The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS • The holy month of June saw the second coming of Mikhail Gorbachev to America, an event of spiritual dimensions exceeded only by the traveling revival show of the sainted...
...The Gorbachev party suffered another grievous loss when the Evil Emperor of Irvine, California, the Hon...
...Agran blamed his defeat on "outside instigators" for circulating an expose of his politics that appeared in these pages last May, a diagnosis confirmed by a Republican spokesman in Irvine who said the article, written by Mr...
...Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez now thinks that the traditional four-year system may be too demanding of his charges...
...Kempton has begun a controversy that he obviously cannot win...
...The commencement season ended on a hopeful note with the arrest of two Livingston (Louisiana) High School students charged with mischief for sailing paper airplanes at the teachers' section during graduation ceremonies...
...In another sign of the times, the seniors of Nashua (New Hampshire) High School were allowed to keep the 1967 Beatles hit "With a Little Help From My Friends" as their commencement song only after promising not to sing the line "I get high with a little help from my friends...
...THE CONTINUING CRISIS • The holy month of June saw the second coming of Mikhail Gorbachev to America, an event of spiritual dimensions exceeded only by the traveling revival show of the sainted Mandela, his murderous wife Winnie, and their disciple Jesse, a mission guided from afar by the trinity of Arafat, Castro, and Qaddafi...
...Now this so-called Kempton comes along and insists that he is alive...
...Brock is taking no credit, however, and suggests blame ultimately lies with Mr...
...Let him sue me for libel and prove that he is alive before a jury of his peers—assuming one can summon them back...
...We have to start looking at learning styles...
...Kitty Dukakis has thanked the American people for electing George Bush in 1988...
...Also needing a permanent home are the 30,000 bees evicted on June 13 from a 107-year-old Victorian house in Bayport, New York...
...Menem had his wife expelled from the Olivos presidential residence in Buenos Aires...
...Dear readers, please advise...
...He, however, offers no proof, no documentation, not even a photograph or helpful samples of bodily fluids...
...In America we've done Canada one better by extending distinctiveness to select members of the animal kingdom...
...last year, relieved himself against a wheel of Mr...
...That comes to a latifundium of 4,200 acres per owl pair—in other circumstances our progressives would be screaming for land reform...
...Murray Kempton came forward on the pages of New York Newsday and denied my report in last month's installment of "The Continuing Crisis" that he had passed away...
...David Rockefeller's private jet...
...I don't smoke dope," he moaned, "I don't drink bourbon...
...And so now this Kempton comes along and besmirches my reputation, claiming that he is not dead...
...None of this, unfortunately, was of any help in resolving a question which even Freud dared not ask, but which was posed with astounding regularity by the late Rex Harrison, who died on June 2: "Why can't a woman be more like a man...
...Gorbachev, who while in California refused to make a last-second campaign stop on behalf of his embattled ally...
...I have studied them with the utmost care, and, truth be known, the thought has occurred to me that Murray Kempton never has lived...
...June was also Nationa Accordion Awareness Month, a datum that went unnoted at the opening of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival where awareness focused exclusively on the person of Sen...
...If he's anything at all like Argentine President Carlos Murray Kempton, R.I.P...
...Anyone who will take the time to look into the issue will realize that Murray Kempton ceased to be alive many years ago...
...It might take longer for some students," he says...
...She has relatives in a similar bind in zoos in Cincinnati and San Diego...
...This could cost loggers in the Pacific Northwest 50,000 jobs, all because 2,000 nesting pairs of pockmarked owls are said to require 8.4 million acres of old-growth habitat to survive...
...An American journalist's claim to objectivity is his most important asset, more important to his professional advancement than the capacity to write clearly, to observe, to think, or even to pat one's editor on the back...
...Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Northern Spotted Owl an endangered species...
...Much as she wanted her husband to win, she went on, "being in the White House and getting into trouble is really hard...
...In news from overseas, 250,000 Hong Kongers, ignoring the advice of their quisling British governor "to look to the future," took to the streets on June 4 to commemorate the first anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, and on June 25 the Bush Administration's China policy won a belated victory when the Peking government permitted the departure of democratic activist Fang Lizhi...
