The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS • December is now filed away and with it all of 1988, which turned out to be a very unpleasant year, especially for those of us who had put our trust in the vaticinations of...
...According to Mr...
...Richard Cohen wrote his annual column on the occasion of the birthday of "my ole man...
...Who knows, Mayor Kurt Schmoke may meet the challenge yet...
...Washington Post columnist Mr...
...The book's title has not been divulged...
...continued on page 45) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 9...
...He has settled on "African-American," bringing this exercise in nomenclature around almost 360 degrees to the 1920s when progressive blacks renamed their race Afro-American and black conservatives such as George Schuyler snickered...
...Granted that Dannhauser's space may have been limited, I'd be grateful for some evidence of this "easily demonstrable love" where I, and so many others, have found only sourness and hostility...
...Like any good welfare recipient, Baltimore knows how to bite the hand that feeds it, and blaming outsiders (Mr...
...Then on December 21, 259 people perished on Pan Am Flight 103 when it was blown up by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland...
...But no, instead it was Governor Michael Dukakis who disappeared, though he punctiliously follows the high-fibre diet of all enlightened Americans and, come to think of it, the family hamster...
...Benito Mussolini...
...Washington, D.C...
...President Ronald Reagan and his wife had their last medical check-up at Bethesda Naval Hospital...
...The Space Shuttle Atlantis deposited a mysterious $500 million spy satellite in space...
...And Oman has banned Western pop music...
...TAS, October 1988)—the high point of the issue, and Bruce Bawer demonstrated, once again, that he's the soundest and most readable critic in the land...
...Yours in Public Service, —Terrence Scanlon, Chairman Consumer Product Safety Commission Washington, D.C...
...But when one looks at the political scene in Baltimore City and sees the one-dimensional machine at work, or better, not at work (as in most troubled American cities), a machine that gives us such senators-for-life as Sarbanes and Mikulski, a machine that refuses to lower the highest property tax rate in the state and thus stimulate growth, a machine that has virtually driven business out of the city for the promotion of charm and tourism, then I can see why Baltimore City is such an easy mark for the satire of John Waters, and why Divine himself said, when asked about his success, "It gave me the chance to get out of Baltimore," or words to that effect...
...Ledeen fails to report to your readers is that Mr...
...Dannhauser's only defense is to point out that The Closing of the American Mind is dedicated to these very students—so it is, and so what?—and to assert, without support, that "an easily demonstrable love of the latter suffuses its pages...
...The Associated Press reports that along with computer disks and textbooks, the best-selling items at Orange County, California's two public universities are condoms...
...Curiously, this year he has refrained from writing a column on the occasion of his mother's birth, his Aunt Beatrice's gall bladder operation, the time his pants fell down at the zoo, his brother George's divorce, his brother George's emergence from the closet, his brother George's threat to sue, and something about his cat being treated for worms...
...Yasser Arafat stupefied many and aroused the suspicions of others when on December 14 he seemed to renounce terrorism and recognize the state of Israel...
...And that's the difference between honorable journalism and the sort of garbage found all too often in Foreign Policy nowadays...
...On December 1, Mexico's new president, Sr...
...Blaming Baltimore Carroll Doherty laments the loss of Barry Levinson's "Bawlamer" (and who doesn't...
...Martyred PTL holyman Jim Bakker manifested signs of repentance, returning to the pulpit and offering to "get a gun and blow my head off" if it would help Christianity...
...I found it effusive to the point of smarminess, marred as it was by too many coy references to the author's friendship with Bloom and by his curious penchant for self-congratulation (" . . . brilliantly exposed in letters to the Chronicle by Werner J. Dannhauser and Arthur Kruger...
...Of course, Mr...
...There's more going on than the gritty details of American life depicted on "The Cosby Show...
...Gorbachev, but not even Miss Mary McGrory surpassed the headline in London's Today, which asseverated above a picture of Mrs...
...Republicans are preparing for yet another round of Inaugural balls...
...Six months ago Governor Dukakis was being widely boomed as the next President of the United States, and Vice President Bush was being written off as a sure loser...
...Prince Charles is fast earning the sobriquet Bon Mots Charlie with his objurgations of modern architecture...
...Queenan Assassins Apparently, Joe Queenan is successful, financially and otherwise...
...Its owner, Mr...
...Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi and Four Eyes...
...Mayor Marion Barry suffered the misfortune of turning up at a drug den just as the cops were moving in on one of his former employees, and at the University of Iowa conservative students upstaged local leftists' annual "CIA Off Campus" rally with a "Lime Jell-O Off Campus" rally that would have stupefied even the late Mr...
...Michael Boskin as chief economic adviser and the Hon...
...In Dusseldorf, West Germany, a philistine judge has refused to rule that a five-pound lump of rancid butter constitutes art...
...I'm among those readers who, like the reviewer in the New Republic, were put off by Bloom's uncharitable—nay, venomous—portrait of his students...
