Polemical Papers
Kimball, Roger
orati of New York and Hollywood, and the elites of the publishing, artistic, and academic world, who recognize them as one of their own. Graduates of Yale Law, they have none of Johnson's hangups...
...Bad news...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...
...But there are some differences as well...
...Some philosophers will trace their first articulation to Nietzsche, a few to Plato's Thrasymachus...
...As it happened, the day after this review appeared, I had occasion to go to a conference at Yale at which the great Martha Nussbaum was speaking...
...Say a year, or two years, or seven years...
...She shows how, by using the term "person" as if it were a special sort of honorific, Singer in effect subscribes to the view that mankind can be divided into two groups, the elect and the non-elect: "Membership of the special group picked out by the bioethicists goes with protection from mundane destruction, " Teich-man observes, "because it's argued that the favored group has something like a real right to life...
...Teichman reserves some of her harshest criticism for Peter Singer, a professor at Monash University in Australia and author of a book called Practical Ethics...
...Rorty's name for a person who espouses this species of postmodern fatuousness is "liberal ironist...
...I suspect that an unfailing sense of humor has been a great aid and comfort...
...By 1989, Rorty had already emerged as the official philosopher of postmodem academic liberals...
...Singer says they don't have to...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...
...One Sunday in April 1989, I stumbled upon a review of scintillating wit, razor-sharp intelligence, and —mirabile dictu — marked political incorrectness...
...O Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$34.95) O Payment enclosed Bill me later • At various times TAS rents its subscriber list to other organizations...
...It's not often that reading the Times Book Review affords such day-brightening experiences...
...You thought experimentation on living human flesh went out with Nazism...
...But what," Teichman asks, "if they needed more time to decide...
...He is also a utilitarian, which means that when it comes to morality he is utterly at a loss...
...Here Beschloss has selected those conversations that illustrate, step by step, how Johnson outmaneuvered the Kennedys and forced the heir-apparent to leave the cabinet and seek political office in New York, rather than to stand as his vice-presidential candidate in 1964...
...In other words, the bumble bees of truth and meaning can actually fly...
...In a typical first trimester the author explains how she came to write the essay, what the weather was like, and where she had lunch....In the second trimester she forecasts what she is about to say on the next page but intimates that it might not, after all, be more than a sketch...
...You thought doctors ought to stick to the Hippocratic Oath...
...It is one of Teichman's great gifts as a philosopher to be able to write clearly not only about technical philosophical matters but also about things that people actually care about...
...To forestall puzzlement, I'll mention that aerodynamics comes in via the bumble bee, a creature that should not—according to some theories of aerodynamics—be able to fly...
...Teichman's piece, reprinted here, was about the philosopher Richard Rorty's book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity...
...Bad news...
...But since I believe that Teichman's essays are models of philosophical sophistication and moral intelligence, I am going to recommend them to you anyway...
...Many of the conversations show Johnson's acute interest in covering up the source of his personal fortune (and that of his wife...
...This book is not only about history, but about people — Johnson's allies and courtiers, rivals and adversaries, many of whom make repeated appearances...
...Jenny Teichman, who recently retired from teaching philosophy at New Hall, Cambridge, is one of those analytically trained philosophers whose intellectual ROGER KIMBALL is managing editor of the New Criterion and, most recently, co-editor of The Future of the European Past (Ivan R. Dee...
...You thought experimentation on living human flesh went out with Nazism...
...He wants to reassure his liberal readers that it's all right to give up on notions like truth and objectivity, but he doesn't want them to lose any sleep over it...
...Perhaps that came a few years later...
...The only difference between killing a normal infant and a defective one," he writes, "is the attitude of the parents...
...But he had certainly already proved his political bona fides, assuring his readers that philosophy "aims at continuing the conversation rather than at discovering truth" and acknowledging that he really did not "have much use for notions like 'objective value' and 'objective truth.'" As Teichman shows with elegant dispatch, Rorty is a happy nihilist...
...It is in the nature of things that anyone who pokes around in the world of contemporary academic writing is going to have many such encounters, so it is a testimony to Teich-man's intellectual robustness that she has managed to preserve her savagery intact at least from 1979, when the first of the essays in this volume appeared, to the present moment...
...spent virtually his entire adult life in Washington, most of it in Congress, where he had the opportunity to take the full measure of the men with whom he would work as president...
