Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM New York Times Once again, the eternal schoolmarm yells out from the vacuity that is Anthony Lewis: Something is missing in George Bush. An empathy gene, if there were such a...
...Either the LAPD lawmen and the returning troops are murderous thugs or they're all heroes: we'd like to have it both ways, but we can't...
...I wanted to be Henry Thoreau as a kid," he remembered...
...I have a feeling if you start doing that with a few friends, you'll be on the cover of Time magazine...
...Diane R Holman Laguna Beach [March 10, 19911 Washington Post Michael Kinsley, everyone's candidate for teacher's pet, makes a point that apparently can never be repeated too frequently about the shocking 1980s and does so with his usual gaiety and fey insight: There is no entry on "hair" in the index to Lou Cannon's fat new book on the Reagan presidency...
...And he said, `Well, at least you tried.' And I said, 'But we didn't try hard enough...
...I want no part of it...
...Bob Wieder, apparently a student of the Dukakis school of political humor: If not out of respect for our fighting men and women, then at least out of respect for the English language, take a stand against a growing tendency to reduce the Mideast war to Gulfspeak...
...Overpopulation puts added stress on every aspect of life...
...I am canceling my subscription to the Los Angeles Times...
...An instinctive response to the pain of other human beings...
...Next time you go to the store, put the eggs in the basket and the onions in the basket and just leave all the packages strewed all over the checkout counter...
...And I just used things...
...April 15, 19911 San Francisco Chronicle The first two paragraphs and the last paragraph of a column by Mr...
...April 19, 19911 New York Times An inscrutable interlude with another 1960s nutball: Joni Mitchell—the woman who exalted the hippie culture of 20 years ago in the counter-cultural anthem "Woodstockt—is not especially sentimental about the 60s...
...Reagan set a new standard of brazen duplicity of which George Bush and future presidents are the beneficiaries...
...There's a purity in 'Blue' that comes from an almost-nothing-left-to-lose attitude...
...This revelation might strike most people as less interesting than Kelley's allegation that Nancy was canoodling with Jerry Lewis on the desk of the Oval Office...
...An internal monitor that tells him when political calculation has to stop, yielding to concern for decency . . . Abroad, as at home, doing right can be more helpful to a President than focusing on politics...
...At the time of 'Blue,' I was very west, which is emotion, and as a result I couldn't communicate with the northeast, which is more rational and business oriented," she said...
...So we must rely on Kitty Kelley . . . The key reference is on page 292...
...March 15, 19911 Washington Post A cautionary tale on the perils of Atwaterism, piously boomed on the Posts front page after a crack reporter discovers forlorn in a homeless shelter, John F. King, former "conservative" genius and "GOP Wunderkind": He thinks about Atwater a lot these days...
...We sing anthems in praise of international law enforcement as we welcome our Air Force home for having done to citizens in Iraq—on a much grander scale—what the LAPD routinely does to citizens at home...
...An empathy gene, if there were such a thing...
...the world is his stage, and all that is not-man—space and Earth, women and children—are props for his performance...
...Criticizing the LAPD for emulating Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopfs law enforcement philosophy smacks of a crude and cynical double standard: it suggests that Americans will not permit at home what we so proudly do to Third World citizens abroad...
...War-born cliches are hell made banal...
...they didn't involve real people...
...The absence of feminist insight from the pages of a "thinking person's" journal, however, means there is nothing new about the news, that there are no new stories, only endless repetitions of an old one...
...Act like it...
...The thinner the layer, the higher the incidence of skin cancers...
...These officers are true heroes in the "new world order" tradition of "kicking butt...
...Man lusts and thinks and dreams and hurts and idolizes and and suffers...
...I was involved in politics...
...The loss of a feminist reader will not be felt, although the production of a newspaper that cannot be read by women who value themselves raises some interesting free-speech issues...
...One night recently, at a post-concert dinner party at which she, Sting, Bruce Springsteen and Don Henley shared a table, a young man approached and started waxing romantic about the 60s...
...Whenever he visited the White House to color the First Lady's hair, Julius also dyed the President's gray roots, which he had been doing secretly since 1968...
...This is the result of insensitivity on the part of producers who fail to acknowledge that our skin color ranges from ebony to dark brown to light brown to almost white—something that the nearly 30 million African Americans are acutely aware of...
...If any progress is to be made, we must show you how we failed.' " In tracing her own artistic growth in the past 20 years, Ms...
...Bush is a highly intelligent man, and he surely should be able to see that...
