Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
THE GREAT BOOKS SERIES In her stupefying memoir once again Hillary Rodham Clinton tests the outer limits of her fans' credulity: My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me [p....
...Matthew Rothschild, discloses his heroic whereabouts when a demo in Paris or Havana is out of the question: The weekend before Bush started the Iraq War, I went to Spring Valley, Minnesota, population 2,518...
...Gene Carroll, of the Center for Defense Information, said: "Helen, our mission in the Pentagon is to destroy property and to kill people...
...The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball...
...Arthur Kempton notes that it made its debut as the title of a million-selling but faintly remembered 1965 release by the Chicago duo Tom and Jerrio, a song that launched two major catchphrases of the era, "sock it to me" and "let it all hang out...
...Hillary puts on the greasepaint and eyelashes, clutches her bodice, and confides to her loyal readers that lugubrious scene, all those years ago, just before she went upstairs and bashed Bill a good one with a White House lamp: I don't think the full effect of the article hit me until the next evening, at a Christmas party for our friends and family at the White House...
...July 7, 2003] ESQUIRE (UK EDITION) Politically incorrect intimations from actress Christina Ricci, provoked by the topic of houseplants: They are dirrrty...
...Literature and art provide intercourse of a unique sort...
...For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare...
...If I have to touch one, after already being repulsed by the fact that there is a plant indoors, then it just freaks me out:' [July 2003] THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS Another doomed attempt by the egghead swells at TNYRB to crack the fuliginous audiences of the inner city: The boogaloo is, or was, one of the thousand dances the land was full of in the 1960s, enumerated in inventory songs [sic] such as James Brown's "There Was A Time" and the Isley Brothers' "Nobody But Me": the skate, the swim, the pony, the monkey, the camel walk, the shing-a-ling...
...We didn't realize it at the time, Al Gore and I, that we not only needed Kweisi Mfume fighting for justice here in Florida counting votes, we need him on the Supreme Court, where the votes really counted...
...These discoveries can be as revelatory as the dreams in which the world turns fluid...
...Random House...
...Through art we discover that we are not alone...
...Police said that they were charging Charles Black, thirty-six, with third-degree menacing...
...Sheen: This supposed idyllic society we have is the most confused, warped, addicted society in the history of the world...
...July 2003] THE GREAT BOOKS SERIES (II) Brown University's expansive Professor Arnold Weinstein reveals why university students first invented the spitball and why the spitball should be returned to Academe: For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise...
...What's your take on military action in Iraq...
...419 pages...
...Then there is this immortal passage from the Great Enabler...
...from The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthal...
...562 pages...
...30.00] THE PROGRESSIVE Editor of the good ole Prog, Dr...
...For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss...
...I told him we had to decide how to respond by the next day...
...Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast...
...465...
...even the Asians were beginning to make their mark...
...July 22, 2003...
...29.95] THE GREAT BOOKS SERIES (III) Lewd prophecy from Sidney Blumenthal, a major zany in liberalism's equivalent of the John Birch Society: Just as the presidents of the late twentieth century operated in the shadow of FDR, those of the first part of the twenty-first century will stand in the shadow of Clinton...
...We white men were now left with half of tennis (at least its male half) and might also point to hockey, skiing, soccer, golf (with the notable exception of Tiger), as well as lacrosse, track, swimming, and the World Wrestling Federation—remnants of a once great and glorious white athletic centrality...
...As the first president of his generation, the first after the Cold War, the first of the global economy, he will be the reference point for the progressive presidency for the next generation...
...May 2003] THE WASHINGTON POST A no-nonsense Wendy's manager makes brisk work of another consumerist pest at large in the Bronx, once a progressive hot-spot: A Bronx man was arrested on charges that he threatened a manager at a Wendy's restaurant with a chair after he reported that he had bit into a mouse in his chili...
...I suggested we go upstairs with Bill for a few minutes...
...I mean, haven't we evolved beyond the primitive notion of killing...
...28.00] THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS From his retirement home in Province-town, Massachusetts, Norman Mailer offers his explication of why America went to war in Iraq and reveals the unfortunate consequences of becoming the complete Couch Potato: And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male...
...822 pages...
...from A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life by Arnold Weinstein...
...But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community, a community composed of buried selves and loved ones, as well as the fellowship of writers over time...
...Helen Caldicott, one of the surviving dinkelspiels of the Cold War's peace movement, deposits more esotery on the public record while being interviewed by another of In These Times's glassy-eyed: In These Times: You have characterized the first Gulf War as the United States's second nuclear war because of the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons...
...What has that price been...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...209] [from Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Simon & Schuster...
...I met up with the Rural Peacemakers at the Spring Valley public library, and an activist offered me a selection of placards...
...July 17, 2003] THE PROGRESSIVE Whilst being interviewed, Hollywoodian Martin Sheen notes another stupendous American milestone: Q: When we met twenty years ago, you told me: "Murder is being conducted in our name around the world and we're paying the price here at home...
...Lisa Caputo told me that two of the troopers were touting their stories on CNN that night and that the Los Angeles Times was about to publish its own version of the troopers' allegations...
...Joe Lieberman appears bottom up: "I remember the great work of this organization in registering voters in 2000 in fighting the outrageous injustices that occurred here in the state of Florida after the election was over, in investigating and making the case...
...I took the one that said "Respect, Create, Dream...
...I wondered if what Bill was trying to do for the country was worth the pain and humiliation our families and friends were about to suffer...
...AMSPEC's Troopergate revelations have just been deposited in the public domain...
...July 17, 2003] IN THESE TIMES Dr...
...Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV had been skewed...
...The encounter with literature adds to who we are...
...He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years...
...I was invited there by a group called Rural Peacemakers, which has been going town to town every Saturday since January—and remember, this is frosty Minnesota!—to picket for peace...
...Clearly it is, and that takes my breath away...
...And I realize this is why I have spent my life teaching literature and art—because they are reflecting pools, soliciting our entry and immersion so as to gift us with a new sense of self, a new awareness of our actual dimensions...
...Maybe that will happen some day...
...A spokesman for Wendy's said that the chili did have a "foreign object" in it but that the object was not recognizable...
...Caldicott: It's the third [nuclear war...
...Well, actually, it's not, because they used uranium weapons in Kosovo and in Afghanistan, so actually it's the fifth...
...It was too much...
...July 13, 2003] THE WASHINGTON TIMES Groveling before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Sen...
...I must have looked as devastated as I felt, because Bob Barnett came over to ask if he could help...
...The boogaloo outlasted many of its competitor dances, or at least its name did, even making the transition into Spanglish as bugalu...
...My friend, the late Adm...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
