Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Great Books Series Another example of the ghastly prose and fractious thought that one has to endure to be a faithful leftist: And there was salvation there, in the New World,...
...This was beginning to feel good...
...When so many have so little . . . well, you know the rest...
...Fox Butterfield of the celebrated Times of New York conducts an interview with the lunatic fringe: But Mr...
...I was free to continue this experiment in compassion or I could grow impatient and crush my captive at will...
...from: The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, by Kirkpatrick Sale...
...What a lucky spider...
...September 30, 1990] Germantown Gazette (Germantown, Maryland) A concerned reader points out the need for more surface-to-air missiles in historic Germantown: As a resident of Clarksburg (specifically, Clarksbrook Estates), I would like to alert readers to a concern I have...
...What happened here was, we were on a tremendous high," he said...
...Today's (Aug...
...He is a historic figure—one of Shakespearean dimensions...
...September 30, 1990] Baltimore Messenger The Marcel Proust of Baltimore turns his attentions to geopolitics: An open letter to Presidents Bush and Saddam Hussein: Gentlemen, I was passing time last night trying to balance my monthly bank statement and, at the same time, listening to the radio for the latest round of madness from the Middle East...
...Helen M. Ford Clarksburg [July 25, 1990] Santa Barbara News-Press Ruminations of a potential mass killer at large in Santa Barbara: First, I double dare you to print this...
...I've also observed a concomitant increase in the number of rabbits in the yard, and for the first time I'm aware of, squirrels...
...But this reporter was serious...
...I did not kill him . . . Instead of violence, I used the point of my pencil to maneuver my uninvited guest onto a piece of tissue paper, whereupon I trapped him by quickly folding up the corners...
...Nine out of ten people that I speak with about the mall think it is obscene, too big, too gaudy, too much, no matter how you look at it...
...I carried the hostage-laden pouch outside to the back porch and flung the whole thing down onto the lawn several feet below...
...The Governor of the state was running for President...
...that colonization and settlement was salvation, and they peopled both continents with conquerors, and it was not that either...
...I chose the former course and immediately sensed that I was on the right track...
...Hers would focus on gay women because that's where her interests lie, but she sees other mini-environments made up of heterosexuals or of gay men...
...But, because these women believe that their desires are perfect guides to behavior, none of them says 'It's got to be done," she wrote last spring in Women of Power magazine...
...Dukakis retains an uncanny equilibrium, a detachment, even a sense of optimism, that friends praise as strength and critics deride as lack of feeling...
...I thought that the purpose of our lives here on Earth was to become more spiritually evolved...
...More than that, it was the best choice imaginable because the new laureate has contributed more to dismantling the Soviet Communist Empire than all of his four predecessors combined or any other person in the world for that matter...
...We go into the locker rooms not because we want to, but because we have to...
...Should residents begin keeping small pets indoors, in light of the potential risk...
...In an interview in his office in the gold-domed Statehouse on Beacon Hill, Mr...
...The quote saying the reception from the community is outstanding is erroneous...
...Her theory leaves room for jobs no one would want to do...
...My family sat around the breakfast table and groaned and booed while I read out-loud your front-page article on the opening of Nordstrom...
...These are large birds—one flew low, within twenty feet of me, about a week ago, and had a wingspan of about five feet...
...He is the first card-carrying Communist to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and I highly suspect he will be the last...
...I had heard it so many times before that I wanted to roll my eyes, say something about it being 1990 and turn the conversation to the substantive issues of the sad, disgusting story of the New England Patriots and sportswriter Lisa Olson...
...We all agree that you did not put this article on the front page, or in the paper at all, because of the enormous amount of money the mall is pumping into your paper with their endless full page ads...
...They're quite graceful, beautiful and wild...
...October 19, 1990] Los Angeles Times An exigent report on the higher intellections of Sonia Johnson, excommunicated Mormon and former presidential candidate on the Citizens Party ticket now living in an "experimental community" with a handful of women near Albuquerque, New Mexico: Johnson envisions other communities based on the same philosophy...
...Trusting their feelings and knowing that they spring directly from their values, they realize that since none of them wants to clean it, something is wrong with the toilet, not with them...
...Suppose, Johnson said, that each woman in the community checks out her feelings and finds that, nope, cleaning toilets doesn't fit in...
...My whole family bets you won't...
...A toilet also takes "marvelous, scientifically unreproducible organic matter . . . and carts it off," she said...
...Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95] New York Times Mr...
...He acknowledged that voters in Massachusetts are particularly bitter...
...The women thus could decide to replace the conventional toilet with custom-made composting toilets, she says...
...I'm just concerned about neighbors who have small cats and dogs that might be at risk for harm...
...My concern is for small pets, i.e., small cats or dogs, that could be about the same size and weight as a rabbit...
...Might an eagle prey upon someone's small pet...
...After Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Brodsky, another Soviet dissident has been awarded the Nobel Prize...
...The name of this no...
...As before, the choice was precise and to the point...
...Jack Hermann Cedarcroft [August 29, 1990] 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...
...I am not a veterinarian, but perhaps readers should consult their veterinarians as to whether it is still prudent to allow small pets outdoors...
...For one thing, toilets are too high for most women, Johnson said, and they waste countless gallons of water...
...1 Soviet dissident is Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the President of the U.S.S.R...
...Dukakis said he does not feel personally rejected by the people of Massachusetts...
...It's Camelot all over again...
...What next...
...It was there especially in the Indian consciousness, in what Calvin Martin has termed "the biological outlook on life," in which patterns and concepts and the large teleological constructs of culture are not human-centered but come from the sense of being at one with nature, biocentric, ecocentric, and where there was myth but no history, circular rather than linear time, renewal and restoration but not progress, imaginative apperception far more subtle than science, understanding without words or even ideation, sacred rather than material interpretation of things, and an interpenetration into earth and its life-forms that superceded [sic] an identification with self or species...
...This mall pays homage to man's greed and selfishness...
...So I told her...
...They thought first that exploitation was salvation, and they went at that with a vengeance, and found new foods and medicines and treasures, but that proved not to be...
...Melor Sturua, a "political columnist" for Izvestia now a fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, demonstrates that even a lifelong Communist can write ad copy for Yankee soap operas: And so the Nobel Prize committee continues its vendetta against Soviet Communism...
...on the contrary, I love watching them soar and glide along...
...Everybody knew I was a long shot, including yours truly, and lo and behold, it gets better and better, and suddenly he's won the nomination...
...I don't want to convey the impression I have any animosity toward eagles...
...People are angry generally across the country," he said, wearing a familiar button-down shirt, his hair a little grayer than during the Presidential campaign...
...I don't think she knew the answer...
...Why do women have to go into the locker room...
...At that instant, he was in mortal danger because my usual response to intruding insects is to squash and dispose with great dispatch...
...A life hung in the balance and I was God...
...And just like that, my job was done...
...He was now my prisoner and all of my options were still open...
...I always reply that I won't subscribe because your paper is biased and capitalist...
...CURRENT WISDOM The Great Books Series Another example of the ghastly prose and fractious thought that one has to endure to be a faithful leftist: And there was salvation there, in the New World, though it was not a kind the Europeans then understood...
...that progress and power and technics wrested from the new lands was salvation, and they made mighty nations and towering cities in its service, but it was not even that...
...How many people, for instance, really want to clean toilets...
...Every month I get a phone call from your paper asking me to subscribe, telling me of the greatness of your publication...
...Without notice, a tiny black spider came marching across my desk in a right-toleft direction within six inches of my right hand...
...That usually stops them in their tracks...
...The Nobel Prize awarded to Gorbachev dramatically underscores the tragic dilemma that haunts him...
...Judging from the way this experience made me feel, I know I made the right decision...
...A life was saved and it made me very happy...
...Over the past year, I've noticed eagles overhead (I believe they are golden eagles, but I am not certain...
...The salvation there, had the Europeans known where and how to look for it, was obviously in the integrative tribal ways, the nurturant communitarian values, the rich interplay with nature that made up the Indian cultures—as it made up, for that matter, the cultures of the ancient peoples everywhere, not excluding Europe...
...18) paper proves my point...
...This time for peace...
...October 17, 1990] Washington Post Mr...
...I can't help but wonder if, when all the saber-rattling in the desert is over, will you be able to say the same...
...August 21, 1990] Washington Post Miss Christine Brennan emerges from the men's locker room, where she has braved the hairy armpits, the gigantic arses, the almost unbelievable groins, the stench of sweat and worse, to report the sporting news to a grateful nation, and, mirabile dicta, confronts the last Victorian gal: The question came from one of the dozens of television reporters who had questions to ask this week...
Vol. 23 • December 1990 • No. 12
