Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
SF Weekly In the correspondence page of a celebrated weekly, the stentorian voice of an Optimist: My appreciation goes out to Sia Michel for her article on female violence ("The Crazy Life," Aug....
...But Peter was a rodent, too...
...August 24, 1994] New York Times Magazine The English language, tortured, bled, and put to death by Miss Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate: Q: In your acceptance speech you spoke against "unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis"—language that "suppresses human potential...
...I have for a long time privately resented Anna Quindlen...
...In the eyes of Clyde J. Browne, as he is listed in a yearbook that notes no clubs, no activities, no honors, nothing at all beneath his name, the conservative, affluent school was being run to stifle the '60s, to keep out any whiff of the excitement and change that the era's most aware and creative teen-agers strained to sniff...
...I sort of hadcontempt for the entire decision to move there...
...Another is David Brock, a poor and shameless excuse for a journalist brought to us by The American Spectator, a laughable charade that attempts to pass as a "conservative" magazine but is really the territory of the neo-Nazi radical right...
...And of course, there's Rush Limbaugh himself, who really believes only in enlarging his fame and bank account as a loyal lackey parroting a dominant cultural mode to the mass of simplistic bottom-feeders on the right...
...When I went to hear her speak in Macomb County two years ago, a thousand other women were there, too, their faces glowing with what looked like unalloyed admiration...
...Their close cousins, mice on the other hand, receive greater understanding, and even respect...
...Before Quindlen's 1990 debut, explaining "why there's no PMS Barbie" might have been considered beneath the standards of the Times op-ed page...
...The ostensible subject was the Barbie doll...
...Oh, Rats" can be said as a curse, but it can also be expressed as a plea for mercy, compassion and understanding...
...But couldn't they come up with something a little less flimsy and transparent...
...It would be best for us all to remember we are all God's creatures, and therefore not editorialize that some exterminations are more justifiable than others...
...You're not stripping language by requiring people to be sensitive to other people's pain...
...Now, this week, a stunning choice: Anna Quindlen announced she is quitting the Times in December...
...Jackson Browne of the famed choral ensemble reveals a sociologist's turn of mind and an aesthete's appreciation of Disneyland in another philippic against hateful Orange County: Jackson Browne arrived reluctantly in Fullerton at age 12, and left eagerly at 17...
...One is Cliff Jackson, a rival of Clinton from way back...
...A mouse was responsible for creating a multibillion-dollar international company that trades on the New York Stock Exchange...
...The poor murdered creature was simply foraging for food to feed her own family, certainly less a threat than, say, a raccoon...
...Hortons (of the SFPD) who claim that girl-gang members are now a problem because "they're not just assaulting other females, they're assaulting males," and the Times of London which states that girls are getting meaner and they have "an air of self-confidence that's almost selfish and menacing," I say: "It's about time...
...The corporate money sustaining institutes and think tanks is not granted to support criticism of the system...
...The bald fact is that a vast number of well-publicized conservative voices are supported at privately financed research institutes...
...She spoke with dazzling self-assurance, answering tough questions with ease and grace, and making people laugh...
...I rather doubt it...
...I can't think through that...
...It's understandable that these rabid rightist jackals will ceaselessly continue their slimy attacks in order to try to regain their lost influence...
...With financing from the Olin Corporation, the Adolph B. Coors Company, and the like, once marginal right-wing magazines such as Irving Kristol's Public Interest become mainline voices...
...Anna stood poised and lovely at the podium, wearing pearls and a fresh, clear complexion...
...It may satisfy something, but there's no information there...
...the editors of Commentary appear on your Op-Ed page, not the editors of Science and Society or Monthly Review...
...In between, he earned a superfluous diploma, class of 1966, while nursing a general, but not absolute, loathing for Sunny Hills High School...
...September 15, 1994] Los Angeles Times Mr...
...Yes, female crime rates are on the rise, but so are those of male offenders...
...They are not considered attractive because of their long and hairless tails...
...Will I feel relieved to be rid of twice-weekly intimidation...
...Some of your critics thought you were using the Nobel ceremony to advocate politically correct literature...
...Now it's another example of the new standard she set...
...What does that mean...
...September 19, 1994] Anchorage Daily News The correspondence page of an esteemed Alaskan paper receives a godly missive, apparently from an adept of the Christian left: Well, it appears that these yelping packs of rabid rightist jackals just won't rest...
