Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" Washington Monthly Recalling all that he has witnessed in his years of foreign travel, Sydney H. Schanberg proves again what has so long been noted about the American progressive,...
...He was a genius who wrote originally in Russian and, later, after he was exiled from the Soviet Union and came to the United States, in English...
...we have our share of public officials and private lords who rule with a callous hand...
...Nevertheless, Jessa may very well get Princess What's-Her-Face...
...In the years to follow, I covered the state government in Albany and was then posted overseas to India...
...I learned that a reporter's life is a continuum...
...To a lesser extent, I have trouble buying her a doll that encourages young girls to wish for their future...
...It's also worth noting that for the second year in a row, the composers included in the subscription season are loo percent white and loo percent male...
...Cambodia's horrors were staggering, but there are horrors in America, too...
...I admit I have trouble buying her a doll so anatomically unrealistic that, were she a real woman, she would surely launch forward and fall on her face...
...Clinton, did many things in Arkansas and later that were stupid but not criminal...
...Petersburg), as a Jew (both parents suffered on that account) and as a poet ("Who said that you were a poet...
...MARCH 10, 1996] The Nation Espied on the Amusement Page of the agelastic Nation, more evidence of why lefty can't laugh: In a speech at an award ceremony sponsored by the National Press Foundation, William Safire of The New York Times, still feeling the heat from the controversy surrounding a column in which he called the First Lady a "congenital liar," claimed that the epithet was the result of a typographical error, according to The Hill, a Congressional newspaper...
...They are like the candid remarks of Soviet-era officials who, toward the end, acknowledged what everyone outside the Kremlin already knew: The system wasn't working...
...Safire insisted that the phrase should have read "congenital lawyer...
...In this case, truth is determined by lawyers, not commissars, although they would be the latter if they had been born in a different place...
...I like her a lot...
...MARCH 21, 1996] AdWeek In awarding its sought-after Editor of the Year trophy, AdWeek alights on the most beautiful man in Washington, D.C., Andrew Sullivan, for whom mothers lust: A Thatcherite running a magazine with a long history of liberalism, a devout Catholic who has excoriated the Church for its position on homosexuality, a homosexual who has angered many gay activists by appearing to be too puppy-doggishly eager for mainstream acceptance (notably with his recent book, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality), Sullivan himself is a mass of contradictions...
...MARCH 4, 1996] The American Spectator • May 1996 77...
...Prosperity is tastiest when it's reserved for the few...
...I like Hillary Clinton...
...At only 55 he died—still a smoker...
...Baywatch Barbie, however, will just have to tug her swimsuit a bit more closely around her shapely thighs...
...That's the boys aisle...
...When Gracie was with us, the attention magnified...
...She's gutsy...
...The Dow Jones Industrial Average retreated 171 points in fright...
...APRIL 1, 1996] The Nation Espied on the Editorial Page of the socialist Nation, more evidence that socialists can't operate an efficient economy: Could the relations between Wall Street and everyone else ever be made clearer than they were on March 8? At 8:3o A.M., the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 705,000 new jobs had appeared in February, far more than anyone expected...
...FEBRUARY 1, 1996] 76 May 1996 • The American Spectator Business Ethics One Mary Scott reports on her human rights fact-finding tour of China, the land of smiling babies: As I boarded the 727 bound for China, I brought with me the media-imposed images of the world's most populous country: child and prison labor, abandoned babies left to die in orphanages—a freedom-less place where people were surely to be cold, tough, and withdrawn...
...As a Russian (born in St...
...We have poverty and discrimination...
...demanded the Soviet judge who sent him to a labor camp), he must have been a congenital ironist, someone who recognized that much of life is absurd...
...She has fame, fortune, position, power and looks...
...In a way—how can I say this...
...In its tacky way, this is almost a theatrical version of a communist state...
...it was fitting that Brodsky could not stop smoking...
...Eventually, I went to Southeast Asia, where the people of Cambodia, helpless pawns in the crossfire of the Vietnam War, became my beat and my obsession...
...I hate fame, fortune, position, power and looks, largely because I have none of those things, but I will admit I'm a prejudiced person, but I'm not going to let my prejudice dictate my behavior...
...Restaurant servers, shop employees, hotel workers — even well-heeled business men—smiled warmly in her face, took her hand, and thanked us for providing a future to one of their abandoned babies...
...That's good...
...Later I ask what she requested...
...Compare my shopping list with hers and we have what's known as dissonance...
...not criminal...
...I can keep my good humor about single entries on my daughter's Christmas list...
...MARCH 1996] New York Times Book Review Liberalism's new standard of excellence...
...CURRENT WISDOM Washington Monthly Recalling all that he has witnessed in his years of foreign travel, Sydney H. Schanberg proves again what has so long been noted about the American progressive, to wit: travel narrows the mind: My first taste of newspapering came when I wrote for an army weekly during my military service in Europe...
...DECEMBER 16, 1995] News Tribune (Waltham, Massachusetts) Newell Davis, of nearby Newton, tells us there are two kinds of women: Run me up the nearest yardarm, tar and feather me, excommunicate me, or accuse my mother of wearing combat boots, but I like Hillary Clinton...
