Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
Sacramento Bee A noble interlude in the life of a great news organ: An apology to our readers We made an insensitive error in judgment in Friday's edition, and I want to apologize for it. On...
...we named him Pidge and he lived with us for six years...
...or else unknown qualities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own...
...They often recovered after a week or a month of rest and proper food and were able to fly away...
...She does not lack for bad examples: Jerry Falwell, who wants women to stay home and have children...
...The party was designed to drum up last minute backing, but not funds, for Clinton...
...It doesn't do to set ourselves above pigeons...
...You don't have very good choices but you make the best choice that you can," partygoers recount Frank saying...
...I don't know that there's a member of the U.S...
...Cronkite—or even Deborah Norville—unwrapping a condom on the air and fitting it over a model of a penis, as Ms...
...March 31, 1992] The Great Books Series Confronting the tough questions of our time, with Miss Pam Postema, female Tarzan: Even though it hurts to do so, I think about umpiring every day...
...So he's a person capable of the finest definition of commitment, and marriage is the ultimate commitment...
...April 7, 19921 New York Review of Books In the pages of the authoritative New York Review, a clarifying moment: To the editors: In an otherwise well documented review ["Reconsidering Vietnam," NYR, October 10, 1991], Jonathan Mirsky simply asserts that twice as many American Vietnam veterans have committed suicide since the war as were killed in it...
...Kate Delano Condax Moorestown, N. J. [March 31, 1992] 64 The American Spectator June 1992 New York Times A memorable testimonial to Katie Couric's hands-on artistry: "Half of America wants her haircut," said her NBC hair stylist, Anna Febres...
...It is this problematics of the exterior and remote other that I have chosen—somewhat arbitrarily and because one cannot speak of everything all at once—in order to open an investigation that can never be closed...
...It's an appeal that "Today" has used to advantage...
...They want those macho, tobacco-chewing, sleazy sort of borderline alcoholics...
...Nicholas Ceausescu, who echoed these sentiments so much that he left Romania with a plethora of pitiful orphans riddled with AIDS...
...And I'll never understand why it's easier for a female to become an astronaut or cop or fire fighter or soldier or Supreme Court justice than it is to become a major league umpire...
...Maybe if I had kissed ass, I'd still be umpiring...
...Does he exploit women...
...Senate who has ever championed the civil rights of women at all levels, married, single, mothers, unwed, wed—I think his record is the best...
...A very hard lesson in the area of sensitivity has been learned...
...And isn't that the way society is...
...One, contrary to your letter, did bite, and when he bit, held on, so I used garden gloves to handle him...
...We were wrong, and our sincere apologies are offered to all of you...
...Can he give us his documentation for this astonishing statement...
...Senate, not just from Massachusetts but from all over the country, then certainly, his commitment to Vickie is a sound one, if you go by the other expressions of his prior commitments...
...senator, I don't know of a member of the Senate who's been there 30 years who's more committed to a more definable or predictable position than Ted Kennedy...
...or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another society which will be near or far away, depending on the cases: beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane...
...Jesse Helms, who echoes these sentiments...
...Couric did after Magic Johnson's revelation of his HIV infection...
...or else as a specific social group to which we do not belong...
...and wanting to pick someone up...
...Some are very independent...
...April 9, 19921 The American Spectator June 1992 65...
...In fact, it's hard to imagine Mr...
...Her music is a fusion of her personal involvement in women's issues, her interest in the pursuit of world peace and her involvement in and love of Judaism...
...Another was so gentle and liked our family so much that when we let him go, he turned in a boomerang arc and returned to us, over and over...
...That the growth in world population is one of the greatest risks to the survival of all species on this planet is now a commonplace...
...They want big, fat male umpires...
...Yes, we're sometimes asked what we think about his past behavior," says her father, "and we need to put that all together...
...Senate and to his work as a senator, which has distinguished him as one of the outstanding senators of all time in the U.S...
...The place is emptying out...
...The implication of the images in the picture and the words in the headline should have been recognized and they should not have run, even though it is a sad commentary on our society that pictures of children of different ethnic backgrounds at play carry such a bitter memory...
...March 29, 4 p.m...
...Personally, I don't think women will ever be considered equals until they're allowed to walk down the street with their shirts off, like men...
...I think his record shows just the opposite...
...So we are all literally constructed of stars, and we are all constructed of dog dirt," as he put it...
...If you fit their idea of what a good umpire is, then you're fine...
...I have also rescued pigeons and returned them' to the "wilds" of their city streets and airspaces...
...But others are also "rs: subjects just as I am, whom only my point of view—according to which all of them are out there and I alone am in here—separates and authentically distinguishes from myself...
...I can count on one hand the times I didn't give 100 percent on the field...