...44 ferocity is never defeated by her encounters with stupidity, moral barbarousness, or intellectual chicanery...
...But forget the philosophers...
...Teichman is appropriately scathing in her criticism of Peter Singer's views...
...It would be unfair to spoil the reader's fun by giving away too much, so I'll just remark that "Deconstruction and Aerodynamics" is one of the most incisive—and certainly the funniest—attacks on deconstruction I have ever read...
...The Republican leadership in Congress—Senator Everett Dirksen and Minority Leader Charles Halleck— are shown here to be in a purely defensive mode, nibbling at the margins of Johnson's legislative proposals, while their flacks spent most of their time on peripheral issues, like trying to dig up the dirt on Lady Bird's shoddy treatment of employees at her ranch...
...He is also a utilitarian, which means that when it comes to morality he is utterly at a loss...
...Box 655, Mt...
...U nlikely though it sounds, I first encountered Teichman's work in the New York Times Book Review...
...Nevertheless, Teichman is right: "if we look around we see that people grasp meanings, understand books, and even understand one another...
...And I'm in a hell of a shape...
...r TAS Address Changes Made Easy...
...I didn't go to Harvard...
...Bioethics is at the "pop" end of philosophy, and like pop newspapers, it keeps itself afloat by constructing bad-news stories...
...How could she...
...If this seems, urn, paradoxical, never mind...
...You thought doctors ought to stick to the Hippocratic Oath...
...The only people who come off as honest, forthright, attractive human beings—straight shooters who let the dice fall where they may—are Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lady Bird Johnson...
...Of course, when Barry Goldwater emerges as the Republican nominee, Johnson refuses to take him seriously and even urges his campaign staff to ignore him...
...Philosophy has a bad rep among sensible people, and not without reason...
...I do not think," Rorty writes, "there are any plain moral facts out there...nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are [sic] preferable to the other...
...It follows that, on Singerean principles, we should not be too hard on that young couple who asphyxiated their newborn and consigned it to a dumpster...
...I want them from twenty-five to forty...
...Rorty's name for a person who espouses this species of postmodern fatuousness is "liberal ironist...
...I don't want any old, broken-down old maids...
...Bad news...
...One Sunday in April 1989, I stumbled upon a review of scintillating wit, razor-sharp intelligence, and —mirabile dictu — marked political incorrectness...
...He wants to reassure his liberal readers that it's all right to give up on notions like truth and objectivity, but he doesn't want them to lose any sleep over it...
...Indeed, the relationship between LBJ and the press, at least prior to his re-election, was remarkably tame by today's standards, although those who would not cooperate could expect serious trouble...
...On the one hand, he tells them that "cruelty is the worst thing we can do"—liberals love to talk that way—on the other hand, he tells them that what counts as "cruelty" is merely a sociological or linguistic construct...
...By 1989, Rorty had already emerged as the official philosopher of postmodem academic liberals...
...Since the favored breed consists of persons who know they are persons in the Singerean sense, no one could possibly be more special, more protected, than the bioethicists themselves...
...Teichman's piece, reprinted here, was about the philosopher Richard Rorty's book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity...
...Anyone who wants an example of the Johnson treatment needs to read the long dialogue with Richard Russell, who after all had been something of a mentor to LBJ, wherein Johnson dragoons him into joining the Warren Commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination...
...Russell's response was appropriately homey: "We're just like the damn cow over the fence there in Vietnam...
...In a footnote Beschloss emphasizes that all this was before post-Watergate rules on campaign fundraising...
...Some of the essays that appear in Jenny Teichman's Polemical Papers were first published in the New Criterion, which I help to edit...
...It is painful to read Johnson overruling Russell's sensible objections, and makes one grateful for small mercies...
...I'm confronted," Johnson confessed to Russell...
...Graduates of Yale Law, they have none of Johnson's hangups about the schools to which they went...
...Teichman's review of Rorty's book impressed me not only because of its suave intelligence but also because of its courage...
...There are obvious similarities: the confusion of public and private interest...
...Perhaps the most important difference of all is that, unlike Clinton, Johnson Polemical Papers Jenny Teichman Ashgate Publishing...
...I want them that can work Saturday and Sunday...
...Morris, IL 61054-8084 1-800-524-3469 ATTACH ADDRESS LABEL HERE IMPORTANT: Allow six weeks for address change...
