Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Great Books Series In a magisterial autobiography, Mrs. Ann Richards, treasurer of the great state of Texas, brings us right to the maternity bed at the historic moment of her...
...November 2, 1989]Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Virginia) Rebecca J. Ochs, doubtless a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, pens a missive to her hometown gazette: I think that the news is too depressing for some people...
...November 17, 1989] New York Times Book Review In reviewing a new biography of our fallen leader, the poet R. W. Apple takes English to the outer limits of aesthetic improvisation: Some will regret the absence of psychohistorical techniques in this book...
...November 6, 1989]Modesto Bee Addressing members of the National Newspaper Association, Dr...
...Bush's economic policies...
...If we were average or good or great, we obeyed the law and the high standards you set...
...He added: "If George Bush, the morning after the California disaster, had said—'It took an earthquake to wake me up...
...June 16, 19891 Washington Post Mr...
...Clearly, the players who enact it thereby also tell it...
...This was the message he shoveled from the back of a train going up the West Coast, and, Morris tells us, "Nowhere, from the hot Central Valley through the neat, cloudy, small cities of Oregon, would he face an audience that did not cheer his claim of smears and savings, did not accept his distorting view of public morality and political motives, did not scorn and when the chance came even punish his opponents . . . " That's the baffling thing that our biographers have to keep coming back to: an awful lot of people like Tricky Dick...
...The wall has played an important role in preserving the peace, and continues to do so...
...America's policy of containment undoubtedly hastened the day...
...Commandments are out...
...from: Straight From the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places by Ann Richards with Peter Knobler, Simon and Schuster, $18.95] Washington Post During the solemnities of a Carter Administration reunion (held, as luck would have it, on the tenth anniversary of the fall of our Tehran Embassy), Governor Neil Goldschmidt of Oregon reveals himself to be a stand-up comedian of uncommon gifts: "President Carter, you chose the honest, the caring, the committed to serve with you...
...I don't really know how to get men permanently," she says...
...Condemning the wall is easy and safe: no one likes it, least of all its East German and Soviet creators, for whom it stands as a symbol of failure and impotence...
...Mikhail Gorbachev's willingness to address the issue in his visit to West Germany is likely to raise hopes that the wall could soon come down...
...M. Steven Fish, a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford University, reveals the derisible quality of mind being engauded with New Age learning at the Palo Alto playground: Should the Berlin Wall be demolished...
...My Mama lay on the birthing bed, only hours after I was born, and wrung that chicken's neck so that Daddy would have supper when he got home...
...One reason is reporters write this information to take up space in the newspaper...
...It's getting difficult, though, since the meat and the cheese are weighed every day now in an attempt to make the size of burritos more consistent...
...Repetition within immutable lines and rules...
...I should never have said what I did, because I couldn't know what was going to happen...
...That means she wants you...
...Reston conceded that Ronald Reagan "could be elected today," despite what he described as "the damned disgrace" of Mr...
...there's no such thing as maternity leave when you're poor, not even for a moment...
...After the recent eight-plus recent years of greed and indifference to human suffering and selling of the government in office, it makes every day of your administration like a sabbath of celebration...
...Tearing it down now could give conservative elements an issue to use against Mr...
...R. W. Apple, Jr., James Reston proves that his retirement came about a decade ago, which was about two decades too late: But Mr...
...Yolanda doesn't have too much trouble scamming...
...Today, the commandments wouldn't go over...
...If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return [to home plate], a vast, communal poem about separation, loss, and the hope for reunion—if baseball is a Romance Epic—it is finally told by the audience...
...November 5, 1989] Washington Post Book World As the Republican ascendancy continues, the democratic fires abate even in the populist bosom of book reviewer Robert Sherrill: Morris's account of the Nixon-Douglas campaign shows that under properly poisoned conditions, it can happen here...
...Six out of 10 Californians voted to send Nixon to the U.S...
...Mama had gotten a neighbor woman to come in to cook supper for Daddy that night, but the neighbor woman couldn't kill the chicken that she was supposed to cook...
...October 27, 1989] New York Times In his valedictory interview with Mr...
