Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
Ait, S D Boston Globe The incomparable Newt Gingrich makes his long-awaited conge, and Globe columnist David Nyhan is thrown into a hysteria of metaphors, superlatives, and visions of Amerika's...
...The society's success lies largely in the caliber of speaker it attracts, according to many...
...Franz-Olivier Giesbert reportsthat years later Mitterrand's judgment upon Reagan was scathing: "The man was a nonentity...
...But like the Vandals and the Goths falling on the carcass of the Roman Empire, Newt and his outriders were better at combat than running the country they took over...
...With a troubling combination of intellect, aggression, a take-no-prisoners hostility to his enemies and a self-destructive streak like none other, this brilliant, brawling, bellicose bully has been blackjacked by the very mini-Newts he spawned...
...At the Elysee lunch the new president had not as yet met Reagan, whom he would regard as a "dullard...
...Did they bring us the crash of 1929...
...And all this cloaked with a staggering hypocritical rhetoric purporting "fairness," "family values" and "Christian" morality...
...SEPTEMBER 8, 1998] Wall Street Journal Dr...
...If I make a minor or major adjustment, a change of pace or direction, consider and try other options, I can create solutions allowing me to continue safely on my way, minimizing harm to myself and others...
...OCTOBER 20, 1998] New York Times A rhapsodic introduction of Hillary Milhous Nixon to Chicago Democrats by the Rev...
...Jackson, the Clinton family spiritual counsel and adviser on safe sex: "There is something about your style, your grace, about your strength, about your motherness, about your wifeness, about your maturity, about your patriotism, about your strength of reasoning...
...The reason Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials of the 1600s, spoke so eloquently to the 195os was that just as there were no witches in Salem, there was no internal Red menace in the United States of the fifties no Enemy Other that justified the hysteria that resulted in the wholesale invasion of the rights and liberties of citizens...
...The Enemy Other is sexual rather than political deviance, the target of opportunity is the President rather than the CP...
...NOVEMBER 15, 1998] National Law Journal Midst a frightening account of the growth of that right-wing conspiracy against the American Bar Association, the Federalist Society, a scholarly NLJ reporter offers readers an explanatory note regarding the esoteric nature of the Federalist Papers: The group's logo is a silhouette of President James Madison, an author of the Federalist Papers, a series of New York newspaper essays supporting ratification of the Constitution...
...The glow I felt that day, which I shared with the other writers, may have been connected with the impulse to look up to a leader for whom culture was an essential need...
...Hillary, you've walked through the rain and you're not wet...
...from: Dying Without God: Francois Mitterrand's Meditations on Living and Dying, by Franz-Olivier Giesbert...
...Democratic gains are important...
...Sitting opposite Mitterrand at the Elysee during the first lunch of his presidency, I thought I had rarely seen a man in such pleasurable thrall to a meal, digging into the foie gras from his native Landes with obvious zest and plainly relishing the belles d'Argenteuil spears of voluptuous white asparagus that he conveyed to his mouth with his fingers...
...Don't relax...
...We are now in a second period of three consecutive terms with Republicans in power...
...NOVEMBER 15, 1998] 80 January 1999 • The American Spectator The Nation A gifted Nation editorialist explains how nearly forty years ago glabrous playwright Arthur Miller prophesied the perky arrival of Monica Lewinsky at the Oral Office and how the Boy President was eventually exiled to Salem, Massachusetts, by Ken Starr to the cheers of William Bennett, brother of Orville Bennett, owner of the largest pornography parlor in Salt Lake City, Utah—or have we misunderstood something here...
...Sakren to change the ending of the plays or "reinterpret" the texts...
...The menu I've kept from that day indicates that one of the wines was a Chateau Talbot 1970, a great vintage that may have accounted for the flush on his face, although it was also plainly the flush of triumph...
...According to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ASU's theater department then introduced a play titled "Betty the Yeti: An Eco-Fable," the story of a logger who has sex with a sasquatch and is transformed into an environmentalist...
...On a January day earlier in the year, Ronald Reagan had had his day of triumph, causing heartbreak and desolation among many of those who considered themselves civilized...
...NOVEMBER 9-15, 1998] The American Spectator • January 1999 81...
...the cars behind me were doing the same thing to avoid hitting the turtle...
...In an interview with Campus, which bills itself as "America's Student Newspaper," Miss Bening speaks in defense of her professor: "ASU made a gross error...
...Arthur Miller's image of a witch hunt fueled by repressed sexuality leading to a form of cultural hysteria survives from the fifties to link the two episodes...
...After passing this little creature, the traffic flowed smoothly...
...The herd mentality will not accept a leader with ability...
...Add the presidential inquisition...
...Arcade Publishing, 163 pages, $22.95] Washington Times (National Weekly Edition) The life of the mind as spat upon at Arizona State University: Hollywood actress Annette Bening, who starred in "The American President," scoffs at the notion that William Shakespeare was sexist and lambastes the Arizona State University administration for its decision to terminate Jared Sakren, her theater teacher from 1980 to 1982...
...Republicans are still in power in our federal government for a third term...
...Speaker Gingrich was bad news for American politics, bad news for the Republican Party and bad news for a civil society...