...Indeed, when it comes right down to it, Singer seems to believe that infants of all sorts, not being "persons," are candidates for early retirement...
...Singer appeals to many "authorities" in support of his monstrous doctrines...
...But as Teichman points out, the fact that "Singer's doctrines are supported by many authors in the bioethics field does not show that they are right...
...she writes about the limits of academic freedom, about philosophers who think that abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are morally permissible (she does not), as well as philosophers, like Jacques Derrida, who think that it is okay to murder language by pretending that the meaning of words is hopelessly compromised by ambiguity, metaphor, and so on...
...SARKES TARZIAN INC Sarkes Tarzion Television Sarkes Tarzion Radio Broadcasters Making a Difference 70 January 1998 • The American Spectator...
...The only difference between killing a normal infant and a defective one," he writes, "is the attitude of the parents...
...That's all there is to it...
...Singer is a big deal in the field of bioethics...
...Bad news...
...Or on his requirements for secretarial staff: "I want the five smartest, best-educated, fastest, prettiest secretaries in Washington...
...Use instead your creative ethnography-reading imagination...
...with the chairman of the board of a major clothing manufacturer on spe44 If this is how one sounds when talking alone with a president, I hope I never have the opportunity...
...What, indeed...
...the desire to buy the love of the American people with other people's tax dollars...
...But what," Teichman asks, "if they needed more time to decide...
...Once the deed is done, McGeorge Bundy, a Kennedy holdover, underscores his capacity to quickly shift alliances: "Now that you've made this decision," he tells LBJ, "you don't have any problem with self-respect You're in charge...
...The room was abuzz with the horror of it all...
...The creative imaginaMOVING...
...No doubt editors at our Paper of Record were wondering the same thing...
...The creative imaginaMOVING...
...At the same time, I don't want to commit us to war...
...O Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$34.95) O Payment enclosed Bill me later • At various times TAS rents its subscriber list to other organizations...
...But fly it does...
...For another, the current president's role model is not LBJ, who accomplished important things, many of them admittedly awful, but John F. Kennedy, whose presidency was largely fluff and "style...
...Rorty specializes in such paradoxes...
...Jenny Teichman, who recently retired from teaching philosophy at New Hall, Cambridge, is one of those analytically trained philosophers whose intellectual ROGER KIMBALL is managing editor of the New Criterion and, most recently, co-editor of The Future of the European Past (Ivan R. Dee...
...Once again her subject was a darling of the academic establishment—the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and her book Love's Knowledge—and once again Teichman dove in without trepidation...
...167 pages / $59.95 REVIEWED BY Roger Kimball I have to begin this review by acknowledging an interest...
...Which means that the theory is wrong...
...That's all there is to it...
...Accordingly, Teichman writes about terrorism, about pacifism and violence, and about the Roman Catholic teaching on contraception (as formulated by Teich-man's teacher, the English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe...
...The Subscriber Service P.O...
...Interspersed between meetings of the National Security Council or the Council of Economic Advisers are discussions—long ones—with a New York hairdresser on how much the latter proposes to charge for the privilege of preparing Lady Bird, the two presidential daughters, and select female members of the White House staff for a grand event...
...For Singer, human life itself has no intrinsic value...
...Fetuses, of course, are for Singer eminently dispensable, but so are severely disabled newborns...
...I suspect that an unfailing sense of humor has been a great aid and comfort...
...After all, Singer tells us that parents, biological or adoptive, A Model of Intelligence and Sophistication 68 January 1998 • The American Spectator The American Spectator • January 1998 should have a month or so to decide whether they really want junior around...
...Accordingly, Teichman writes about terrorism, about pacifism and violence, and about the Roman Catholic teaching on contraception (as formulated by Teich-man's teacher, the English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe...
...Since the favored breed consists of persons who know they are persons in the Singerean sense, no one could possibly be more special, more protected, than the bioethicists themselves...
...In Polemical Papers, as she explains in the introduction, she rangeswidely, touching on "human problems which are of interest not only to academic philosophers but to everyone else as well: problems relating to war and peace, to love and sex, and to life and death...
...Remember what she did to Richard Rorty...
...And those bits of it that are clear often seem irrelevant to the pressing concerns of life...
...167 pages / $59.95 REVIEWED BY Roger Kimball I have to begin this review by acknowledging an interest...
