Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" Washington Post Book World Kultursmog Konservative Kevin Phillips, in his usual role of disparaging conservatives while sucking on a lemon and striking a pose of loo percent...
...Bruce MacPhail, monitor of the nation's funny pages: The comic strip Garf eld is neither humorous nor insightful...
...Therefore, when the editor guy at Mother Jones told me they wanted to send a cleaning consultant with a doctorate in history (his thesis was on 17th-century Dutch household-management techniques) to my house, the proper warning bells and whistles did not go off in my head...
...Their will and intentionality have become macrophase and consonant with the primary order...
...My daddy...
...SPRING 1996] Associated Press Hillary Rodham Clinton's spiritual masseuse, the callipygian Jean Houston, explains human nature in terms com prehensible to a dope, college educated: The high actualizer I have known, the pragmatic saints and world-making mystics, have been essentially of that genre: they have allowed their body-minds to become fields of space-time from which can be harvested the formings of the Farm...
...The cat is blended from all the Biblical faults-sloth, greed, envy and meanness, and the strip depends on the distortions of caricature for its effects...
...Well, we're not buying into it...
...She should have been a labor organizer...
...It's certainly a disgrace to America...
...The violence is assumed to be natural and justified because the victims are a special class...
...But unfortunately it's more than just not funny...
...It becomes another morning bathroom habit, like washing and brushing your teeth...
...The NRA's placement of a woman at the top of their organization is just another ploy to gain the advocacy and membership of more women...
...They are a special class because they look different...
...CURRENT W I S D O M Washington Post Book World Kultursmog Konservative Kevin Phillips, in his usual role of disparaging conservatives while sucking on a lemon and striking a pose of loo percent regular American guy: This is a fascinating and important book, although it is mostly about the Clintons prior to January 1993...
...JUNE 13,1996] Curbstone INK Curbstone Press, publishers of `Books that Make a Difference" ("Libros que marcan la diferencia"), interviews its prize poet, Egdar Gabriel Silex, and pops the question: Would you say that your poetry has a commitment to social change...
...Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is a drooling Saint Bernard...
...The days when feminists cheered every time a woman achieved a position formerly held by a man simply because it had formerly been held by a man are over...
...By someone you love...
...Nixon was a growling Doberman...
...This is domestic crime...
...I would like to see a day called Singles Day...
...Or perhaps not improvement, but greater and greater humility in the entire social fabric of man...
...Confusing feminism with firepower ("Why Feminists Should Be Trigger Happy," editorial page, May 13...
...Richard Cohen, in his familiar hammock on the op-ed pages of the venerable Post, elaborates on his quite new and relatively unknown canine theory of history, or is this another of his attempts at being droll...
...I would like it to be on a Sunday in August and to receive the same status as the other major special days...
...Please put the cat out, for good...
...It is an easy, cost-effective adjunct to a healthy regimen...
...Do you want us to go round giving credibility to every piece of dirt thrown at the President like those assholes at the American Spectator?' [JUNE 8, 1996] 85 The American Spectator . August 1996...
...Murray Kempton, not hereto fore known to have a drinking problem: The percentage of our children who are under five and underweight is unknown because we, who count everything else all the way through the annual consumption of bellywash, apparently don't bother to count ill-nourished babies, even though El Salvador and Haiti do...
...LORI A. TIRBASO Chagrin Falls, Ohio [JUNE 4, 1996] Washington Post Grown-up drama critic Kara Swisher reports on a sentimental triumph for all art lovers jaded by their long evenings of prime-time television and Sunday morning sermons from Yuppie clerics: Sexually oriented party games, a lot of liquor and seven naked gay guys-would you believe it if we told you that "Party," at the Church Street Theater, is perhaps one of the sweeter and more innocent plays now on Washington stages...
...It gets worse...
...Use the money saved to support a new strip...
...Garf eld celebrates the killing of spiders for no reason other than they are spiders...
...She should have overthrown the monarchy instead of marrying into it...
...It's a medium of extremism...
...Then she danced with the prince once and married him...
...I would like to establish a day for all singles...
...Her mop is a crutch...
...Social change is a very big term...
...I love to clean...
...It appeals to a closed-minded know-nothingness...
...And it moves very, very, very slowly...
...To me, social change amounts to the slow and glacial improvement of man's humility...
...MAY/JUNE 1996] Washington Post Prof...
...The way I look at my poetry, or this particular book, or all of my work, really, my life's work, and that includes raising my son, being a member of a community that's very close knit, all those things, is that I think they're but a tiny ripple in an Ocean, and it's up to the wind, really, to sort of lift that tiny little ripple and make it into a large wave that will hit some cliff edge or shore that represents the human heart, and in some way perhaps chip one little, tiny grain of sand off of that stone heart...
...JUNE 15,1996] Syracuse Herald American Another Yuppie visionary, Mark of East Syracuse, dares to speak up: As Father's Day approaches, I am disappointed to say I cannot receive any honor or respect on this day...
