The Nation's PulselReality Check
Queenan, Joe
Reality Check by Joe Queenan When I was a nine-year-old boy growing up on the mean streets of North Philadelphia, I got a job in a clothing store that took me off the mean streets of Philadelphia....
...I would also like to straighten out Michael Jackson...
...I extra from any Paula Abdul video is will seat him next to Marilyn, the five more innovative...
...Unfortunately, property rights must be repealed to guarantee low rents for all, but that's a small price to pay for compassion...
...Jackson needs help...
...Black 47 eschewed anything so congenial...
...When did UNLV acquire an academic standing that could be damaged...
...It was the United Auto Workers officials who were the problem...
...got to thinking the same thing when I attended a Jerry Brown rally at the GM plant in North Tarrytown, New York, which is scheduled to be shuttered in 1995...
...NY 10021 wormem^ hy SCOTT URANIA The American Spectator June 1992 45...
...Jerry's material was fine—he was in vintage apocalyptic-jeremiadic form—and he wisely refrained from using the word "ashram" in front of 300 guys in baseball caps and leather jackets...
...Indeed, the rally might have had a bigger turnout save for all those UAW workers stuck at home because their Buicks and Pontiacs wouldn't start...
...And the liberated countries of the ex-Soviet bloc, despite their reputation for spiritual richness, do not seem to have found a third way in culture any more than they have in economics: these days, the public in Moscow lines up for a movie called A Gang of Lesbians (presumably Russia's answer to Basic Instinct...
...They all gave their usual spiel—management deserves to die...
...Barney Frank, who let his roommate run a prostitution ring out of his Washington townhouse, and then wrote a book called Speaking Frankly: What's Wrong With the Democratic Party and How to Fix It, has certainly earned a visit...
...acts—don't upstage the headliner, don't wreck the mood, and don't play more than six stupid numbers—Black 47 performed an interminable set in which the lads repeatedly exhorted the audience to help them establish a socialist worker's state...
...I got to thinking about Len Mohr a couple of weeks ago when I saw a rock band called Black 47...
...No, I had only one thing to say to the author of that inept AP article, and I think you know what it is...
...And yes, there is one slight flaw...
...This applies equally to ideologues and system-builders such as Rousseau or Marx, whose ascendancy was unanimously deplored, and to true writers interested in language, harmony, and human experience...
...When I went to work for him in 1960, he was still doing all sorts of dangerous things, like refereeing amateur fights at a North Philly gym called the Blood Pit, operating three parking lots within the shadow of Connie Mack Stadium—where the Phillies were losing games twenty-three at a time—and trading in penny stocks...
...This band, comprising five standard-issue, unpleasant young Irishmen dressed in black, was the opening act for David Bromberg, an excellent guitarist who plays a soothing, life-affirming mixture of blues, folk, bluegrass, and rock 'n' roll...
...In March, after years of scandal that eventually resulted in a Supreme Court ruling against him, Tark the Shark finally stepped down as coach of the Runnin' Rebels...
...The city of Newark, generally not known as a cultural center, hosted a dazzling constellation of literati, including Nobel laureates Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, and Czeslaw Milosz, grand dame of Russian letters Tatyana Tolstaya, occasional heretic Susan Sontag, novelists Vassily Aksyonov, Ralph Ellison, and Doris Lessing, historians Richard Pipes and Walter Laqueur, writer and translator Richard Lourie, and others...
...Though highly receptive to such concerns after catching a few minutes of "Studs" on TV the night before, I was bothered by the dim view Bellow, with his predictions of "mental misery," seemed to take of what the ex-Soviets longingly call a normal society...
...Exuding the unctuous sanctimony that has become a staple of Celtic rockers, many of them bald, Black 47 went on and on about the imminent demise of capitalism...
...Then intellectuals led the fight against totalitarianism—until one day, to their amazement, they won, only to find themselves confused and unsure what to do next...
...In his latest megamillion-dollar extravaganza, he is dressed in motorcycle boots and what appears to be a lame skirt, this in a video set in the time of the Pharaohs...
...Brodsky, whose works are being published in his native country nearly thirty years after he was jailed as a "parasite," confirmed that the role of writers and intellectuals in Russia was diminishing...
...Such is the brief history of intellectuals in the ex-Communist world that emerged from discussions at an extraordinary conference, "Intellectuals and Social Change in Eastern and Central Europe," held on the Newark Campus of Rutgers University from April 9 to April 11 and co-sponsored by Partisan Review...
...Oh well, nobody ever said the plan was ppeerfect...
...Hold on a second...
...Gone fishing...
...but I wondered if there wasn't something shockingly selfish about suggesting that misery and oppression for most people were at least in some ways preferable to a society less appreciative of the things we enlightened The Second Time It's Comedy ENT KONT1101...
...I suppose a society can livewithout art, just as one can eat without salt," he said, "but it's not very agreeable, and it's not even real life...
...T he very first panel—which, accidentally or not, included the three Nobel laureates—grappled with the modern intellectual's dilemma, summed up by Bellow: in totalitarian societies, intellectuals are important but oppressed...