...Although she tells us that she is not herself a religious believer, she finds good philosophical grounds for arguing that "human life is sacred" and that "it makes sense to suppose that human life could have a transcendent purpose," even if we have difficulty in specifying exactly what that purpose is...
...Who was this Teichman...
...It is one of Teichman's great gifts as a philosopher to be able to write clearly not only about technical philosophical matters but also about things that people actually care about...
...44 ferocity is never defeated by her encounters with stupidity, moral barbarousness, or intellectual chicanery...
...I don't believe the American people ever want me to run [abandon Vietnam...
...Take it from there...
...This will tell you, surely, that the dogmas above represent nothing more nor less than the tribal mores of teenage human males...
...I went to San Marcos State...
...At the center is, of course, the Sun King himself, LBJ — vindictive, self-pitying, vulgar, cruel and ruthless, with an appetite for power that seemed like an addiction to drugs...
...She shows how, by using the term "person" as if it were a special sort of honorific, Singer in effect subscribes to the view that mankind can be divided into two groups, the elect and the non-elect: "Membership of the special group picked out by the bioethicists goes with protection from mundane destruction, " Teich-man observes, "because it's argued that the favored group has something like a real right to life...
...Neither Clinton nor his putative successor Gore possesses anything like Johnson's skills at manipulation and persuasion, and for the sake of the Republic, a good thing too...
...A lot of it is silly, obscurantist, muddle-headed, pretentious, or all of the above...
...I do not recall whether he had yetreceived that ultimate imprimatur of liberal acceptability, a MacArthur "genius" award...
...spent virtually his entire adult life in Washington, most of it in Congress, where he had the opportunity to take the full measure of the men with whom he would work as president...
...On the one hand, he tells them that "cruelty is the worst thing we can do"—liberals love to talk that way—on the other hand, he tells them that what counts as "cruelty" is merely a sociological or linguistic construct...
...Russell was old and tired and had no appetite for working with the chief justice, whom he rightly judged to be a publicity hound...
...Bioethicists say only some human beings have this right...
...Use instead your creative ethnography-reading imagination...
...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: L VCAFRM J^ 69 idency as a hateful regency, to be ended at the earliest possible date with the restoration of their dynasty...
...Perhaps that came a few years later...
...It's nice work if you can get it...
...Fetuses, of course, are for Singer eminently dispensable, but so are severely disabled newborns...
...I've pulled out...
...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: L VCAFRM J^ 69 tion readily suggests an answer but it is not a very polite one...
...Teichman is appropriately scathing in her criticism of Peter Singer's views...
...U nlikely though it sounds, I first encountered Teichman's work in the New York Times Book Review...
...An unexpected runner-up is J. Edgar Hoover...
...Secretary of State Dean Rusk even suggested to him that New York Times reporter Tad Szulc be put under surveillance...
...After all, Singer tells us that parents, biological or adoptive, A Model of Intelligence and Sophistication 68 January 1998 • The American Spectator The American Spectator • January 1998 should have a month or so to decide whether they really want junior around...
...Although she tells us that she is not herself a religious believer, she finds good philosophical grounds for arguing that "human life is sacred" and that "it makes sense to suppose that human life could have a transcendent purpose," even if we have difficulty in specifying exactly what that purpose is...
...This will tell you, surely, that the dogmas above represent nothing more nor less than the tribal mores of teenage human males...
...Some philosophers will trace their first articulation to Nietzsche, a few to Plato's Thrasymachus...
...Inevitably, one finds oneself comparing the Johnson of these tapes with the present incumbent...
...I Please write your new address in the space provided...
...Rorty specializes in such paradoxes...
...In Polemical Papers, as she explains in the introduction, she rangeswidely, touching on "human problems which are of interest not only to academic philosophers but to everyone else as well: problems relating to war and peace, to love and sex, and to life and death...
...The Subscriber Service P.O...
...If you prefer that your name not be rented please check here...
...By now everything has got very big and Et but there is no actual baby...
...Graduates of Yale Law, they have none of Johnson's hangups about the schools to which they went...
...For yet another, the Great Society and the "civil rights" movement—the principal domestic policies of the Johnson administration—have all dropped off the tree as rotten fruits, leaving Clinton with the task of convincing Americans that policies that have been demonstrated not to work should nonetheless continue...
...It follows that, on Singerean principles, we should not be too hard on that young couple who asphyxiated their newborn and consigned it to a dumpster...
