Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
Cleveland Plain Dealer Satire? Columnist Phillip Morris at work: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is without question the most dangerous judge in America. . . . Thomas hasn't added a shred of...
...But she seemed neither apologetic nor exhausted as the congregation greeted her with a standing ovation...
...I guess you 82 The American Spectator May 1992 had to have been there, but it was the way of saying that one purpose of Western religion was to lay patriarchal claim to the miracle of birth...
...I knew I was going to throw it out the first chance I got...
...There isn't much else to tell...
...Muerto...
...The dead bird went next into a vat of hot water, then into the poultry equivalent of a spin cycle, to emerge looking as innocuous as any plucked chicken you buy in the store...
...So when Steinem said, "Them what eats can also cook," and, "We've shown that women can do what men can do, now we must show that men can do what women can do," I figured she never laid a glove on me...
...March 5, 1992] New Republic The Oxford-educated Yale undergraduate mind of Naomi Wolf pursuing the high aesthetic points of slop-pop: While the rights to vote, be educated, and get equal access to wages and health care all serve as gateways to feminism, the gleaming secret, the unspoken pulse, of feminist commitment is the orgasm...
...The American Spectator May 1992 83...
...But no chimp has ever been seen to grab a condom and use it properly...
...One accepts a byproduct of instant death, lingering illness and a cancerous legacy...
...She got things off to an unsettling start by likening the layout of a church to a woman's reproductive organs...
...In our family the wife is credentialed, employed and hooked into the system, whereas the husband has a high school diploma and improvises a freelance vocation at home during his children's school hours...
...Stone apparently decided to drive his car right off the cliff...
...I've come to have severe doubts about Columbus," he said, "about Washington, about the civil war being fought over slavery, about World War I, about World War II and the supposed fight against Nazism and Japanese control of resources...
...Steinem's oration on self-esteem and the enduring effects of child abuse electrified my daughter, and when the time came for questions Casey rose to speak...
...I became a feminist because when I was 15, I was given the essential feminist gift: a safe loss of virtue unmarked by social ostracism...
...not that the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearing and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial revealed "filth" at hie core of certain male-female relations in our society, but the public airing of such, the very hearings and trials, are the problem...
...Steinem...
...I spent the afternoon in a fit of self-loathing that was only made worse by the fact that every time I opened my briefcase I found a dead pheasant in it...
...Steinem's new book as an apology for activist feminism and a confession of personal exhaustion...
...No one made me sign a release that it would be used for non-threatening, egalitarian, unphallocentric activity...
...That is feminism, and that's why it's sexy...
...Turning to me, he added, "You want it dead, right...
...As she talked I considered the state of the patriarchy in my household...
...We were the stimulus to the West to develop modern democracy...
...The other suggests a natural balance with energized crops protecting themselves against uneconomic weed competition...
...I and the other fellows spent most of the morning on our knees in the fetal position while Steinem flailed away at our machismo—which she aptly defined as sexual fascism...
...he asked...
...yet, it is rarely advanced as a means of eradicating boxing that poverty itself be abolished...
...Almost by definition, the only single thing that people do that no other animal does, is to practice contraception...
...To thrilled applause, he concluded, "I don't even know if I was born or who my parents were...
...that it is the social conditions feeding boxing that are obscene...
...Thomas hasn't added a shred of original thought to the court, but he has brought an irrepressible desire to change its constitutional politics...
...Muerto...
...She created a sensation...
...Careering toward a climax, Mr...
...How are you going to cook your bird...
...So condom use is one of our most human characteristics, and that is cheering...
...Now, I understand that the concept of feeling violated as you watch someone kill a pheasant for you, particularly when you're carrying a bag of Swiss chocolates, is ludicrous...
...One can only wonder when Thomas will sharpen his knife for something truly meaningful like, say, the 13th Amendment prohibition against slavery...
...In some kind of wine sauce," I lied...
...March 13, 1992] Washington Post Someone by the name of Andrew Ward speaks of his unhappy daughter Casey with nincompoop pride: Still I didn't know what Casey would make of Gloria Steinem...
...October 1991] New York Review of Books Authoress Joyce Carol Oates experimenting with stream-of-consciousness prose or perhaps illicit drugs on the otherwise staid pages of NYRB: Boxing is only possible if there is an endless supply of young men hungry to leave their impoverished ghetto neighborhoods, more than willing to substitute the putative dangers of the ring for the more evident, possibly daily, dangers of the street...
...February 26, 1992] New York Times What Mr...
...March 16, 1992] BBC World Service Mr...
...The press has characterized Ms...
...There were two other women in the audience who would also become my wives, one passing on the baton and billy club of rectitude to the other in the relay of our liberation...
...I find that an amusing view...
...It is a widespread behavior in human beings...
...February 25, 1992] The Great Books Series More palmary stupidity from Dr...
...She spoke at Southern Methodist University, which was comparable to Che Guevara parachuting into Brigadoon...
...My taxi driver got a 100 percent tip...
