Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
The Progressive The rarely noted sources of Republican electoral genius, as discovered by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, and a follow-up question put to the Times's Mr. Conservative: Q: Not...
...Working from an office in New York, he is part of the team that protects President Clinton on visits to Manhattan and in the past has guarded such notables as Marilyn Quayle on diving expeditions and Ron Reagan when he was a member of the Joffrey Ballet...
...Ours may be the first country ever to pine for its lost glory while still being the most powerful nation on Earth, and in its rose-colored images of bygone days, Apollo 13 makes such nostalgia seem like a rational political position...
...His extravagant and perverted operas have poisoned the souls of the people...
...Although the movie's publicity trumpets its historical accuracy, the movie itself celebrates the paradisiacal America invoked by Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan—an America where men were men, women were subservient, and people of color kept out of the damn way...
...Russell was separated from his wife, but they had made a pact to stay married until one of them fell seriously in love with someone else...
...Like many of his fellows degenerates, Franz Schrecker was wildly popular in the thirties and not a little risque...
...I've known Willie Brown for 30 years...
...Hah, hah, hah...
...reviews the late Franz Schrecker's naughty but lovely opera, only to come down with a troubling case of Republicanitis: Franz Schrecker Die Geziechneten (London)—This lush record comes from "Entartete," a word that means "degenerate" in German and a series that's dedicated to music that was, 60 years ago, deemed as such by the Nazis...
...I'll support either Achtenberg or Alioto in the first round...
...George Webber of the New York Theological Seminary: Webber graduated from Harvard in 1942 with a degree in history...
...But they can say, 'Look, I messed up, I've done awful things, I've committed murder, I deserve punishment, yet at the same time I was victimized by a vicious, corrupt, awful society that never gave me a chance.' Rarely do I have anybody who wasn't treated like s— since he was a baby...
...Whatever the dormouse said, she's forgotten it...
...But to promote a study that degrades an intelligent, successful woman based on the current definition of physical beauty does a disservice to your readers...
...Q: How so...
...Then how do Republicans keep winning...
...The Republicans keep winning this way: instead of addressing the serious problems we face, they have been very good at taking symbolic, divisive issues and exploiting them...
...He didn't expect to be the first...
...Astronaut Jim Lovell's daughter goes from being a rebellious teen with "White Rabbit" on her stereo to a docile young woman restored to the bosom of her family by her father's ordeal...
...By Webber's lights, those victims include violent criminals...
...Quayle on a national book tour for her novel "Embrace the Serpent...
...August 1995] Washington Post Movie critic John Powers is calmly, steadily, if ploddingly reviewing Apollo 13, when visions of Republicans cloud his mind and all hell breaks loose: ['Otis particular true story seems tailor-made for today's conservative mood—its Angry White Men and its nostalgia for a homogeneous America that never was...
...He's not a murderer, damn it all...
...July 9, 1995] 76 The American Spectator September 1995 New Woman Carol Minton of historic Norristown, Pennsylvania, foresees the day when the Venus de Milo will be replaced by a scarecrow: One of the things I love about New Woman is your philosophy that we should not blindly conform to society's image of female beauty...
...July 6, 1995] San Francisco Chronicle Writing from her solitary confinement cell somewhere in the City on the Bay, Serena Bardell announces Her Vote: I'm a lifelong liberal...
...July 10, 1995] The American Spectator September 1995 77...
...July 9, 1995] New York The mysterious C.N...
...And what of satanic '60s counterculture...
...Granted, New Woman didn't commission the study and was only reporting its findings...
...Surely the Republicans would understand...
...While they are funneling money to the rich from the bottom up, they are saying to ordinary Americans, "The reason you're in a bad situation is because of the blacks, or welfare, or immigrants, or affirmative action, or the liberals...
...And I have written that people often vote against their own interests...
...In Brown's case we know he received gobs of money from Big Tobacco and supported measures hateful to those of us who can't or won't tolerate smoke...
...I'm very allergic to tobacco smoke...
...But falling in love was not something either of them planned...
...I wasn't miserable and looking for a way out of my marriage...
...The guys take responsibility for what they did," he explains...
...Take Don Mason," he says of one of his graduates...
...I tend to appear more liberal than I really am because of the political climate that is prevailing now...
...The lurid, pre-Freudian themes were doubtless responsible for at least part of Die Geziechneten's tremendous popular success, but the music—wildly colorful with dazzling instrumental work and florid vocal lines, a cross between late-Strauss, Scriabin, and Puccini—is a legitimate marvel, one studied carefully by such composers of the era as Alban Berg...
...It was, like, as soon as I met him, my heart lurched to him, and it's never lurched back...
...She's been working on your national health care plan all week, folks...