...So I take her hand, sweep past the Bay-watch Barbies, and show her that we can shop —and live—as we please...
...Such a waste...
...the Clintons and especially Mrs...
...She's my hero...
...The brave ones offered a loud "hallo...
...I teach my daughter to work for her future...
...It was on Nanchang's packed streets that I experienced first-hand the affable nature of the Chinese...
...She's staying at the North Pole...
...The land deal was stupid but not criminal...
...I lose it massively, however, every time I walk into a toy store...
...Afterward, in 1959, I went to work at The New York Times as a copyboy...
...Sure, Bill, we believe you...
...Rather, what I found were warm, friendly, and caring people who seemed oblivious to living in a country trapped between communism and capitalism, and filled with dire social and economic problems...
...MARcH/APRIL 1996] San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner Joshua Kosman, music critic for the incomparable Chronicle, laments the countless bigotries practiced against the world's black Beethovens and Red Indian Tchaikovskys: A more telling statistic is the count of living composers whose music will be played—a measly seven...
...Westerners are an anomaly in this region and hundreds of eyes followed us as we walked the streets...
...Amid the paunches and pinstripes of media types in Washington, he is rumpled and rather beautiful, with the kind of melting eyes that would make my mother shake her head and tsk, "He doesn't like girls...
...He and his lovely wife Bruno have been naive, evasive, foolish, misleading, but—what luck...
...Bay-watch Barbie and Princess Wishing Star," she answers, so excited she shivers...
...She looks like Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm, but you can't tell a book by its cover...
...It's a compromise between a mother's principles and a daughter's television-induced dreams...
...I don't like her hair style...
...This, not professional sports or the military, must surely rank as America's most sexist institution...
...Let's look down this aisle," I tell my daughter, steering her toward soccer balls and shin guards...
...MARCH 24, 1996] Reliable Sources On a formal televised pablum powwow, host Bernard Kalb indulges in a little wishful thinking: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I'm not suggesting that we didn't cooperate, but I am suggesting that James Stewart, in the new introduction in Time magazine, says there's no smoking gun here, there is no new allegation...
...These people love their children...
...What I am saying is there's room in this country for two kinds of women, and Hillary, while she is a member of an often despised minority, is a nice person, and I like her...
...Four more years...
...What you have is many pages of recycled gossip, some minor new details, but nothing that adds to the overall story...
...MARCH 17, 1996] Cincinnati Enquirer How Krista Ramsey, columnist, found America's most sexist institution just before Christmas and led a revolution in the boys' aisle: My daughter sits on Santa's lap, her hands gesturing the size and shape of the gifts she wants, her eyes bright with the joy of pure consumption...
...and their attempts to respond to the hailstorm of charges against them have been variously naïve, impetuous, evasive, foolish, misleading and stupid, but not criminal...
...Everyone wanted to touch her because in doing so, some of the luck bestowed on her would be carried to them...
...BERNARD KALB: George, what you have given us is possibly the last word...
...I was in China to help my sister, Anne, bring home her eight-month-old daughter, Grace Zhi Fan, from Nanchang...
...I'm not going to be shouted down by a bunch of puddin-headed yoyos who think that every woman should remain in her place, in a typing pool at the local insurance company or home and pregnant, shopping and cleaning house...
...Say, that steno's name wasn't Rosemary Woods, was it...
...I'm not saying there's anything wrong with housewives who stay home...
...Cambodia's suffering was on a grander scale, but it's really the same basic story...
...He explained that rather than filing electronically, he had dictated his column to a Times stenographer, who misunderstood him...
...Such a person could appreciate the legions of corporate executives and lawyers insisting that what we all know to be truth is, they do so solemnly swear, false...
...He was a sick man with a heart condition and a habit he could not break...
...I must admit, sometimes I think she is kind of a "holier than thou" type of individual, a super-moralist that makes me feel like a perfect skunk for just being my sinful self, but still she has it all...
...We can't," she tells me...
...These confessions of what we already know, these acknowledgmerits of the obvious, have become front-page news...
...Blood Sport is by far the most complete, the best and the fairest account of the Clintons and their troubles to date, and it concludes that the Whitewater grab bag of scandal, controversy and unanswered questions does not justify the attention it has received...
...Boy Clinton has been "stupid but not criminal...
...PBS's Charlie Rose devoted part of his show Tuesday night to the poet Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate who died in January...
...When we responded, they burst into laughter...
...APRIL 1, 1996] Washington Post Richard Cohen, the fantasist, equates tobacco companies with the Soviet Union, a poet's hard-earned cigarette habit with the Gulag—still trying to impress Peter Jennings's wife, Richard...
...Now, a small number of cigarette industry scientists have stepped forward to say that, yes, nicotine is addictive and, yes, the industry manipulates the amount found in various cigarettes...
...You can give that fact as political a spin as you choose, but it's certainly a reflection of overreliance on the tried and true...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
