Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Hill The successful bullying of the Fourth Estate by one of Congress's most tiresome plaintiffs, the Hon. Waxman: To the Editor: On your April 23 "Open Secrets" page, you...
...The fiction you and American Spectator printed proves the point...
...Instead, we should use less judgmental terms, like "standard," and "conventional," and, most useful, "appropriate...
...These terms are at best counterproductive, because they belong respectively to systems of manners, logic, and ethics, not to the socially-constrained system of language...
...MARCH 2, 19971 The American Spectator • July 1997 85...
...I am showing my brother that I am strong...
...The item is a complete fabrication and a smear on my reputation...
...I am Olive Oyl with Popeye arms...
...In reviewing the usage with the letter's context, a lower case "g" was used when the letter was published...
...They emphasize the physiological consequences that workers suffer when they are not allowed to interrupt work to rest or urinate...
...Yet here I stand, at 44., brushing my hair before the mirror and admiring the undeniable torque of the muscles of my upper arm and shoulder...
...Kennedy's parents and several of the Kennedy children participated in the White Water Derby, an event that made history in this small Adirondack town...
...Years, even decades, of my life have gone by when the idea of flexing my biceps would have seemed ridiculous, foolish, the vestige of some bygone little girl machismo...
...I do not mean to suggest that society does not have certain expectations with respect to language usage—quite the contrary...
...HENRY A. WAXMAN ( D -CALIF...
...In a keynote address to several hundred people in the auditorium of the Johnsburg Central School, Mr...
...I am showing him that I can kick his butt...
...REP...
...Instead of hungering to be the next Damon Runyon—the voice of a city or at least a slice of life—they want to be the next George Will...
...News & World Report Bilge: In some ways, newspaper writers are better than ever—more educated, more broad-minded, more representative of a diverse society...
...Marc Linder, a labor lawyer and political economist, and Ingrid Nygaard, a physician specializing in urogynecology, place this regulatory breakdown in the wider context of the history of labor-management struggles over rest periods...
...local is out...
...The "private—keep out" sign with the Big Sur coastline behind it contrasts tellingly with the Native American definition of "property rights" as meaning the place where one lays his blanket...
...Love, Jack restores the cherished image of Kennedy as a man filled with a love of life and adventure, a man of great passion and gentle tenderness...
...FALL 1997] 84 July 1997 The American Spectator Santa Barbara News-Press Another descent into Yuppie esotery in progressive Santa Barb: Clarification In her May 3 letter, local Planned Parenthood Executive Director Cheryl Rollings referred to "God...
...MARCH 17, 1997] New York Times More moving Kennedyana from another loyal reader of the unsatirizable Times: Re "Kennedy Family Values" (column, May 3): While Maureen Dowd was joining others in splashing around "in the shallow end of the Kennedy gene pool," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy, was canoeing the upper Hudson River as part of the 4oth annual Mite Water Derby in North Creek, N.Y...
...Waxman: To the Editor: On your April 23 "Open Secrets" page, you reprinted an item from American Spectator that alleged I rummaged through the trash of two other members of Congress...
...Paula Jones is expected to pen: Actoe, /)ache By GUNILLA VON POST with Carl Mines Written with moving honesty and imbued with the warmth of a treasured memory, Love, Jack is a portrait of Jack Kennedy as he has never been seen before...
...His remarks were fired by his passion for environmental justice, enriched by his personal experiences diving in the Croton River, supported by a knowledge of the underlying scientific and social issues, and broadened by a global perspective...
...After the talk, many in the audience were moved, as was the moderator, who urged us all to go home and contemplate what we had heard...
...Rollings' intent was to capitalize "God...
...perhaps I am six or seven...
...FALL 1997) The Great Books Series Another Kennedy hagiographer, one Burton Hersh, spins still more of the enervating fantasia that is the Kennedy bulsh, and the opiate of Liberalism: Dick Armey and other hard-right ideologues in the House sometimes attempted to vilify Kennedy for stepping on his own bill, but beyond that it was surprising overall how little heat he took...
...JANE HAINES, PANELIST PACIFIC GROVE [MAY 1, 1997] Women/Sport Anna Quindlen, the feminist Proust, writes of her voluptuous biceps, prefatory to further belles lettres on her bushy nose hair, and that historic night when her halitosis wilted a floral arrangement at the Ritz: When was it that I finally gave up that gesture, as simple and as symbolic as flashing a thumbs-up or flipping the bird...
...But such expectations can be recognized and described in ways that do not demean people by using diction that treats them as deficient, diseased, damaged, or depraved...
...Editor's note: Rep...
...Without legal protection, workers are held captive...
...Kennedy spoke about his work as an environmental lawyer...
...But few work, as Royko did, in the town where they were raised...
...It turned out Medicare really was the third rail of American politics...
