Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM Guardian In the inimitable Guardian, Britain's chief processor of Fabian flapdoodle, a Comrade Lawrence Sutton blows the whistle on the conspirators in Peking's pro-democracy putsch...
...As they persisted in waving through the porthole windows of the airplane, only large enough for Raisa's two flattened hands, the television announcer said that because their plane was not equipped for aircraft noise reduction, the people of South Minneapolis would surely hear it fly over...
...June 10, 1990] Hollywood Reporter Another tear-stained remembrance of the American Richard II by another of our country's gifted poetizers: Watching and listening to Nixon as he shifts and blurts out his take on things, one is again struck by the perverse singular status this banished shadow king enjoys, this reigning embodiment of forbidding times, when the streets were blank and dark with tears and hope burned with a gangrenous iridescence...
...The well-known television journalist revisits the scene of the war he once covered, and his short book, composed of brief chapters, vividly portrays both people and places...
...Safer tentatively and unhappily concludes that the war was a tragic waste, but he is uncertain who is to blame...
...In his own words: "I am not, or ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way social and political equality of the white and black races...
...Those who have studied history know that the comparison is hardly apt...
...In fact, his reasons for resisting Baltic secession efforts have been directed towards this end...
...Florio...
...In truth, there are no primitive cultures: just as everything can be expressed in every natural language, all the fundamental relationships of life are accommodated and given meaning in every actual culture—so all cultures are equivalently complex...
...Governor Jim Florio works fast...
...We watched these two on television, each enthralling their own audiences and then rejoining at the airport...
...And, most of all, thanks for the leadership...
...May 3, 1990] Washington Post Here we are ninety-one months into the longest economic growth period in postwar history and this is how Walter Mondale responds to George Bush's suggestion of a tax increase...
...May 14, 1990] Minneapolis Star Tribune Al Sandvik of Edina, lost in the literary raptures: My wife Lois and I came only within 4,000 or 5,000 feet of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev...
...June 22, 1990] Minneapolis Star Tribune Painfully cerebral historical reflections from a Francis Froelich, alas, one more victim of the American education system: Eric Black suggested in his June 3 article that Mikhail Gorbachev might one day be looked upon as the Soviet Union's Abraham Lincoln—the man who "saved the union...
...one man asked...
...June 28, 1990] Yale Daily News What passes for a Saturday night drunk at Yale University, one of the finest institutions of higher learning: The racism which pervades American society may stem from white people's subconscious fear of genetic annihilation through mixing with other races, a Washington psychiatrist said Saturday...
...Hey, Governor, read our lips: Thanks for the courage...
...He came across as the kind of old-fashioned, deal-making politician who ran the machines and local governments in the New Jersey towns and counties where we were born and raised...
...Welsing responded that a white supremacist society teaches blacks to hate themselves...
...He didn't seem like the kind of progressive, honest politician our generation admires (we're both in our 20's...
...May 28, 1990] New York Times Book Review Human rights violations against the English language, as committed by a Mr...
...Florio and Representative James Courter ran mud-slinging campaigns that brought the gubernatorial race to an all-time low...
...Besides, there was something we didn't like about Mr...
...June 10, 1990] Nation Introducing a must-read essay, "The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today," an editorialist at our favorite insane asylum makes some perfectly sensible points about the neighborhood Nazi and his Republican fellow traveler: On the surface Ellinor Langer's essay in this special issue of The Nation, "The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today," concerns a narrow spectrum of the ultra-right .. . But it is impossible to read Langer's account of anti-Semitism and racism at the fringes without the ominous sense that it also contains a message about our culture at its core, a distant early warning of the perils that racial thinking and ethnic conflict hold for the future...
...Given the evidence of the regimes' failure, Mr...
...We watched their plane lift and rise on the television screen and, an instant after the engine roar subsided there, outside our den window we heard a far off hum fattening into vibrations...
...If I teach you to hate yourself, you will destroy your image," she said...
...We wouldn't have it any other way...
...This is probably the most basic, deliberate, horrible economic mistake in American history and it was all driven by a disingenuous political strategy that has cost our nation terribly...
...Baltic secessionists want to create a society based on blind nationalism and marked by all of the inequalities that a market economy will allow...
...Hence primitivity is an interpretation imposed upon cultures, and by means of which we immediately place ourselves in a special relationship with their members, wholly different from that in which we stand to other cultures not so characterized...