...In a side-splitting and no-holds-barred portrait of good intentions gone berserk, a former Manhattan property owner exposes the chaos and lunacy lurking behind rent control's so-called "benevolent" facade as he pokes merciless fun at landlords, tenants, bureaucrats, and politicians alike...
...Was I out of the room when this happened...
...The owner was a stocky, muscular, German-American ex-boxer named Len Mohr, who had joined the Marine Corps at age 32 and won the Distinguished Service Medal on Iwo Jima...
...After '75 tragic years, the Evil Empire collapsed in its ill-fated effort to make a controlled economy work...
...He also uttered what may have been the most memorable line of the conference: "The writer owes absolutely nothing, zilch, to society...
...With 50 years of rent control having the same effect on the People's Republic of New York, its present economic plight need no longer be viewed with a straight face...
...Tarkanian's last game was covered by the Associated Press, which concluded its report with these words: "The image of his players, including pictures of three with a convicted point-shaver, have damaged the academic standing of the university...
...so do those damn Mexicans—but then one of them went off the cliff .and said that the quality of U.S...
...Surely the personal computer and the fax machine, which kept Russia's democratic forces in touch with the world during last August's coup, deserve a better rap...
...He was a tough, direct sort of guy, and one of his favorite expressions has always stuck with me...
...Ditto Marilyn Quayle, whose Cold War thriller Embrace the Serpent is set in a strange, pre–John Bircher era where the Russkies are still calling the shots...
...As Karl Marx once wrote, Me first time it's tragedy, the second time it's comedy...
...This was news to the hundred or more Yuppies for Brown who had driven to the rally in Mazdas...
...Reading an incredibly engrossing E. J. Dionne, Jr...
...After all, who could ask for a more Chernobyl motive than helping the poor...
...Eight years ago, when he made "Billy Jean" and "Beat 44 The American Spectator June 1992 It," there was no one on earth who could phant Man, and Diana Ross's friendship, cut a rug like Jackson...
...How did they do that...
...T he list of people I'd like to see in my office goes on and on...
...I got to thinking the same thing when I read an article about the continuing travails of University of Nevada–Las Vegas coach Jerry Tarkanian...
...free, especially since few people in the audience seemed poor...
...Whether he was talking to local hoods, ward leaders trying to shake him down, or shifty jobbers hoping to unload three dozen pink shirts with ruffled cuffs (never an easy item to hawk in an Irish-Polish neighborhood), Len always used the same expression...
...Rent control is to New York what communism was to Russia: an incredibly seductive idea...
...All of which made me want to tell the UAW boss: "Why don't you step into my office...
...Asked to comment on the role of personal communications technology in the defeat of Communism, he turned the question around to lament these technologies' grip on us—"man-made miracles" we don't understand but serve and worship...
...automobiles had never declined all the years the GM plant had been in Tarrytown...
...in democratic societies, they are free but marginal...
...book explaining the gnawing sense of alienation felt by the American body politic...
...Before Brown was allowed to take the stage, he had to suffer through six different speeches from the UAW honchos, including one delivered by Michael Moore, of GM-bashing Roger and Me fame...
...Unlikely...
...Sensing that these boys had never renewed their newspaper subscriptions after Woodstock, I wanted to jump onto the stage and tell them: "Why don't you step into my office and I'll straighten you out on a few things...
...I'll be starting tract with Sony, the bones of the Ele- the session with Barney Frank, and I The Dispossessed by Cathy Young Early in this century, revolutions born of utopian visions to reshape human life seemed about to bring intellectuals to unmatched power—only to demote them to a far less exalted status as servants of the totalitarian state and take away their freedom of thought...
...And it was news to me: I came in a Toyota...
...Bellow sounded more pessimistic as he spoke of a rising tide of "aesthetic illiteracy" and of flagging interest in "the things we have devoted our entire lives to serving," eclipsed by popular culture and TV...
...Rent control, like communism, turns out to benefit the privileged few at the expense of almost everyone else...
...The conference was supported by the National Endowment for Humanities—undoubtedly a worthier cause than a chocolate-covered Karen Finley, but I'm still not sure why admission had to be Cathy Young, our regular Russian Press-watch columnist, is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...
...Ignoring the three cardinal rules for opening Joe Queenan's book on Vice President Dan Quayle will be published by Hyperion this fall...
...Whenever someone said or did something stupid, implausible, or completely wacky, he would point to the door of the dressing room and say: "Why don't you step into my office and I'll straighten you out on a few things...
...Today, the 435th he needs to be taken inside for a chat...
...Send $11.95 to: will••^•• LIVE RENHBEE FORM SCOTT GARDNER Box 248A 1173A 2nd Ave...
...The funniest, sunniest, most outrageously shocking book you've ever read, and that's no blini...
...Al- Irish rockers, and the UAW official, but though he still has the $50 million con- he'd better bring a book...
...yes, democratic capitalism allows vulgar tastes to assert themselves...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