...A well-meaning editor made it worse when, trying to persuade me to begin a column of my own, he proclaimed, "You could be the next Anna Quindlen...
...Browne says he hated it when his parents, Jack and Bea Browne, moved their three children from the old Los Angeles suburb of Highland Park to a house on the edge of the new Sunny Hills subdivision...
...The definers want the power to name...
...Will I be able to awaken on Saturday without having to read Anna's astutely articulate column, without imagining her baking ham for tomorrow's eggs Benedict...
...Her hair hung thick and long—beautiful...
...It is well and good that you beat your breasts in justification that the "grandfather" was only protecting his grandchildren, but this is at the expense of another fact...
...August 25, 1994] New York Times A debonair explanation of how Irving Kristol and The Right took over America from historian Sandi Cooper: Whether or not the "public intellectual" is an original addition to American civic life or a variant on a familiar tune, your August 9 news article ignores the serious dangers that privately financed think tanks pose to a democratic society...
...Though I believe the issue of sexual harassment to be a serious one, these latest charges are of course courtesy of these same, woeful ultra-rightist "`smear-icians" who gave us those earlier attacks...
...More likely the ghost of Anna Quindlen will haunt my small insecure self, the one that would rather be her, for the rest of my life...
...Or hierarchy...
...I was popped down in a sort of very sterile tract-home community...
...To all the Sgt...
...MUS, or "rats," if you insist, have a particular problem...
...I believe that powerful, sharp, incisive, critical, bloody, dramatic, theatrical language is not dependent on injurious language, on curses...
...It was a refreshing jolt of media honesty that put the flailing statistics of recent news coverage into perspective...
...June 5, 1994] 88 The American Spectator November 1994 The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon) Miss Ingrid E. Newkirk, Grand Kleagle of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, proves that leftists, too, can admire family values: Left to their own devices in their homelands, elephants are highly social beings that enjoy extended family relationships...
...And I have to use language that's better than that...
...She is a year older than I am, but comparing my life and work to hers, I seem small and inadequate, and so does every other woman whose life I know...
...After their miserable failures attempting to use the Arkansas State Troopers and Whitewater to undermine the administration, we have Paula Jones and alleged sexual harassment...
...Would you express a similar satisfaction had farmer MacGregor caught and killed Peter in Beatrix Potter's "The Tale of Peter Rabbit...
...August 12, 1994] The American Spectator November 1994 89...
...Sunny Hills' purpose, he felt, was to uphold a tidy Orange County vision of clean-cut appearances and straight unquestioning right-thinking—something it accomplished with considerable success...
...They sort of bamboozled me by saying it was near Disneyland, but I didn't have any choice in the matter...
...What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define...
...September 11, 1994]Wall Street Journal Before laughing off this letter to the editor, remember how Americans laughed when they first read Betty Friedan: With respect to your defamatory editorial that attempted humor over the wanton and vicious murder of a poor defenseless rodent (or the Latin mus as the name "rats" prefer to call themselves) at the hands of a white human male who is 100 times the size of the victim, I must protest ("Oh, Rats...
...A: You know, the term "political correctness" has become a shorthand for discrediting ideas...
...aunts babysit, mothers teach junior life skills such as how to use different kinds of leaves and mud to ward off sunburn and insect bites, babies play together under watchful eyes, lovemaking is gentle and complex .. . [August 31, 1994] Detroit Free Press It is the autumn of 1994, and out of the Michigan countryside a female fascista lets out a roar for feminist journalism's Mussolini: How can you like a woman who writes two columns a week for the New York Times op-ed page, wins a Pulitzer before she's 40, raises three children, publishes two novels, cooks her husband eggs Benedict every Sunday morning with home-baked ham and manages, she says, to read recreationally for about three hours each day...
...Billion Basp President MUS Anti-Defamation League New York [August 31, 1994] Newsweek Critic Jonathan Alter, in praise of lowered standards, and now let's hear it for Muzak: On the day her resignation was announced in the New York Times, Anna Quindlen's column was a perfect illustration of why newspaper readers will miss her so much...
...I can't just go around saying, "Kill whitey...
...And the defined are now taking that power away from them...
...Sadly, due to human prejudice as exhibited by your editorial, this would not have been the case had he been named "Dickey Rat...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