...I know, because I do the exact same thing...
...Oh, very smart, Cin...
...Once you overcome the cultural bias against "pee," you will find that it is not at all unplea surable to the taste -in fact, it's quite palat able...
...JUNE 16,1996] Washington Post One of the premier frauds of America, Harvard Law School professor and weekly talk show host Alan Dershowitz, sends his love: [Talk show radio is] "totally unrepresentative of America...
...Apple, one of Washington's foremost advocates of civility in politics and staunch opponent of all forms of meanness, lapses, forsooth, into inscrutable billingsgate at the mere thought of a handful of patriots: R. W. Apple, the New York Times's Washington observer, almost chokes with fury at the mere question as to whether the liberal press has been tardy in following up the sexual and financial allegations against Mr Clinton...
...The play's appeal is certainly due in part to the complete nudity of all the characters by play's end, but also its frothy, shamelessly entertaining nature...
...It is a tough life as a single...
...Never has been, never will be...
...Single people deserve a day of honor, too...
...Not with bullets, with selfesteem...
...We hold that it's not all right to kill, curse or deny an education or a job because of differences of appearance...
...Since most perpetrators of violence against women are known to them, we should teach women to take responsibility for their own safety through choice...
...But there is one device above all others that places the strip beyond the pale: It repeatedly uses lethal violence as a source of humor...
...Women interested in fighting violent crime against women have to arm themselves, all right...
...Along with a regular hatha yoga practice and a healthy vegetarian diet, drinking one's urine can truly improve your health...
...This is preposterous...
...JULY 11, 1996] New Yorker In Yuppiedom's premier magazine of belles lettres, Diane from Portland (Caucasian) works through her problems: One day, I met a little black girl and her puppy in front of the grocery, and I asked her the dog's name...
...Author Roger Morris, a liberal, earned praise from reviewers for his books skewering Nixon Era Republicans-Nixon himself, Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger...
...It's tough not finding the right one and being lonely...
...I always tell my foster kid, "You know, they don't tell you what happens after she marries the prince...
...In Washington, every snow's a blizzard and every event's historic...
...She cleans just to avoid real life...
...The only reason she ever got anything is because she cried and her fairy godmother showed up and dressed her...
...I asked...
...So I can't say that I do it intentionally, but I do hope I can make some kind of change...
...That's prejudice...
...MAY/JUNE 1996] Wall Street Journal On the howl page of a distinguished Kapitalist organ, more counsel on how the unsuspecting American female might get herself killed: Poor Laura Ingraham...
...Who do you think broke the goddamn story in the first place?' he yells down the phone...
...You see, I am a single bachelor without a soul mate and without a child of my own...
...Now he has written a notquite-indictment of Bill Clinton that is cumulatively more damning than the onedimensional harshness churned out by the American Spectator and suchlike...
...The same goes for Valentine's Day...
...Where have you been, Laura...
...From "The Possible Human: A Course in Enhancing Your Physical, Mental and Creative Abilities" [JUNE 25,1996] 84 August 1996 • The American Spectator Valley News (White River Junction, Vermont) Freedom of speech, as celebrated by another unscotchable progressive, Mr...
...Indeed, perhaps the best way to describe David Dillon's romp about a group of friends who get together for a monthly fiesta and gossip fest is as a gay "Shear Madness"except it's a lot less crude than that perpetual Kennedy Center hit...
...Of course they get the job done...
...JUNE 22, 1996] The Spectator (London) Upon being interviewed by an English journalist, Mr...
...I have tried to teach my children to kill only for food, defense or compassion, and to try to maintain a high degree of awareness of the lives we take as a means of understanding our part in the circle of life of the Earth...
...JUNE 17,1996] Mother Jones More of the infantile gibberings that pass for sophisticated discourse in the ruins of what was once called Liberalism: Cinderella is a terrible role model for kids...
...JUNE 16,1996] Yoga Journal In the magazine that is on Hillary Clinton's coffee table always, a missive from David Ackerman, who has apparently been able to evade law enforcement officials for nearly two decades: I have been drinking the middle third of my early morning urine for almost twenty years and feel that it has enhanced my well-being...
...Nigger," she said...
...In the home...
...I was stunned...
...She has no virtues at all...
...Who gave him that name...
...JUNE 16, 1996] New York Review of Books Another incomprehensible communique from Dr...
...That's why Whitewa ter, which is about a nondescript land deal in Dogpatch, is compared to Watergate, which was a singular mugging of the Con stitution, and why a bureaucratic foul-up involving FBI files in the White House is now being compared to Richard Nixon's enemies list...
...Cinderella should have gotten out of the house...
...Not only did that little girl's daddy have a wicked sense of humor, but he was also a great tactician: I was just a neighbor, but in my white skin I represented a power structure, and so I could not address that man's dog...
...I resent being exposed to an unregenerate proponent of prejudice in my daily paper...
Vol. 29 • August 1996 • No. 8
