The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS • In the first month of the new decade the official Laotian radio broadcast the solemn judgment of millions of adepts of Dr. Marx when it intoned that 1989 was "a nightmare...
...That New York City remains a vigorous intellectual hub was vividly demonstrated by that legendary hoaxer and teacher at Manhattan's New School, Mr...
...Skaggs, who went on to speculate that colleague Abel, despite access to the New School's erudite faculty, may have "run out of ideas...
...In East Germany former Marxist-Leninist wizard Mr...
...Alan Abel, who duped much of the Manhattan press into misreporting the winner of a $35 million Lotto jackpot...
...There is a whole generation of young Americans out there to be deprogrammed, Tom & Jane...
...Hayden's graffiti as "white gang stuff," and Mother Jane had always raised youngli.oy to be a person of color...
...3, yet still there are no changes at the Harvard Law School or in the Cuban Politburo...
...Muslim-made bean pies are a Muslim specialty item...
...Kelson had also noticed the accused's posterior the fastidious prosecutor replied, "I personally never cast my eyes upon a 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 defendant's nether regions . . . but the witness apparently did...
...In Bulgaria the same status befell former Bulgarian leader Mr...
...Darron Anderson, 21, is no longer quite so proud of one of his comeliest assets...
...In Washington Mr...
...The United States Playing Card Company conferred its annual awards for "best" headlines on four of the nation's most authoritative newspapers, among them the Sun for "Grossed Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient," the National Enquirer for "Politician Gives Birth—To His Twin Brother," the Globe for "Man Explodes On Operating Table," and World Weekly News for "Bride's Kiss Makes 80 Guests Sick...
...Rick Walker further described Mr...
...but at this writing it appears that the New York intellectual community is leaning toward the Skaggs position, though all await Susan Sontag's analysis in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books—if there is a forthcoming issue...
...On January 10, an ambulance carrying a critically ill man to Bellevue Hospital was brought to a halt by a laughing delivery-man's double-parked UPS truck...
...Richard Craft, winner of the Washington Times's coveted Gruesome Murder of the Year Award, was sentenced on January 8 to fifty years in prison for murdering his wife and disposing of the corpse via a wood chipper...
...The bizarre sociology of New York City continues to supply stories of singular contrast and imbecility...
...Think of what the- administration did to Noriega, and Noriega, true to the voodoo catechism, always swaddled himself in red underwear...
...He once owned eighty-five...
...Zachary stepped back out on the streets of Manhattan his chances of being mugged, murdered, or sexually molested were greater than were he to walk the streets of Beirut—yet his civic concern is his neighbor's smelly magazine...
...Abel's work as "a publicity stunt...
...Joey Skaggs, formerly of the School of Visual Arts, whose hoaxes include duping a television station into presenting him as "Joe Bones, head of a Fat Squad of diet-enforcers," was moved to depreciate Mr...
...In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the famously callipygous Mr...
...Peter insisted that he was only kidding...
...He had many other distinctions, some of which could have gotten him before cancer did on January 2. Among the frauds of the old decade to expire was Mr...
...His book sold eight million copies in more than thirty languages, even though after its initial success the amused Mr...
...and the Czech government asked Moscow to remove its troops, post haste...
...When Mr...
...And there are more New York tales...
...Connor, whose communications director, Miss Amy Solomon, is "chemically sensitive...
...At Harvard University researchers released a thoughtful report discrediting the claim that oat bran is the health food of the decade, though it made no mention of the fact that the stuff tastes somewhat like peat moss...
...Richard Zachary, who showed up at a Manhattan hearing on smelly magazines wearing a gas mask...
...Laurence J. Peter, author of The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, died in his sleep...
...Todor Zhivkov...
...The Los Angeles Times reports that dialogue is continuing between Los Angeles police officials and the Nation of Islam to propitiate hard feelings that have steadily worsened since police officers arrested an unnamed Muslim who had stepped into traffic while attempting to sell a bean pie...
...Anderson got five years...
...It's not complex," averred Mr...
...Aldo Gucci, who brought the Gucci label to the U.S., passed on in Rome...
...William McEntire, who became indignant over a faulty cheeseburger...
