a raccoon that got hit by a pickup truck...
...The individuals involved in the accident clean-up —state police included—should be charged with cruelty to animals...
...The folks in Moscow had to see that Comrade Mikhail can set the world on its ear, outclass any Western orator and boldly proclaim that the erstwhile number one police state is going to show the world the way to the rule of law and decency...
...If persisted in, it could lead to American-style fascism...
...December 8, 1988] New York Pete Hamill, metaphysician, reveals his thesis on the impossibility of rape: When I was a young reporter for the Post in late 1960, I was once assigned to cover Jack Kennedy during one of his stays at the Carlyle hotel...
...Meager reward for prayer that such a result would be, its possibility offered cause for higher suspense than the Democrats had lately known in any recent hour after the polls closed in Kentucky...
...The principle is a worthy one and should be applied to Hoover as well...
...Richard Cohen on how to deal with resident Stalins if you do not happen to know what Stalin did, or what a leading American vacuum-cleaner tycoon does: The Soviet Union offers us few models to emulate, but it does offer one: the willingness to admit a mistake and change place names...
...Poppy," might never have been elected...
...December 12, 1988] Washington Post Rockets go off when Mary McGrory meets the fellow with the map of Florida on his forehead: Mikhail Gorbachev, somebody said, sounded as if he were running for president of the world...
...Still, if he must be judged a low card in a Democratic hand that looked as if it had been dealt no very high ones, except the singular Jesse Jackson, Dukakis had to contend with an electorate increasingly skewed to the middle class in times whose comparative peace and glistening, if inequitable, affluence provide scant promise for the challenging party...
...It was conducted with a brutality and lack of attention to basic issues that appalled, and the success of its ugly strategies flashed signals that this was the kind of electioneering we should expect during the next three national campaigns of this century...
...All fit...
...Anyone who saw this accident would feel sick next time he thinks about eating pork...
...The foggier Thompson became, the more he stumbled, the more the crowd cheered...
...Some of the audience didn't mind too much...
...Gorbachev's motives, his ideas merit—indeed, compel—the most serious response from President-elect Bush and other leaders...
...Andrew Galarneau [November 16, 1988] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 51...
...His bureaucratic achievements do not excuse or overshadow his abuse of power...
...for multilateralism, not unilateralism...
...This was cosmic stuff, an announcement of a new order, one in which the Soviet Union will march side by side with, although a step ahead of, other nations toward peace and reason on Earth...
...But whatever Mr...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
