Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Nation A comforting advertisement found in the books section of America's foremost magazine of liberal progress: SPANKING Do you have spanking fantasies? We do: hundreds, and...
...Susan McDougal already has been sentenced harshly to two years in prison and now faces another 18 months for refusing to answer questions posed by a Grand Jury in Little Rock...
...Clinton and some of their old friends and associates from Little Rock...
...According to the myriad of local and national news stories covering the event, Comel West emerged as the toast of the Eliot House party...
...Lippo are the first major Indonesian group to realise what the Japanese, Taiwanese, South Korean, plus Canadian and European, companies have known for a long time—it doesn't hurt business to have friends in high places in Washington...
...DECEMBER 30, 1996] New York Daily News Reflections on the subject of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, from Our President's own James Carville, another liberal advocate of Civility in Politics: "He's one more mistake away from not having any kneecaps," Carville chortled...
...Now, under the excruciating pressure of a lengthy prison sentence, Susan McDougal has stated emphatically that she won't "lie for leniency," which is what prosecutors often demand, even though none will admit as much...
...Reggie Zelnik, chairman of the history department at the university, is also scheduled to speak...
...elections...
...If economic, and even political favours, can be bought from the self-proclaimed bastion of democracy, freedom and unrestricted trade...
...As a professor of history, I was asked to speak to my son's second-grade class about Christopher Columbus...
...DECEMBER 11, 1996] Rolling Stone Peter Buck, guitarist and philatelist for the rock ensemble REM, sounding like the young George Bush: The most useful, practical child-rearing advice he has had came from Bono: two nannies...
...DECEMBER 13, 1996] New York Observer Unclever sophistry from the painfully unclever Joe Conason: Despite the occasional outbreak of xenophobia, Americans can tolerate foreigners who stay in their place...
...Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who has been a contributing editor to The New Yorker for several years, served as guest editor for this landmark issue...
...and his class colored a picture showing that Columbus discovered that the world was round...
...I'm not sure which is better: to remake the past into a heroic tale when it was not...
...These are the nuttiest fruit cakes in —Jeez...
...The novel was published last April...
...The record for this is probably the paper on "A Special Haunting: Gus Lee's Tiger's Tail...
...Barr [Rep...
...Robert Barr (R-GA)], to the National Rifle Association, to the cigarette companies, to the militia, to the whole cockamamie group of these right-wing goofballs, I ain't shutting up...
...Listed among the speakers are several people who played significant roles in the Free Speech Movement, including his widow, Lynne Hollander, Bettina Aptheker and Michael Rossman...
...FALL 1996]New York Times A poignant charnel notice spotted on the obituary page of Manhattan's leading underground newspaper: A memorial for Mario Savio, a student leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960's, will be held at noon on Dec...
...The foreigners who now insinuate themselves into our electionsare merely imitating the behavior of Americans who have done the same in their countries for the past several decades...
...Romantic, erotic, disciplinary spanking stories...
...But what's happening is that the texts that do get mentioned are often by very contemporary multicultural writers...
...Why should books written in the contemporary moment be deprivileged, seen as less in what they communicate, simply because their authors aren't dead...
...Surely not those who take advantage of the rules, but those who make them...
...Starr has sought desperately to bring down President and Mrs...
...Why should companies like Lippo get world exposure, when the greedy politicians in the USA can't even clean their own house...
...and leave our children to uncover the lie at some future point, or to tell the sometimes sorry truth and search for a remedy...
...whose fault is it...
...How long can she resist offers of freedom from her prison cell...
...DECEMBER 16, 1996] 80 February 1997 • The American Spectator CNN Crossfire On a celebrated television shout show James Carville, Esq., delivers up his considered estimate of the Republican Party: "Let me just say one more thing to Mr...
...I had no idea...
...It all blurs—the texts into the events into where you were at the time...
...And Starr, longtime crony of George Bush, has been mentioned as Bob Dole's first choice for a Supreme Court vacancy in a GOP administration...
...But the paper she delivered here was not quite as breathlessly up-to-the-minute...
...Then Bono and his wife, Ali, told us: 'You can't travel the world with only one nanny...
...Despite my efforts, my son cheerfully brought home a class project on Columbus's singular bravery...
...I thought it was so bourgeois to have any help, so while we were making the record, we had one person who worked about four hours a day...
...Rock-ribbed Republican torturer-in-chief Kenneth Starr is no more independent than Newt Gingrich or Elizabeth Dole —and I'm a lifelong, if disenchanted, Republican...
...McDougal, former spouse of the free-wheeling entrepreneur, simply did what her ex-husband asked her to do, signing whatever documents were put before her without paying much attention, just like my mother used to do, acting as a co-signer when the lawyers or authorities required it, but initiating nothing and assuming essentially a passive role...
...his school principal dressed up as Columbus...
...Plus, unlike a Korean company whose donations to the DNC had to be refunded as they were earned outside the United States, Lippo have stayed, just about, within the legalities of the matter...
...Huang are disturbing, and they deserve to be investigated for possible criminal violations...
...So much for letting the passage of time determine the classics...