...I do not think," Rorty writes, "there are any plain moral facts out there...nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are [sic] preferable to the other...
...You thought everyone has a right to life...
...It's one of those things where, 'Heads I win, tails you lose.'" This was in May of 1964...
...I want them that can work at night and not be afraid to go home after the Secret Service takes them out of the gate...
...I didn't go to Harvard...
...Anyone who wants an example of the Johnson treatment needs to read the long dialogue with Richard Russell, who after all had been something of a mentor to LBJ, wherein Johnson dragoons him into joining the Warren Commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination...
...What, indeed...
...she writes about the limits of academic freedom, about philosophers who think that abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are morally permissible (she does not), as well as philosophers, like Jacques Derrida, who think that it is okay to murder language by pretending that the meaning of words is hopelessly compromised by ambiguity, metaphor, and so on...
...I Please write your new address in the space provided...
...with another source on the outfitting of the entire White House staff with Western ranch outfits like his own, and so forth...
...I only wish that we had gotten dibs on "Deconstruction and Aerodynamics," one of my favorite pieces in Polemical Papers...
...Much attention is given to cajoling the press —with some success—to lay off what today we would call "investigative reporting...
...Singer says they don't have to...
...Neither Clinton nor his putative successor Gore possesses anything like Johnson's skills at manipulation and persuasion, and for the sake of the Republic, a good thing too...
...The third trimester consists of a long review of the first two...
...As could be expected, plenty of attention is given over to Vietnam...
...Bad news...
...I am proud to say, however, that her work has subsequently appeared several times in the New Criterion...
...What," Teichman asks at the end of her review, does the creative imagination tell us about the probable sources of the liberal ironist's special dogmas, namely, that there is no such thing as human nature or human solidarity or objective morality or objective truth...
...Thus he denies that there are any innate human faculties but nonetheless recommends that everyone use his "creative imagination" to stamp out cruelty and help sponsor the "liberal utopia" he envisions...
...How could the Times publish such an unkind piece...
...A lot of it is silly, obscurantist, muddle-headed, pretentious, or all of the above...
...Why do philosophers elevate the temporary instinctual behaviour patterns of the male human teenager into supposedly self-evident truths...
...But since I believe that Teichman's essays are models of philosophical sophistication and moral intelligence, I am going to recommend them to you anyway...
...I went to San Marcos State...
...Clever professors at Monash say such experimentation is OK...
...If this seems, urn, paradoxical, never mind...
...Morris, IL 61054-8084 1-800-524-3469 ATTACH ADDRESS LABEL HERE IMPORTANT: Allow six weeks for address change...
...These dogmas are not grounded in reason, nor indeed in the imagination...
...And attempting that in the pages of the New York Times, then as now, required grit...
...What is remarkable here is the degree to which, long before committing American combattroops, Johnson and his associates had lost most of their illusions about the country and the possibility of winning the war...
...Russell was old and tired and had no appetite for working with the chief justice, whom he rightly judged to be a publicity hound...
...But he had certainly already proved his political bona fides, assuring his readers that philosophy "aims at continuing the conversation rather than at discovering truth" and acknowledging that he really did not "have much use for notions like 'objective value' and 'objective truth.'" As Teichman shows with elegant dispatch, Rorty is a happy nihilist...
...r TAS Address Changes Made Easy...
...Resorting to a parable," she mused, I would say these essays are like a false pregnancy...
...For yet another, the Great Society and the "civil rights" movement—the principal domestic policies of the Johnson administration—have all dropped off the tree as rotten fruits, leaving Clinton with the task of convincing Americans that policies that have been demonstrated not to work should nonetheless continue...
...For one thing, Clinton and his wife have a much better relationship with the glamThe American Spectator • January 1998 67 orati of New York and Hollywood, and the elites of the publishing, artistic, and academic world, who recognize them as one of their own...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...Bioethics is at the "pop" end of philosophy, and like pop newspapers, it keeps itself afloat by constructing bad-news stories...
...the collusive relationship with friendly forces in the media...
...One particularly pregnant dialogue deals with "envelopes" of cash to LBJ—and we aren't talking about contributions to charity...
...If I lose it, I think they'll say, I've lost...
...I clipped the piece but forgot about its author until, a couple of years later, she again appeared in the pages of Times Book Review...