...We mustn't forget that Jordan, too, succumbed to political (and, for all I know, financial) pressures from the pro-smoking lobby...
...I didn't even know there was a problem with my marriage...
...How do you respond to that...
...however, since Mayor Jordan insisted on postponing San Francisco's restaurant smoking controls for a year after the other sections went into effect as a condition of signing the ordinance, I do not foresee any problem voting for Brown over Jordan should it come to that eventuality...
...The libretto of the opera Die Geziechneten (roughly, "the stigmatized") concerns a beautiful woman for whom orgasms are fatal and her adventures with a misshapen dwarf...
...In fact, its story line could be a Republican parable about 1995 America: A marvelous vessel loses its power and speeds toward extinction, until it's saved by a team of heroic white men...
...four were assassinated in office...
...Ms...
...It sounds like a bad song, but I wasn't looking for love, and then I met Penny and all of a sudden I realized there was more to life...
...He committed a murder...
...I think I have a conservative approach to the problem of crime...
...Herbert: The funny thing is that I don't consider myself nearly as liberal as most people tend to think...
...I've tried hard to avoid being a "single issue" voter—although admittedly some matters like the Vietnam War and racism have made me feel I had no choice...
...Still, for decades all that survived of this fantastic work was the official Nazi review...
...At 46, he carries around plastic cockroaches to use in pranks and is more interested in talking about his definition of true love than about guns or assassinations...
...Herbert: It is a question I often ask myself...
...Am I correct in suggesting that the Presidency is by far the more potentially dangerous position...
...I thought love would never come again," he said recently...
...That would tend to pigeonhole me as way over on the left somewhere, when in fact, I don't believe that is true...
...Not everyone was so exuberantly mean...
...he has been at the seminary since 1969 and established the prison program...
...I figured: I'm content...
...Simon, who is as forthright as she is funny, recalled: "When I met Ed and we started to talk, it was like a connection I'd never had in my whole life...
...April 23, 1995] New Yorker After all the shocking reports of the hellish Christian Right, the New Yorker introduces the clear-thinking, tough-minded, dirty-talking Christian Left, the Rev...
...He finds in the Bible "a radical, countercultural Jesus who teaches us to expose the injustices of society and deal with society's victims...
...Here are my points: About 8,744,000 people served in the Vietnam War...
...I travel and exercise and eat right and take vitamins...
...there were 47,369 deaths in battle...
...I can imagine the political commercials in which Hanks morphs into Phil Gramm...
...Of the Sing Sing residents he declares, "They're human beings, not criminals," although, whatever else they may be, they are certainly criminals...
...He met Penny Simon, 31, four years ago when he was assigned to accompany Mrs...
...Q: Some readers call you an "ultra-liberal fanatic...
...the chances of being killed while in office are about one in 10...
...In one of the most telling subplots, Apollo 13 vanquishes the Jefferson Airplane...
...If you were to read over the years, for example, my views about crime, I don't think that it could fairly be described as a liberal view...
...Forty-one people have served as President...
...August 1995] New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd hears a little felicitous pasquinade from Pat Buchanan and swallows a peeled lemon: Mr...
...Herbert: I'll start by saying that I am opposed to the death penalty for a variety of reasons...
...July 17, 1995] Parade The sad consequence of the Clintons' education reform back home, displayed in a letter to columnist Marilyn Vos Savant from Charlene Robbins of Paragould, Arkansas, the banking capital of the United States: Much has been said about Bill Clinton's alleged draft dodging, with implications of self-interest at best and cowardice at worst...
...They were both married at the time...
...June 2, 1995] New York Times Another weird communication found on the society page of the Times, the only morning newspaper on the asteroid Manhattan: Unlike the stereotypical Secret Service agent who is barely more animate than a Mount Rushmore figure, Edwin Russell is emotional, confessional and often downright silly...
...Therefore, the chances of being killed in Vietnam were about one in 185...
...Buchanan offered this sarcastic introduction for his quiet wife, Shelley...
...Politics aside, I have had reservations about the reasoning involved and have tried to evaluate the question logically...
...Conservative: Q: Not long ago you quoted the following from Kevin Phillips's book, The Politics of Rich and Poor: the historical role of the Republican Party has been "to tilt power, policy, wealth, and income toward the richest portions of the population...
...Because my ability to enjoy any activity outside my home is curtailed by smoke, I find myself going into the mayoral election season in the strange-for-me position of putting self-interest ahead of every other issue of political importance...
...So I am reacting to what I consider to be far-right or conservative excesses...
...So I was disturbed to see the item "When a Body Meets a Body" (Attitude, June), which related a study that found Janet Reno's body one that "a lot of us find the scariest...
...In a fit of rage, he kills his wife...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
