Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" International Herald Tribune A dubious pitch for funds from 52,000 members of the Federation of International Civil Servants' Associations: An open letter to the Fifth Committee of the UN General...
...I'm not getting racy¡ªI've been racy...
...If the President-elect is to avoid being weakened even before he steps into the Oval Office, he had better cut off the poisoners at the knees now...
...What happened was that Madonna was telling her father he might not want to attend her show two nights in a row because "it's pretty racy in some sections...
...James Demulling Miranda (Humboldt County) [October 28, 1992] New York Times Book Review In a laid-back review of a new history of left-wing radicalism, Professor Michael Kazin displays the kind of insouciance toward murder we wish he and his friends would display toward capital punishment: There are events in the life of every political movement that appear to prove its critics' worst charges...
...He must send out the word that he knows who they are¡ªand that he will settle accounts soon...
...November 6, 1992] New York Times Stalin called them "wreckers...
...Adoption is, however, an experience that holds a great deal of loss for the birth family, the adoptee and the adoptive family...
...You're getting racy on me, huh...
...Joyce Maguire Pavan Somerville [October 22, 1992] Mentor In Mentor, the cleverly named organ that bills itself as "a magazine for men interested in hearing about their gender and sharing their discoveries with other men," irrefragable proof that men can equal feminists in all the realms of banality, stupidity, and tedious esotery: We have to look at our lostness to be on the road to our answers...
...Or maybe they do know what the word "liberal" means and that is why they do not like liberals...
...Carter made human rights a centerpiece of his foreign policy...
...November 8, 1992] Los Angeles Daily News In faraway California, another oaf deluded by the Wonders of Education myth: Genethia Hayes says she recently learned firsthand the importance of getting a good education¡ªwhen her car was stolen...
...Adoption can be a wonderful way to create a family when family preservation (a child is kept by his/her birth parents, extended family or culture) is not an option...
...24, 1970, accidentally killed one man (a theoretical physicist named Robert Fassnacht) who was doing research in the basement, injured several others and caused over $6 million of property damage...
...Other car theft victims might be understandably angry at the thieves, but Hayes said that whoever took her car was also a victim...
...8 Living/Arts article titled "Families: Made in China...
...Stalin had them tortured, shot, or exiled...
...Refugees would be lost with no one to help them...
...It is an attitude of optimism, of hope, it is a belief in toleration, it desires freedom, liberty and the equality of men...
...Last Tuesday, for example, on The Tennessean's op-ed page, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman managed to both mischaracterize and misquote Madonna, all in the same paragraph...
...Madonna: "Dad...
...November 1, 1992] New Yorker A little balmy historical revision is practiced by a properly anonymous editorialist upon the genius President who in the year 1979 saw Iran fall to the Ayatollah and the Soviet Union slip into Afghanistan, Cambodia, Grenada, and Nicaragua: Mr...
...And with only 43 percent of the popular vote, Bill Clinton has no mandate...
...Given the choice, I would have loved to go to private school...
...Their message is everywhere the same: This Governor of a small Southern state is dangerously inexperienced in world politics, as was Jimmy Carter...
...Madonna (very calmly, and not in "outrage"): "No, because that would be compromising my artistic integrity...
...when I quit, there weren't any girls at all...
...Fall 1992] The Tennessean Dr...
...If they would even consult a dictionary or encyclopedia they would find that the definition would include such words as: generous, open-handed, possessing a free and generous heart, unprejudiced, broad-minded, bountiful, appropriate or fitting for an enlightened mind, free from narrowness, bigotry, or bondage to authority...
...On a personal level, I know that person now driving my car on a road to crime had an inadequate educational background," Hayes said, after getting a ride to school district headquarters...
...Dad: "Of course...
...Although his "heart remains with those who tried to stop the war in Vietnam," he dispenses empathy on both the amateurish bombers (who called themselves the New Year's Gang) and the zealous police officers, FBI men and prosecutors who took several years to track them down...
...Gelb only calls for knee-cappingtypical liberal half-measures: Republicans are already undermining Bill Clinton with foreign diplomats and businessmen¡ªjust as they did to Jimmy Carter with crippling effect, after the Nixon and Ford Administrations...
...The goal of life is to become wise and compassionate...
...This is one of the most racist and cavalier ways to talk about a baby, a couple and a family, and it further demeans the culture of this child and, now, her family...
...There is the pain of infertility and the pain of disconnection that must remain a reality for families made through adoption...
...Dad: "Yeah...
...September 20, 1992] L.A...
...This means going back to recover the rainbow of feelings in our autobiography...
...Millions of children would not be vaccinated and become ill...