...The same film, which chronicled the life of the Rev...
...April 11, 19911 San Francisco Chronicle The Jonathan Swift of Ukiah makes another witty point: What's all this fuss about a gang of LAPD officers savagely beating up one black, convicted criminal...
...The list of ills is lengthy...
...Mitchell uses metaphors drawn from American Indian mythology, in which the four points of the compass represent different ways of perceiving the world...
...Richard L. Huff Ukiah [March 13, 19911 Modesto Bee The farfelu ramblings of Dr...
...Have I got that right...
...Nor in Reagan's own recent autobiography...
...I have been a Sunday subscriber for years, primarily because of the Book Review section...
...Now, he said, his views are radically different...
...I will not use the phrase "the mother of all" to describe head colds, keg parties, business deals, poker games, utility bills, hangovers, or fights with my spouse or lover...
...Although he still considers himself a conservative on some issues, he said, he believes that economic racism locks many blacks into a prison of poverty...
...Invite CBS television along to have a look...
...Just as he saw himself like Atwater at the zenith of his career, he said, he now sees parallels at the nadir...
...March 15, 19911 New York Times Shady cerebrations on the op-ed page of a great American daily the morning after lunatics commandeered the computers and went hog wild: For years, TV and movies have presented us—light skinned blacks like myself, and my darker brothers and sisters—with images of recognizable blacks that don't ring true...
...Join me in pledging the following oath...
...I ended up being George Patton with a little Marquis de Sade thrown in for character...
...President Bush would be ashamed of Police Chief Daryl Gates' wimpy failure to back up his soldiers on the thin blue line...
...After that I had to grow some claws to survive, which means I had to develop my northeast and become more emotionally detached...
...A friend should tell him: George, you've made it...
...I told him, 'Don't be romantic about it—we failed,' " she recalled...
...Plastics are produced with toxics that pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe, she said...
...3], I realized how routine the feminist-hating has become and I thought: I'm paying out my hard-earned money to be assaulted...
...That in turn accelerates the "greenhouse" effect and the depletion of the ozone layer, Caldicott said...
...Martin Luther King Jr., also featured Howard Rollins Jr., who is dark, as the much lighter Rev...
...I had no defenses...
...Governments must build mass transit, she said...
...Start a revolution against packaging in this country because packaging is just one of the things that is destroying the Earth...
...Why do we now threaten these honorable police officers with prosecution...
...That's one of the things that keeps running through my mind," he said...
...April 6, 19911 Los Angeles Times A grim reminder of the social benefits of government-supplied Valium for the gals of Laguna Beach: I don't do this lightly...
...With a grim laugh, he remembers the old saying, "We have met the enemy and he is us...
...March 17, 19911 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 43...
...You're President...
...The lack of attention to shades of skin color when choosing black actors to play historical figures was led by the casting of Cicely Tyson—in history's worst make-up job, a ludicrous skin lightener—as Coretta Scott King...
...People, he said, were just numbers to him, things to be manipulated in order to win...
...I would look at the business people and burst into tears...
...Homelessness, racism, poverty and drug addiction were just abstract issues...
...I was in a position to help change things...
...Paper packaging, made of wood pulp, requires the killing of trees...
...We didn't learn from history...
...But many will fmd it a good deal more plausible A small matter, perhaps...
...War is hell...
...Caldicott said solar energy research should be mandatory, abortion available to everyone, and education and medical care free to all the world's people...
...Just as a dying Atwater came to regret some of what he had done, King said, he too now rues his past...
...But you can read the saga of Ronald Reagan's hair as a metaphor for the 1980s, a time when deceit by public officials reached new levels of respectability...
...They had to lock me up to make that record...
...Helen Caldicott, the Australian crank strutting before 500 intellectualoids at famed Stanislaus State University, somewhere in California: She said everything from the bombs manufactured by multinational corporations to the packaging on the products plays a part in the Earth's gradual death...
...3, after reeling from "the white feminists of today who have their own black spokespeople" [Ishmael Reed's review of "Frederick Douglass," Feb...
...There is a smell of stale semen about the story...
...even recycling will not answer the problems of a wasteful society, Caldicott said...
...This so disconcerted many people that they told me they found it difficult to focus on the show...
...When I see or hear commercials in which actors moan, "I've got the mother of all headaches/heartburn/hemorrhoids/etc.," I will boycott those products...
...On Sunday morning, Feb...
...Andrew Young...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