...These dialogues also cast interesting light on the state of the Republican Party a quarter-century ago...
...His energy seems inexhaustible—not only for our domestic and foreign policies, but for every niggling detail of his life and the lives of those around him...
...Teichman reserves some of her harshest criticism for Peter Singer, a professor at Monash University in Australia and author of a book called Practical Ethics...
...Like Bundy, most of those whose conversations are recorded in this book—Walter Lippmann, J. William Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, Abe Fortas, Joseph Alsop, Paul Douglas, Hale Boggs—should be glad to be dead...
...You thought everyone has a right to life...
...It's nice work if you can get it...
...Philosophy has a bad rep among sensible people, and not without reason...
...It is painful to read Johnson overruling Russell's sensible objections, and makes one grateful for small mercies...
...The seven-page conversation with Senator Richard Russell will surprise many who lived through those years, and were treated to nightly television disquisitions by LBJ on the rightness of his policy...
...what endows human life with value, he says, is being aware of oneself as a person...
...Some of the essays that appear in Jenny Teichman's Polemical Papers were first published in the New Criterion, which I help to edit...
...And those bits of it that are clear often seem irrelevant to the pressing concerns of life...
...with Frank Stanton, president of CBS, on the expensive rebuilding of the White House desk to accommodate LBJ's unusual height...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...But forget the philosophers...
...Clever professors at Monash say such experimentation is OK...
...Say a year, or two years, or seven years...
...I do not recall whether he had yetreceived that ultimate imprimatur of liberal acceptability, a MacArthur "genius" award...
...If you prefer that your name not be rented please check here...
...Bad news...
...if this is how one sounds when talking alone with a president, I hope I never have the opportunity...
...These dogmas are not grounded in reason, nor indeed in the imagination...
...Why do philosophers elevate the temporary instinctual behaviour patterns of the male human teenager into supposedly self-evident truths...
...But as Teichman points out, the fact that "Singer's doctrines are supported by many authors in the bioethics field does not show that they are right...
...It follows that, in the world according to Singer, many classes of human beings have only the most tenuous right to exist...
...Singer is a big deal in the field of bioethics...
...what endows human life with value, he says, is being aware of oneself as a person...
...Perhaps the most important difference of all is that, unlike Clinton, Johnson Polemical Papers Jenny Teichman Ashgate Publishing...
...It follows that, in the world according to Singer, many classes of human beings have only the most tenuous right to exist...
...Indeed, when it comes right down to it, Singer seems to believe that infants of all sorts, not being "persons," are candidates for early retirement...
...What," Teichman asks at the end of her review, does the creative imagination tell us about the probable sources of the liberal ironist's special dogmas, namely, that there is no such thing as human nature or human solidarity or objective morality or objective truth...
...cific requirements for his casual pants...
...At one point Johnson even laments that the Republicans have no policy of their own—he would enjoy, he claimed, a spirited and principled opposition...
...Bioethicists say only some human beings have this right...
...Similarly, the theory of deconstruction says that meaning is impossible, that truth is an illusion, that (in Derrida's famous phrase) "there is no outside to language," etc., etc...
...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...
...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...
...In my opinion this book is mainly snake oil...
...Thus he denies that there are any innate human faculties but nonetheless recommends that everyone use his "creative imagination" to stamp out cruelty and help sponsor the "liberal utopia" he envisions...
...It is in the nature of things that anyone who pokes around in the world of contemporary academic writing is going to have many such encounters, so it is a testimony to Teich-man's intellectual robustness that she has managed to preserve her savagery intact at least from 1979, when the first of the essays in this volume appeared, to the present moment...
...For another, the current president's role model is not LBJ, who accomplished important things, many of them admittedly awful, but John F. Kennedy, whose presidency was largely fluff and "style...
...The portrait that emerges is of a man who repeatedly confuses the public interest with his own private good...
...In any event, that was back in 1991 and Teichman has not appeared in the Times Book Review since...
...It is quite obvious now that the Eisenhower administration postponed serious thinking about Republican domestic policies for a decade, so that by the time Johnson got to the White House, the GOP was still trying to figure out an answer to the New Deal...
...Singer appeals to many "authorities" in support of his monstrous doctrines...
...Box 655, Mt...
...To challenge Richard Rorty was to challenge the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy...
...For Singer, human life itself has no intrinsic value...
Vol. 31 • January 1998 • No. 1