...Read his writing in Newsday and the New York Review of Books...
...Yeltsin, during his visit to the U.S...
...His claim is without precedent...
...the sly Yeltsin replied when reprimanded by airport personnel...
...Perhaps, like most of us, she underestimates her husband...
...Rebel forces in Liberia captured the village of SmellNo:Taste, adjacent to the international airport outside Monrovia, and President Corazon Aquino signed a bill outlawing the Philippine mail-order bride business...
...Gorbachev's visitation concluded in San Francisco, where he met with Our Ron and Their Nancy, and traveled to Their Stanford University though not to Our Hoover Institution...
...RET 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 Menem, he would have found a way to deal with whatever trouble she might have caused as First Lady...
...David Brock, "singlehandedly won the ouster of the socialist mayor...
...Jesse Helms is so stupid, that when he sees a sign saying `Wet Floor,' he does" and "Jesse Helms is into small endowments, not unlike his own" were among the tastier remarks directed at him...
...Finally, on June 6, the Institute of Medicine told pregnant women to forget about all those vitamins and to gain more weight, and on that very day Houston police chief Elizabeth Watson officially became the nation's first pregnant police chief...
...Miss Newton-John's qualifications include an Australian accent, American citizenship, and a Malibu beachfront home that siphons off sand from adjacent properties...
...All was not bliss, alas, in view of growing American fascination with the Russian Beelzebub, Boris Yeltsin...
...On June 22, the U.S...
...At long last, Mrs...
...Miss Olivia Newton-John, the singer, was appointed United Nations ambassador on the environment...
...Stiv Bators, the lead singer for the early punk band the Dead Boys, who became a dead boy for good after being hit by a car in Paris...
...Jaime O'Neill, a community college teacher in Olympia, Washington, was hoping to hear...
...Peter Singh, a Sikh, performed as Elvis Presley at a community center...
...Miss Staller, the Italian member of parliament famous for her semi-nude campaign appearances, confined her politicking to Montreal's Sex Gallery, one of those institutions that have turned Quebec into a "distinct society...
...On June 25, my reputation for objectivity was trampled when the late Mr...
...Soundtrack tapes of the Fremont County Centennial Pageant in Ashton, Idaho, were found to contain instructions on how to castrate a bull, and in London, England, Mr...
...If I erred at all in my report of his death it was on the side of caution, but one cannot act hastily in these matters...
...visa while on a visit to divided Canada...
...It might be added that the Agran cause was also hurt by Miss Ilona "Cicciolina" Staller's inability to obtain a U.S...
...Yet, the truth being an absolute defense against libel, let this Kempton take his preposterous claims to a court of law...
...For years I have been reporting the deaths of eminent Americans in this section of the magazine and none has ever protested before...
...One beast that could use a little more living space is Rapunzel, a 1,725-pound Sumatran rhinoceros that recently found shelter at the Bronx Zoo...
...This is a very serious matter...
...An American Express poll of high school seniors found that 70 percent listed cash or a new car as their preferred graduation gift, and in New York City the good news was that whereas only one-third of the city's public high school students earn a diploma in four years, 57 percent do so within seven years of entering high school...
...I'm just a Russian peasant, what do I know...
...Of late his new students have been telling him that Socrates was an American Indian chief, that The Great Gatsby was a famous magician, that Andy Warhol wrote War and Peace, and that Ralph Nader is a baseball player...
...All I want to do is shake my turban...
...No sooner did a senior official in the Bush Administration acknowledge that "Yeltsin isn't some drunken buffoon" than word leaked that Mr...
...Larry Agran, was overthrown in the June 5 mayoral elections...
...In the final analysis, I was grateful things worked out the way they did," she said...
...In its place, they were forced to repeat an earlier line, "I get by with a little help from my friends...
...A more convincing stunt was pulled by Mr...
...Unsubstantiated assertions like this are what give journalism a bad name...
...Kemp-ton's sensational claims cannot but damage our profession...
...On June 12, Mr...
...Just the sort of thing Mr...
...WP...
...Jesse Helms...
Vol. 23 • August 1990 • No. 8