...Without Washington's help, let us hope...
...Apparently Detective Ron Lemke made the infelicitous eructation on his police radio, thus necessitating an obnubilation of the dyspeptic oratorio...
...Sausalito, California, declared itself the Republic's first cholesterol-free city...
...Donald Strong, the Santa at the Boulevard Mall, was arrested as a common frotteur for fondling women between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, the oldest of whom were having trouble enough maintaining their faith in the merry old soul...
...his book suggests, rather, that he despises them...
...It was Washington money (UDAG grants), after all, that kept the Inner Harbor from going under...
...RET CORRESPONDENCE October's Horror Show Andrew Ferguson's memoir of New Orleans was a hoot ("Wanna Party...
...Bush is making cabinet appointments...
...Ramon Jose Rodriguez, 23, a construction worker,Tassed away after a portable toilet fell on him from the fourth floor of a building site...
...Maynes, of course, felt no such obligation to his readers...
...Michael Ledeen returns to our foreign desk...
...The Rev...
...Bloom professes to pity them...
...What Mr...
...Six months ago 4,000 diplomas—all with the state's name misspelled—were presented, yet only this fall was the botch discovered and then by a mere student...
...Johannes Stuttgen, had sought $29,000 until confronted by Hun thrift...
...Jim Lushine, a trained meteorologist brought in from the National Weather Service, the loo probably wafted from the uncompleted fourth floor propelled by 30-mph winds—the thing was equipped with rollers but regrettably no wings, a matter the Consumer Product Safety Commission might well scrutinize...
...In the same article Ledeen praises the editor of the Washington Post Outlook section, David Ignatius, for debunking such "wacko stories...
...In Madison, Wisconsin, the full import of a typographical error is slowly spreading through the university community...
...Ignatius did not regard the Parry and Kornbluh article as "wacko...
...Jack Kemp as secretary of housing and urban development...
...Carlos Mejia Godoy, the composer of Nicaragua's Sandinista na8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 tional anthem, defected to Spain...
...The brisk sale "definitely has a lot to do with concern about AIDS and the fact that we have an extensive education program on this campus," boasted Miss Laurette Beeson of the University of California, Irvine, AIDS Education Project—from which one concludes that either both campuses abound with sodomites and drug addicts or that Miss Beeson's education program is an exercise in scare mongering...
...Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was sworn into office over the inscrutable complaints of opponents who held that his election was rigged, and in Miami, Florida, Mr...
...Indeed, he reprinted major sections of the piece in the September 4, 1988, issue of the Washington Post...
...Hoping to thwart employees from "pocketing" bus fares, a spokesman for the Southern California Rapid Transit District, Mr...
...Among his choices were Stanford University economist Mr...
...In Hong Kong, Justice Patrick George O'Dea has been forced to resign from that colony's supreme court, after it was revealed that whilst hearing testimony in a robbery trial, the erudite judge was also perusing a book...
...The repellent mess, titled "Corner of Fat," was dropped by a cleaning crew at Dusseldorf s Academy of Art in 1986...
...Charles William Maynes Editor, Foreign Policy Washington, D.C...
...They emerge in his book as caricatures combining the least attractive aspects of the automaton and the barbarian: unthinking, uncultured, incurious beings, shallow and promiscuous, their brains benumbed by rock music and TV...
...Most recently he described the reading room of the new British Library as looking "like an assembly hall for an academy for secret police," and Birmingham's central library as resembling "a place where books are incinerated, not kept...
...Cohen has all next year to bore us with such narcoleptic stuff...
...Sr...
...Why, I had the pleasure, even, of having a local pol (UDAG funded) ask me if I knew any rich Washingtonians who might want to invest in housing there as a tax write-off...
...Six thousand two hundred of the numinous sheaths have been sold since forty-four vending machines were placed in campus comfort stations...
...Christmas was celebrated with the usual threats to public nativity scenes by the American Civil Liberties Union and arrests of sex-crazed Santa Clauses...
...Sure, the Outlook section of the Post ran bits and pieces of the hogwash that Maynes published, allegingfalsely—that the NSC and the State Department were engaged in "propaganda and disinformation...
...As this column heads for the printer, the speculation mounts that some of Mr...
...Rich Jager, has vowed that the uniforms will be ready "within a month," and surely a pair can be found in Speaker Wright's size...
...Soviet Armenia suffered its most devastating earthquake since 1046, leaving 25,000 dead and 500,000 homeless, and causing President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to cut short his suave tour of New York during which he delivered an address at the United Nations that left listeners of a historic turn of mind convinced that the world's greatest living dictator has boned up on the public addresses of the late Sr...
...But Baltimore—and I'm speaking of Baltimore City—has a lot to answer for itself, I'm afraid, for the way the city has changed...
...TE.D...