...A Nobel prize-winning scientist said that humans make a mistake to think that they are separate and apart from the rest of the universe, since we are all made of the same atoms that were once parts of stars, and everything on earth is made of reshuffled atoms...
...But that's not the way I operate...
...Is it not, Rifkin asks, a little disingenuous of intellectuals and planners in the first world to dwell on the number of babies being born in less affluent nations, while ignoring the overpopulation of cattle, to which we ourselves contribute...
...He added that choosing Clinton was not like "you're getting betrothed for life" and that "you don't have to like him in the morning...
...He finally flew boldly away without looking back...
...For Christ sakes, it's only baseball...
...Indeed, she has so many qualities with which so many people identify—or want to--that she seems a kind of walking demographic miracle...
...Passover at the Nuclear Test Site" is one of her original songs...
...I loved the freedom that came with the job, and I liked the theory—because that's all it ever turned out to be—that if you worked hard enough, you could advance to the big leagues...
...Well, when does dating become womanizing...
...Pigeons are beautiful, sane, clean, and personable birds...
...I've had one or two other letters questioning this statement, and no longer stand by it...
...I can conceive of these others as an abstraction, as an instance of any individual's psychic configuration, as the Other—other in relation to myself, to me...
...April 9, 1992] Newsday In a suave review of Marilyn French's latest tome, Carolyn See slanders a deceased Romanian progressive: French writes persuasively of the perfidy of men...
...Couric gets away with things, and the program has been able to stretch itself as a result...
...David Slawson Jonathan Mirsky replies: In response to David Slawson: I got the number of suicides from Walter Capps, The Vietnam Reader, p. 2 (galley): "More than twice the number of those who lost their lives there [Vietnam] have taken their lives since the war...
...Gregory E. Favre Executive Editor [November 2, 1991] New York Review of Books In Peter Singer's seminal review of Jeremy Rifkin's Beyond Beef, we see the beginnings of the condoms-for-cattle movement: If it seems odd that a book about cattle should be so important, consider the growth of the cattle industry alongside that of the world's population...
...April 2, 1992] The Great Books Series Plain English, from the enlightened pen of Professor T. Todorov, an Orwell for our time: My subject—the discovery self makes of the other—is so enormous that any general formulation soon ramifies into countless categories and directions...
...So if he commits himself that well to the U.S...
...Let me be more blunt: almost all of the people in the baseball community don't want anyone interrupting their little male-dominated way of life...
...April 9, 19921 Boston Globe The devastating effect of "mystery pie" on the locution of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's future father-in-law: It is not until near the end of lunch, over dessert of mystery pie and "Mona Lisa" by Nat King Cole, that a dark side of the relationship with Kennedy is introduced...
...This group in turn can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the "normal...
...We can discover the other in ourselves, realize we are not a homogenous substance, radically alien to whatever is not us: as Rimbaud said, Je est un autre...
...Often the birds had been struck by cars and were flopping pitiably in gutters when I found them...
...At a private party at artist David Fisch's Chambers Street loft attended by many of the city's gay movers and shakers, the congressman likened choosing a Democratic presidential candidate to picking up someone in a gay bar...
...Barney Frank...
...Nobody wants any glitches...
...but do we ever hear of the threat from the world's cattle population, now 1.28 billion and with a combined weight exceeding that of the human population...
...I've known Ted Kennedy a lot of years, and when it comes to his behavior—someone asked me about his womanizing...
...March 25-April 7, 1992] New York Times Cerebrations from a self-proclaimed birdbrain: I was glad to see your March 3 letter about pigeons, those very nice birds much maligned by unthinking humans...
...from You've Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League, by Pam Postema, Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $20] Minnesota Women's Press The gifted Linda Hirschhorn, another progressive suspended forever somewhere in the 1970s: Linda Hirschhorn will perform a two-hour concert of celebration and song at Beth Jacob Congregation, Mendota Heights...
...from The Conquest of America, by Tzvetan Todorov, HarperPerennial, 274 pages, $10 paper] New York Post Congressional oratory of the highest order put to a noble cause by the Poofter's Pol: As Bill Clinton's New York campaign wound down to its weary end, the Arkansas governor's grass-roots rhetoric was replaced by some frank talk—delivered by Massachusetts Rep...
...Tickets $10...
...Well, if you look at Ted Kennedy's commitment record as a U.S...
...The way I see it, I tried my best but got screwed by a system that wasn't built for women...
...But what was not caught in the editing process was the stereotype enforced in the picture of an African-American child dressed in a maid's uniform putting lipstick on a white child dressed in a party outfit...
...So how do I feel about Vickie marrying a person who's been dating a great deal...
...On page Al, we ran what was initially seen as a cute, innocent picture of two children dressing up for Halloween...
...Sources who attended the soiree say Frank, in a push to sway undecided gay Democrats, said that choosing between Clinton and Jerry Brown was "like being in a bar at 3 a.m...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