...The pious hypocrisy of Caucasian moralists vis-a-vis the sport that has become almost exclusively the province of black and ethnic minorities has its analogue in a classic statement of President Bush's some months ago, that he is worried about the amount of "filth" flooding America by way of televised hearings and trials...
...Yes, I wanted it dead...
...One hemorrhaging fool stood to fight her off, and she annihilated him with such cool dispatch...
...I became a feminist because a kindly young intern in a white lab coat at Planned Parenthood handed me, with no lectures or questions, a rubber disk and a trial sized tube of gel...
...Chimpanzees are capable of quite conceptual thoughts, problem solving, and so on...
...Like maybe even feminist girl scouts...
...I have never had nor made as much money as my wife...
...She would not let me forget it...
...So I have no right to feel upset about the man in the back of the store...
...in a leading ideological organ: Two systems of weed control are before the world...
...Then he dropped the bird into a trash can and watched me watch it flap and struggle until it died...
...Staring meaningfully into my eyes, he held up my beautiful pheasant—by now the bird had become my pet in the same way that the taxi driver had become my husband—and drew the knife slowly across its throat as slowly as one can draw a knife across a pheasant's throat...
...Summer 1991] Spy Inscrutable adventures of a girl and her pheasant as chronicled in a leading Manhattan journal of belles lettres and bravado: The clerk reached into the pheasants' cage, grabbed the nearest bird by the feet and held it, writhing and squawking, out to me...
...Disillusionment evidently has been a bitter pill...
...For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt odd, even a bit guilty, about being a male...
...an orgasm that was pure heat and light, unshadowed by the specter of death from septicemia on a basement gurney...
...One looks to the annihilation of species and varieties with killer technology...
...I always ask them which particular animals they have seen recently using contraception...
...February 13, 1992] Tell Your Friends About The NEW AMERICAN SPECTATOR or send them a gift subscription today...
...Ban the spectacle, and the obscenity will cease to exist...
...For instance, historians are just beginning to relate the otherwise mysterious democratic movements of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to the growth of less violent and less authoritarian child-rearing...
...Other animals use tools...
...For all my torture, I heard not one false note from her, and she talked for more than an hour about 5,000 years of male dominance...
...Bees and wasps use tools...
...from Environment in Peril, edited by Anthony B. Wolbarst, Smithsonian Institution Press, 233 pages, $19.95 paper] Whole Earth Review Solemn declarations from Mr...
...Chimpanzees use tools...
...Gennady Burbulis, State Secretary of Russia and First Deputy Premier of the Russian Federation, sheds much-needed light on the misty origins of "modern democracy": And the very existence of Communism in many ways was what stimulated the Western world to harness democratic institutions as a defense against that Communist threat...
...And yet, Ms...
...The other increases wealth, intelligence, and civilization...
...February 23, 1992] New York Times The stupendous Gloria Steinem, at the height of her polemical powers, explaining the superiority of child-rearing techniques in a Communist society or the self-destructiveness of Communist child-rearing techniques, or how feminism won the Cold War, or perhaps she is just drunk as a skunk and no one will tell her to shut up: Looking at the world as if women mattered, with both eyes open, provides a long overdue depth of understanding of how and why events take place...
...Or rather, I didn't, but wasn't that the point of this exercise...
...she suggested with a laugh, and everyone beamed and applauded, including Ms...
...She informed the audience of 1,300 that she was 12 years old and wanted them to know that girls her age needed more strong feminist role models outside school...
...Orgasm is the body's natural call to feminist politics: if being a woman can feel this good, women must be worth something...
...It—and hence my body—were mine to do with what I pleased...
...I told myself I had learned a lesson, and reminded myself not to forget it, forgetting my wife was there as well, separate from me, congregated with her sisters...
...my driver exclaimed...
...March 8, 1992] Austin American-Statesman Use of the first person singular is pushed to artistic limits by the learned Bill Porterfield, a columnist famed for writing in the fetal position: I'll never forget seeing and hearing Gloria Steinem in Dallas on a February day 20 years ago...
...Maybe Casey was just hamming it up, but I was grateful to Steinem for providing Casey with some external affirmation of the feminism we practice so reflexively at home, as we pushed our way out of the birth canal of the First United Methodist Church...
...She began speaking, and the words that came from her mouth were beautifully chiseled...
...One system delivers to farmers pauperism, ignorance, depopulation and barbarism...
...Charles Walters (or Walter Charles, could be, what's the diff...
...As I write this, it dawns on me that she had help in keeping me converted even after we divorced...
...When I put out birdseed now, I feel like a double agent...
...Paul Ehrlich, almost always wrong: People have said to me, "If we practice contraception, we are lowering ourselves to the level of the animals...
...Oliver Stone sounds like when allowed out in public without his doctors: In a crowd-pleasing recitation, he went over the experience of working on JFK, one that has shaken him so deeply, he said, that he has wondered aloud about the version of American history given in the books he read as a youth...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