...I was the valedictorian of my class, and the winner of the French award, but I can barely speak a word of French, never had an advanced-placement course (none were offered except in science), never wrote a real research paper, and learned almost nothing about world history...
...September 1992] New York Times Another bizarre communiqu¨¦ from Academe, published as a public service on the correspondence page of New York's incomparable Times: Most successful female candidates have been involved in politics even while they were still menstruating...
...I certainly didn't look smart, particularly when the mud turned to ice and snow in November...
...We are taught to live in our heads, to oversee and be planners...
...After the embarrassing spectacle of the refusal of the Ford White House to permit a visit from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for fear of offending the Kremlin, Mr...
...The underminers include the likes of Henry Kissinger, former top Reagan-Bush national security aides and conservative legislators...
...And many people would die...
...The hits come from former officials who have worked intimately with foreigners in 20 of the last 24 years and have gained their trust...
...She is a real and beautiful person, and she and her family deserve more than this flippant headline...
...People would freeze and starve and suffer...
...The father replies, "Oh, s--t...
...November 2, 1992] San Francisco Chronicle The culmination of a life of scholarly research, deposited on the correspondence page of a monument of the American journalistic industry: Many Republicans have been critical of liberals and what they call the liberal media...
...He is being surrounded by naive Carterite liberals and Democratic neo-isolationists...
...nor did Madonna in that conversation...
...Stephanie Riger Prof of Psychology, U. of Illinois Chicago [November 1, 1992] Boston Globe A dangerous crank loosed by the incomparable Globe: As an educator and clinician in the field of adoption psychology and most of all as an adoptee, I was appalled by your Oct...
...Hayes, assistant executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, found her car gone as she left her South-Central Los Angeles office to attend a special Los Angeles Board of Education meeting...
...Bates¡ªa journalist, most recently with the Los Angles Times Magazine, who attended the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s¡ªembeds his conclusions in a lucid, dramatic narrative that avoids taking sides...
...The world without the UN sounds terrible, doesn't it...
...When the adoption is crosscultural, there are even greater identity issues¡ªespecially for the child, but also for the family that is now biracial...
...I went to public school in Boston and, at least from the sixth grade on, I hated it...
...Pregnant women all over the world would be deprived of pre-natal care...
...Madonna: "For you...
...We, as men, need to grieve for ourselves and then understand...
...I dropped off the math team in junior high because it wasn't something girls did...
...My greatest accomplishment in high school was learning to twirl a baton and do splits in the mud at football games in the hopes that people would forget that I was a smart girl...
...Shake that and start to work in our hearts and our souls...
...November 1, 1992...
...Columnist Leslie H. Gelb calls them "poisoners...
...When we go through the work, we will reach the full range of feelings...
...Her father never mentioned masturbation...
...Of course I don't...
...Clinton could easily make the case that Jimmy Carter, the personification of weakness in the Republican demonology, fenced with the Soviet Union more effectively than any other President in the past twenty years...
...International Herald Tribune A dubious pitch for funds from 52,000 members of the Federation of International Civil Servants' Associations: An open letter to the Fifth Committee of the UN General Assembly If the UN went on strike, the world would be in a fix...
...Tom Bates's Rads tries to make sense of what in retrospect seems an act of political idiocy and self-destruction...
...To use the term "made in China," which has many connotations¡ª"merchandise purchased," "quickly and poorly made" and "goods imported"¡ªis racist and totally insensitive to James Braude and Kristine Rondeau, and especially to this small human being, Lily Mi, who is not an object, an import or merchandise made quickly and inexpensively...
...Madonna (in outrage): "No...
...Do you undress in this performance...
...In her documentary Truth or Dare, Madonna did not¡ªas Goodman contends¡ªblurt out "in banal outrage" to a question by her father about whether "she should cool the masturbation number": "I have to protect my artistic integrity...
...For the radical opponents of the war in Vietnam, such an event was the bombing of Sterling Hall, a large brick building in the middle of the sprawl ing campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison...
...The massive explosion early in the morning of Aug...
...Style Susan Estrich is a law school professor at USC, Michael Dukakis's erstwhile campaign manager, and, as you can see from what follows, a self-confessed dunce: My commitment to public education is not entirely a product of my own experience...
...Frank Ritter, a leading Nashville philosophe, exposes Ellen Goodman's despicable sciolism with scholarship of the top chop: A lot you see written these days in response to Madonna's new book, Sex, is uninformed criticism of someone not really known, despite her notoriety...
...Bates, unlike most who write nonfiction about the radicals of the 1960s, cares less about coming to judgment than about mining the lode of extraordinary tales the decade produced...
...Dad: "Well, could you tone it down...
Vol. 26 • January 1993 • No. 1