...Dinkins arrived in the mayor's office trailing behind him hundreds of favors rendered and thousands of favors sought, not to mention his tricky tax returns, stock deals, classic garbage contracts...
...On January 17, Washington's controversial Mayor Marion Barry declared that the capital's war on crime was succeeding, twenty-four hours before he himself was apprehended on charges of possession of cocaine at the Vista International Hotel (Room 727...
...A good point that, and during January the Polish Communist party shed its name and heaved aside the red star from all official stationery...
...Ronald J. Longo, 45, was convicted of second degree murder for his actions in defending a waitress at the Spa City Diner from the complaints of another customer, the late Mr...
...His was a useful life...
...Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, 58, another Indian guru to die of Rolls Royce poisoning...
...Further details of the trial are not available, but prosecutor John Kelson asserts that upon seeing Mr...
...Finally, State Senator Martin Connor of Brooklyn has gone before the New York State Senate to demand that magazines bearing "fragrance strips" be banished from the state...
...Longo killed Mr...
...Can it be that in the Republican 1990s this impressionable young man has fallen under the spell of the Republican National Committee and its activist arm, the Ku Klux Klan...
...Anderson from behind she "was adamant...
...Corbin had the distinction of being an aide and lifetime loyalist to Mr...
...Erich Honecker was arrested...
...Abel's deception set off a stupendous debate among the city's intelligentsia...
...True to his parents' code of social consciousness, the young moralist was wearing a "Heal the Bay" T-shirt at the time of his arrest, but there is irony here...
...Abel has defended himself, insisting that his hoax abounds with "social significance" and "nuance...
...Anti-Armenian rioting in the southern Soviet republic of Azerbaijan approached the dimensions of civil war, motivating the Kremlin to send the Red Army into action in the province...
...In a follow-up on a story from last month's "Crisis," Mr...
...David N. Dinkins, the first of the black Irish to be elected mayor of New York since Mayor Jimmy Walker, was inaugurated...
...In these dark days of the Bush Terror no New York egghead knows what to expect next...
...John F Kennedy, Jr., who plans a second attempt to pass the New York Bar Association exam no matter what the odds, broke from his onerous studies to fly to Rome, New York, where he solemnized the closing of a local lunatic asylum, comparing it to the dismantlement of the Berlin Wall...
...On January 29, in Washington, D.C., the Food and Drug Administration drastically limited the use of Red Dye No...
...Troy Hayden, son of Manuel Antonio Noriega look-alike Tom Hayden and Miss Jane Fonda, has been arrested in Los Angeles, California, for spray-painting what police call "gang-type" graffiti on The Environment during a nature walk through metropolitan Los Angeles...
...Feminists shuddered when in Ballston Spa, New York, a Mr...
...Manhattan's assistant district attorney Mr...
...Anderson, who was accused of being one of the two men who robbed Garfield's Restaurant and Pub, has now been identified beyond any doubt by a waitress who recognized his strikingly beautiful buttocks...
...McEntire with a knife...
...In response to queries as to whether Mr...
...Robert F. Kennedy, a friend to former CIA Director William Casey, and to The American Spectator...
...While sirens screamed, the laughing deliveryman "purposely slowed down," according to testimony gathered by concerned UPS officials, and leered lewdly at the disappointed paramedics...
...Quite possibly the awards committee-did not have time to evaluate a lulu from the boy editors of Time—to wit: "Man of the Decade, Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Tammany Hall returned to life on January 1, when Mr...
...California Highway Patrol Sgt...
...Marx when it intoned that 1989 was "a nightmare year for socialism...
...History cannot be delayed forever, comrades...
...The actress Miss Ava Gardner died of natural causes in London, and in Los Angeles Mr...
...When a friend of the ailing patient pleaded "He's dying, let us through," the deliveryman cracked up...
...The only hazard New Yorkers should face when opening a magazine is a paper cut, not a migraine headache," attests the enlightened Mr...
...Responding to widespread disparagement that he had shown "apparent lack of emotion," the former airline pilot declaimed that "I have feelings like everyone else...
...McEntire had wanted lettuce and tomatoes with his viand...
...Paul Corbin died, aged 75...
...RET THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 7...
...Adding momentum to this latest humanitarian drive is that paradigmatic New Yorker, Mr...
Vol. 23 • March 1990 • No. 3