...THE CONTINUING CRISIS • December is now filed away and with it all of 1988, which turned out to be a very unpleasant year, especially for those of us who had put our trust in the vaticinations of those medical experts who felt that 1988 would be the year in which singer Michael Jackson would disappear from the face of the earth, owing to his preposterous dietary proclivities...
...But Outlook editor David Ignatius made sure that his readers received, in considerable detail, a thorough debunking of the lunatic accusations...
...Norman Roth, who co-developed the heart pacemaker thirty years ago, was amply rewarded when he suddenly suffered second-degree heart blockage and received a pacemaker of his own...
...Jesse Jackson announced his intention to rename the Negro race...
...What an attitude...
...Sorry, but it ain't so, Joe...
...Michael Ledeen replies: Mr...
...There they besieged the wrong house after being called in to save a woman from an armed assailant...
...However, because the man was inconvenienced by a hamburger, he would not fall within our jurisdiction...
...On one point, in particular, he left me unconvinced...
...Based on his article "Character Assassins" (TAS, December 1988), he strongly prefers that characters in American fiction be equally fortunate...
...But now Mr...
...In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the joke was on the local police...
...Maynes, whose rumor-ridden publication is now the National Enquirer of foreign policy magazines, misses the point...
...Robert Mrazek of New York purchased an island retreat in the Bahamas, and Speaker Jim Wright was elected to another term as Speaker of the House at about the same time that authorities in Los Angeles announced a sartorial innovation for their transit employees eminently worthy of emulation in Speaker Wright's domain—to wit, pocketless pants...
...Harry Williams Washington, D.C...
...seemingly at the expense of federal encroachment from the South, the Washington yuppies, and Edward Bennett Williams ("The WashBalt Syndrome," TAS, November 1988...
...With this issue, Mr...
...I have forwarded the complaint to the Food and Drug Administration...
...In the aftermath of the Republicans' fifth presidential triumph since 1968, eight Democratic congressmen led by the Hon...
...In Crawfordsville, Indiana, Mr...
...Not My Department Your scatological pooh-poohing of the Consumer Product Safety Commission ("The Continuing Crisis," TAS, December 1988) was gracefully received...
...Vice President Bush continued filling posts for his incoming government...
...The prescience of Mr...
...Just as we were called colored," the poet gibbered, "but were not that .. . and the Negro, but not that . . . to be called black is just as baseless...
...i.e., the complete absence of growth in the environs around Inner Harbor (just walk east or west on Baltimore Street from Inner Harbor), the profusion of sports bars and nightclubs at the expense of commercial growth (the Brokerage is broke, Charles Street is struggling, while the Power Plant boasts of being the biggest nightclub in the East and the old Fish Market becomes a new entertainment complex...
...Baltimore can turn itself around, but the political scene will have to change before it does...
...Many American journalists became quite mashed on Mr...
...Lexington Market is halfway there as it shifts from selling "most of the parts of a pig" to fast food that disappears quicker, especially to the weekend rhythms of city-sponsored musicians), the blight of public housing downtown, arch symbol of that absence of growth, and symbol, as well, of that housing's absence in Roland Park, where Jonathan Yardley lives, and in Ruxton, where such caring people as Reg Murphy and Kathleen Townsend live, and, yes, a pit stop, as one sportswriter indecorously put it a while back, a place to get a beer and a crab-cake on the way to New York...
...But Professor Werner Dannhauser's defense of Allan Bloom was a disappointment ("Allan Bloom and the Critics...
...Gorbachev standing in the Armenian ruins, "SAINT RAISA...
...The assailant (who was in the house next door) tried repeatedly to surrender only to be ordered away by the officious cops who suspected him of being a nosy neighbor...
...Both men strike me as, if you'll forgive the suggestion, much too good for The American Spectator...
...Klein New York, New York Maynes' Point In your December 1988 issue Michael Ledeen [in "Presswatch"] excoriates Foreign Policy for printing an article by Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh, who report on a propaganda and disinformation campaign run out of the National Security Council during the Reagan Administration...
...Terry Eastland becomes TAS's Presswatch columnist, and Mr...
...Arafat's former colleagues were responsible for that bomb and decent impulse urges that justice be done...
...Three Miami homicide detectives (one, Detective John Buhrmaster, being a former Florida officer of the year) have been publicly disgraced and transferred to new jobs for participating in a burp cover-up...
...The University of Wisconsin faculty may be even more intellectually inert than Stanford University's, which is to say that the only thing that differentiates its members from your average New York City bag woman is that the Wisconsin dolts have lost their bags...
...What's worse, those engineers, physicists, systems analysts, and investment bankers he so sorely wants to read about can just as easily be losers, drunks, wackos, addicts, or creeps...
...Doherty is certainly not alone) who arrive in "$40,000" cars is easier than seeing the rot under the glitz...
...And another Democratic presidential candidate, shaped by the incomparable kultur of bumper-sticker liberalism, has bitten the dust...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