...But that means that the primitive is not Other at all: in encountering it, we encounter ourselves, as we must have been or could or should have been had it not been for the benefits or discontents of civilization...
...CURRENT WISDOM Guardian In the inimitable Guardian, Britain's chief processor of Fabian flapdoodle, a Comrade Lawrence Sutton blows the whistle on the conspirators in Peking's pro-democracy putsch for the edification of his fellow clock-stoppers: The most prominent student leaders—Chai Ling and Wu'er Kaixi—are now based in Paris and have dropped all pretense of reforming Chinese Communism...
...Let's hope we learn our lesson and start to talk honestly and openly in these campaigns...
...No blood-alcohol test was administered at the time of this dithyramb: What I hope is that we'll all learn something...
...now he learns that the Vietnamese commanders were at least as ruthless, and that many Vietnamese, who thought they were fighting for independence, not Communism, are disillusioned with the fruits of victory...
...In 1988 I saw changes for the worse, as the profit motive had been encouraged in the intervening years...
...Arthur C. Danto whilst arguing the case for Cro-Magnon man, whose eloquence the moron seems to be emulating: The fictiveness of the concept can be deduced from the very meaning of the term, which connotes simplicity, basicness, the zero-degree of cultivation, mankind in its so-called natural state...
...How can we stop this violence in our communities...
...We hurried out into the backyard in time to see the plane fly overhead, nosing into the first sunshine of an otherwise glum Minnesota day...
...Western perceptions, Ms...
...And now look what he's done: raised taxes by $2.8 billion, the largest increase in state history...
...In a speech to 150 people at the Yale University Art Gallery, Frances Cress Welsing said that since whites comprise only ten percent of the world's population and the ability to produce pigment is a dominant trait, the mixing of races would result in the eventual genetic eradication of white traits...
...Their "Goddess of democracy" flagship is now a front for the god of capitalist consumerism...
...Why are blacks killing blacks...
...Reporting on the war decades ago, Mr...
...July 11, 1990] THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 43...
...In a 1981 visit to China, I saw many examples of kindness and comradeship under Communism...
...Safer disliked and distrusted our leadership...
...18, 1858...
...For a while, standing there in the grass, wet from the previous night's storm, we couldn't talk...
...Gorbachev has dedicated his life to creating equality of opportunity among the diverse peoples and ethnic groups that comprise the Soviet Union...
...Having grown up in the era of sound-bite politics, a la Ronald Reagan, we can't believe what we're seeing...
...Thanks for taking the risk...
...Stephen D. Dnistrian an "assistant director of public affairs at Phoenix House, a drug-rehabilitation center" and Maureen Muenster, a "freelance researcher" are elevated to transient greatness by the op-ed editor of the venerated Times for saluting the King George III of the Garden State: Robin Hood is alive and well, and working out of the State House in Trenton, New Jersey...
...Torgovnick writes in her discussion of Freud, "assume that the primitive is prior to the civilized and can be subordinated by it...
...I wouldn't have been surprised to see their wings waggle at us, so gracious were these two...
...July 16/23, 1990] New York Times Mr...
...Indeed, Lincoln's vision of a post-Civil War United States was one in which a white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant clique would brutally enforce the dictates of Northern corporate elitists...
...January 22, 1990] New Yorker Authoritative conclusions on the origins and comparative morality of the Vietnam unpleasantness as conveyed in a pithy review of the idiot's essay into Gibbon's art: Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam, by Morley Safer (Random House, $18.95...
...Lincoln, on the other hand, was hardly concerned with fairness and equal opportunity for peoples of color...
...Since he was sworn in just six months ago, he has shocked both friend and foe with several stunning moves . . . We didn't vote for this man, nor for his opponent...
...The sky swallowed up the noise and the sight of them, the first couple of a nation that, in another time, with another leadership, had threatened to annihilate us...
...Gorbachev desires to preserve a fair, multicultural, egalitarian society...
...There is, one might claim, a direct line between the burgeoning neo-Nazi Zeitgeist, symbolized by the Republican candidacies of David Duke, the former Klan Imperial Wizard in Louisiana, and Ralph Forbes, formerly of the American Nazi Party in Arkansas, and the Reagan-Bush legacy with its Southern strategy of pitting whites against black "special interests...
...Lincoln-Douglas debates, Charleston, Ill., Sept...
Vol. 23 • September 1990 • No. 9