...SEPTEMBER 29, 1998] The Great Books Series Retired novelist William Styron in his limpid introduction to a memoir/portrait of the late gourmet president of France, Francois Mitterrand, cleverly juxtaposes the Epicurean genius with Ronald Reagan, a sad figure who could not tell a foie gras from a folie de grandeur...
...I took my foot off the accelerator, slowing down the speed of my car, swerved slightly and drove around the turtle...
...The professor...
...The turtle was in the direct path of my car...
...His presidency has been destroyed on the altar of jealousy, greed and hidden agendas, and he knows it...
...The most confrontational national figure since George Wallace, he may have eclipsed the former segregationist governor of Alabama as the most divisive American politician since Sen...
...We should also work to see that we never again have any term under far-right Republicans...
...Styron's moral indignation were he to espy two Fortune 500 executives dawdling over "their belles d'Argenteuil spears of voluptuous white asparagus...
...OCTOBER 10, 1998] Altoona Mirror The hitherto chaste Linda Becker of old Altoona inflamed by that human aphrodisiac that serves as Our President: I personally feel Clinton is an elegant, brilliant visionary whose main problem is being too gifted...
...But the Republican nightmare is not over...
...The ghosts of those who were martyred for their gifts in unenlightened times surely surround him more, weeping...
...The first three Republican terms ended in 1928...
...We clearly see their agenda: evisceration of programs for the poor, punishment rather then prevention, health care monopolies for corporations, depleting the natural environment, destroying public education, tax breaks and subsidies for the rich...
...The speaker stepping down is great news...
...This, for many good reasons, is only the second time this has happened in almost 7o years...
...NOVEMBER 2, 1998] Fresno Bee Mr...
...As I resumed my speed, I glanced into my rear-view mirror...
...It was his cunning and his oratory that crafted the Republican takeover of Congress just four years ago...
...An obstacle or problem is just something temporarily in my way...
...His unconquerable spirit will not allow him to give up just yet...
...It will award to Clinton, who is indeed adored for his shining humanity and intellect and for his desire to be more than a cipher, the laurel crown worn by all who speak for the dispossessed who help children to see their potential, who lead in the finest tradition of rulers over time...
...Fuentes, who had served as Mexico's ambassador to France and had been a friend and neighbor of the president, asked him how it felt to have won the prize...
...Professor Sakren, the head of ASU's acting program, was fired for teaching Shakespeare and using a "classical" approach to acting in his classes...
...There were no collisions, no screeching of brakes, no screaming, angry outbursts...
...He refused...
...We can work to see that this second third term under Republican power ends in 2000...
...And, by the way, can you imagine Mr...
...all cars resumed speed and continued on to their respective destinations...
...Ait, S D Boston Globe The incomparable Newt Gingrich makes his long-awaited conge, and Globe columnist David Nyhan is thrown into a hysteria of metaphors, superlatives, and visions of Amerika's tenebrous past: Hurricane Newt, downgraded to a tropical storm, is blowing himself out...
...The department head criticized his "selection of works from a sexist European canon that is approached traditionally...
...Mitterrand's response was almost boyish as he shook his head and exclaimed, "I still can't believe it...
...Peter Singer, DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton's illustrious Center for Human Values, avers a very fetching rationale for ridding society of thick-headed and disagreeable professors of Bioethics: "We should certainly put very strict conditions on permissible infanticide, but these conditions might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant...
...Besides Jared himself, Jared's students are the ultimate losers here," says the actress...
...History cannot be co-opted...
...This talented, energetic, caring teacher has fallen victim to an atmosphere of political correctness and this is wrong...
...A complete nonentity...
...A turtle, intent on achieving its goal, crossing a road to get to a grassy embankment by the river, gave me an opportunity to pause and reflect on how to face the more difficult challenges of life...
...James Snider of progressive Coarsegold, California, takes pious exception to the Republican Utopia: Don't be distracted by the mostly marvelous results of the 1998 election...
...a Juilliard graduate, angered feminist faculty in the ASU Theatre Department by teaching plays by Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Chekhov and Ibsen...
...NOVEMBER 13, 1998] Orlando Sentinel In the correspondence section of a great American daily the not-terribly-bright Dorothy M. Weiss guilelessly describes a doomed turtle's last minutes before being transformed into turtle pancake: I saw a turtle crossing the road as I was driving home one recent day...
...Today we have independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Representatives Henry Hyde and Newt Gingrich, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist waiting in the wings to preside over impeachment proceedings in the Senate cheered on by such as the Christian Coalition and William Bennett—arguing in effect that to have (dirty) sex in the Oval Office means one should be thrown out of office...
...His abilities will not be again seen in the presidency in our lifetimes...
...Joe McCarthy, the red-baiting terror of the '6os...
...If Clinton was a deadhead photo-op junkie opportunist all would now be well...
...I found myself comparing this turtle crossing incident to other moments in my life...
...The department labeled plays by Shakespeare offensive, sexist and Eurocentric, and asked Mr...
...And we surely must work to see that they don't bring a crash in 2001...
...You've walked through the fire and there's not a singe on your clothing...
Vol. 32 • January 1999 • No. 1