...So eat it and know...
...Reagan's and Mr...
...She makes a lot of new friends, she says...
...November 12, 1989]New York Times Mr...
...But we should heed the Soviet leader's words at a Bonn news conference yesterday...
...November 6, 1989] City on a Hill (University of California, Santa Cruz) A young professional caters to the gourmets of Santa Cruz, California: What's it like working at Burrito Express...
...By joining his predecessors in calling for its demise, President Bush does nothing to erode the foundations on which the Berlin Wall stands...
...November 7, 1989] Newsweek A. Bartlett Giamatti, the late baseball commissioner, elucidates baseball in the kind of professorial flumdiddle that makes just and enlightened souls yearn to burn every American university to the ground: Baseball is counterpoint: stability vying with volatility, tradition with the quest for a new edge, ancient rhythms and ever-new blood—an oft-told tale, repeated in every game in every season, season after season...
...In conclusion, I think that reporters should be more sensitive to the feelings of the people who read the newspaper and stop writing stories just to make money...
...Gorbachev and his fellow reformers...
...Although after a few weeks it was all a waste of time, because the reporters thought wrong...
...Morris recalls that when Nixon was Ike's running mate in 1952 and disgruntled Republicans leaked details of his $16,000 slush fund, Nixon counterattacked by claiming the leak had come from communists and that the fund was set up to save taxpayers' money...
...My Daddy would be getting home any time now and something had to be done...
...It's high stress...
...Senate in 1950, just as six out of 10 Americans voted to re-elect him president in 1972...
...Michael Kinsley, still playing courtier to the Republic's neurotic Liberal clerisy: Conservatives, having said the collapse of communism would not happen, now claim credit for it...
...But it's like a family there, a weird family...
...Ann Richards, treasurer of the great state of Texas, brings us right to the maternity bed at the historic moment of her birth and a barnyard friend's demise: I finally arrived at six the next morning...
...If this is the tale told, who tells it...
...But if a reporter is not sure of himself or he thinks that what happened that day does not fit the peoples' likings, he should keep it out of the newspaper and into the business that it belongs to...
...The wall can disappear only when those conditions that created it fall away...
...People hear of deaths and get all worked up over a death of someone they don't know...
...It is the Romance Epic of homecoming America sings to itself...
...But the other true tellers of the narrative are those for whom it is played...
...November 12, 1989] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 51...
...Gloating over the upheavals and changes that are transforming the Communist world weakens Eastern-bloc proponents of reform, who are locked in battle with conservative adversaries...
...We're going to raise taxes'—the country would have raised its arms in applause...
...Of course, everything in the newspaper is not negative...
...But I can get them for a few days...
...Ted Turner of the Turner Broadcasting System divulges his latest findings in the fields of world history and personal growth: "When Moses went up on the mountain, there were no nuclear weapons, there was no poverty...
...Can I take your order...
...Nobody around likes to be commanded...
...But lust will always prevail...
...If Yolanda likes you, you'll get a fat burrito, really fat...
...Yolanda is the one with no hair...
...And communism obviously deserves more credit than it has gotten for being able to produce its own collapse...
...Another example is if reporters think some other country is going to bomb us then we might stay inside our houses all day thinking that a bomb is going to hit us...
...You'll see her there, standing in the window, smelling like beef...
...I do not—not only because I have little confidence in them, but also because I wonder whether any technique can fully explain the crippling lack of self-confidence, the hatreds, the self-obsession, the sheer awfulness of Richard Nixon's personality...
...For example, it scares us when people die in car accidents—to the point that we don't even want to go out on the road, thinking that some crazy man is drunk and is going to hit us...
...Sure readers like to be informed of the happenings in the world and to be entertained, but why does the whole city or state, depending on the newspaper, have to know about funerals and weddings of other people...
...The wall was raised in a concrete situation and was not dictated only by evil intentions," he said...
...He's right...
...We've got good information in Washington, but we haven't got that pipeline to the Lord...
...But the party line that containment was abandoned in the 1970s and had to be reinvented by Reagan is mostly myth...
Vol. 23 • January 1990 • No. 1