...His dancing prowess, which was quite evident on this occasion, helped him to secure his spot in the limelight...
...It takes one nanny to handle all the diapers and the clothes.' And they were right...
...JANUARY 6,1997] Washington Post At the annual meeting of the Modem language Association, doctoral candidate Yvonne "Baubie" Paschal comes forward to explain why she is soon to become a professor of English at a university near you: For years, there have been grumbles from the old guard about what they see as the predominance of presentations on feminism, "queer theory," canon reformation...
...And their place —as suggested by the furor over John Huang, the Democratic Party fund-raiser who allegedly brought in illegal contributions from Asia—certainly does not include meddling in U.S...
...And why should they not...
...This time, suffering from the flu, she merely read...
...But the level of indignation over Mr...
...She is a gutsy woman, a latter-day freedom fighter with the courage of her convictions...
...Wait a minute...
...The spectacle of rapacious Korean corporations and front men for Indonesian dictators purchasing access to the White House is perfectly disgusting, although no more so than that of British tobacco merchants or Australian-American media magnates doing the same with Republicans...
...Huang as a symbol of foreign manipulation requires that we overlook the habitual tendency of Americans to intervene in elections and political parties around the world...
...Savio, a teacher at Sonoma State University, died on Nov...
...Prof...
...6 at 53...
...I've got to say I will owe them an everlasting debt just for cluing me in about how other people do it...
...Everyone has a bad memory about the '6os," she says...
...FALL 1996] The American Spectator ?February 1997 81...
...McDougal a "red badge of courage...
...DECEMBER 2, 1996] Jakarta Program What's On In one of Indonesia's leading literary omniurn gathera, a splendid example of the idealism Our President inspires overseas: There are no doubts that major loopholes exist in the current American system of campaign financing...
...The prosecutors haven't yet lit her funeral pyre, but that could be next on their agenda...
...Ordinary people of every stripe shouldrebel vigorously against the Starr-chamber tactics employed by the shamelessly-partisan prosecutor who is entangled in egregious conflicts of interest...
...This whole thing is so ?this ?these —this right-wing cabal of a pack of goofballs that is sitting here attacking me, trying to jail me, trying to say I'm the Landmark Legal Foundation...
...Yet in all the uproar over foreign money, no one has asked an obvious question: If foreigners are supposed to stay out of our elections, why are we always interfering in their elections...
...Wives often do exactly that to accommodate their husbands, not infrequently complaining but dutifully going along...
...Ken Starr and his minions, by tightening the screws without mercy on Susan McDougal, ex-wife of James McDougal, the prime Whitewater figure who is being worked over separately, aim to elicit testimony from her—be it true or false—damaging to the Clintons, whether before November 5 or even after his re-election to weaken the President in a second term...
...This habit is occasionally benign, though much more often malignant, and always—as with the Indonesians and others who recently have greased American politicians ?in pursuit of whatever is deemed in the national interest...
...My own proposal for Columbus Day is to exchange it for "Explorers Day" and celebrate the spirit of adventure...
...Give Mrs...
...DECEMBER 1, 1996] New Yorker Professor Doktor Martha May of Western Connecticut State University has inspired another colossal intellectual effort for the edification of human kind: I was intrigued by Adam Gopnik's account of our collective inclination to tell the truth about American history ("Grim Fairy Tales," November 18th...
...NOVEMBER 1996] Chicago's Life Wide-ranging thoughts of a spiritual and gynophysical nature on the predicament of Susan McDougal by the illustrious William Rentschler, winner last May of the Chicago Headline Club's first annual "Ethics in Journalism Award": What the wrongly-designated "independent" prosecutor is doing to Susan McDougal is sinful, cynical, scandalous, and a perversion of our vaunted criminal justice system...
...As one of these fellows put it this weekend under the cloak of anonymity: "It's very difficult to find a session with a paper that even mentions a text...
...Even as he conducts his Arkansas witch-hunt, Starr, a partner of well-wired, Chicago-based Kirkland & Ellis, represents as his private client Big Tobacco interests, which have pumped millions into their largely covert effort to oust from the White House their staunch anti-cigarettes-for-kids nemesis, Bill Clinton...
...For a complete catalog, send $3.0o to CF Publications, Box 7o6nn, E. Setauket, NY 11733...
...It seems our truth-telling sometimes makes only a small noise against larger cultural myths...
...OCTOBER 17, 1996] Black & Crimson Introducing the Eliza Doolittle of Harvard's high-steppin' Department of Afro-American Studies: After the media forum, nearly 400 guests gathered at Eliot House to celebrate the release of The New Yorker's special issue, "Black in America...
...My best guess is that Ms...
...No one is going to suggest that companies like Lippo and individuals like James Riady in Indonesia, and many others elsewhere, have not used the system to their own potential advancement...
...Called "Dramatizing the Intellectual," it was about three '6os playwrights...
...8 in the Pauley Ballroom on the Berkeley campus...
...Paschal asks...
...Of course, the activities of Mr...
...Usually, she both reads and, where necessary, performs her talks...
...We do: hundreds, and ours are for sale...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