...Gunilla Von Post describes in poignant detail the love that flowered from 195310 1958, spanned the width of the Atlantic Ocean, and survived the ever-present threat of public exposure, Kennedy's constant struggle with debilitating back pain, and the increasing demands made upon the young senator by his ambitious father and by the sweep of history itself...
...Knowing that supervisors often deny permission to leave the production line, a poultry processor who cannot risk losing her job may urinate where she stands...
...People generally do not like to be attacked, especially about something as intimately identifying as their language...
...MAY12, 1997] New York Times Another implausible peroration for the usual laudation to "the vulgarity and violence of gangsta rap" by another cheap version of the modern Christian minister, Michael Eric Dyson, author of Between God and Gangsta Rap: In the aftermath of the murder of Notorious B.I.G., we have heard the usual condemnations of the vulgarity and violence of gangsta rap, and perhaps rightly so, because the genre's glamorization of guns and gore is deeply unsettling...
...Rappers like Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony have all grappled with one of the oldest, most vexing theological issues: the problem of evil...
...It reminds us that sometimes the greatest love stories are spun not in fiction, but in real life...
...The cover photo is perfect...
...Well done...
...In this case, The Hill failed to follow a basic rule of journalism, which was to give him an opportunity to respond...
...They're great guys," veteran reporter Jules Witcover said of younger colleagues, "but do they write songs...
...Ironically, because most statutes singled out women for rest breaks, they were invalidated by Title VII's ban on sex discrimination...
...Still, amid all the attacks, one important dimension of gangsta rap has been overlooked, perhaps because it is hidden in plain sight...
...Thirty years earlier, Mr...
...The authors explain other countries' regulations and conclude with a recommendation for legislation to mandate rest and bathroom breaks for all workers...
...The Hill should be embarrassed for reprinting the story without first checking whether it had even a single element of truth...
...APRIL 30, 1997] Coast Weekly (Seaside, California) Testimonial of an inchoate kleptomaniac: Thanks to CW staff for an accurate and sensitively edited coverage of the April 15 panel discussion on private and community rights...
...I bend my arm at the elbow, make a right angle and a curled fist, and then pop my biceps, the muscle bulging beneath my skin...
...I ask that The Hill acknowledge that your story was without merit with the same prominence you gave the original item...
...Your story began by noting that "Slinging mud has reached new lows on Capitol Hill this year...
...There's more concern with profundity, less with aesthetics...
...A consensus was forming among scholars of the Senate that, as Ross Baker of Rutgers put it, "It's not just occupying a seat— but to have had an influence to varying degrees on important aspects of public policy over nearly forty years ranks with the Henry Clays and Daniel Websters...
...Waxman, unfortunately, has a point...
...They rarely take up a neighborhood cause or take on the downtown establishment...
...Both polls and focus groups indicated widespread revulsion with Gingrich...
...Those expectations, although often arbitrary and capricious, are very real...
...DOROTHY B. ROSENTHAL Indian Lake, N.Y., MaY 4, 1997 [MAY 6, 1997] Cornell University Press From the Fall Publication catalogue, glad tidings regarding a tome from Professors Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard, prophets of the Golden Shower: VOID WHERE PROHIBITED Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard Although federal and state regulations require employers to provide toilets, government agencies, incredibly, do not require employers to permit workers to use them...
...Kennedy, the lawyer for the Hudson Riverkeeper Fund, came not only to commemorate the anniversary but to bring attention to the environmental problems of the Hudson River...
...We regret that we didn't, especially since the American Spectator is a conservative opinion journal known for its ideological bias...
...MARCH 30, 1997] Crown Books Not the sort of book Ms...
...Many now wear adult diapers designed for the incontinent...
...An elementary school teacher wanting to use the bathroom may take her whole class along...
...SPRING 1997] U.S...
...I was therefore deeply distressed to find your otherwise potentially useful article "Grammar ror" poisoned by such obsolete, prejudicial, and ultimately damaging terms as "proper/improper," "correct/incorrect," and "good/bad...
...Cosmic is in...
...In memory I am as skinny as a straw, fragile, almost pathetic...
...I am showing him that I am tough...
...from The Shadow President: Ted Kennedy in Opposition, by Burton Hersh, Steerforth Press, 219 pages, $231 Herald Times (Bloomington, Indiana) In the pages of a great American daily, Associate Professor of English Jeffrey F. Huntsman finally gets published: I have taught general linguistics, including grammar and usage, to prospective teachers of English for nearly thirty years...
...Linder and Nygaard explain how protective rest period legislation has shrunk over time...
...Even the ever-innovative Richard Viguerie, fund-raiser to the Right, found receipts falling off sharply whenever he tried to resurrect Kennedy to his time-honored prominence as bogeyman from the Left...
...Ted Kennedy, on the other hand, seemed to have taken on that peculiarly American sanctity that devolves on a reformed sinner...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
