CURRENT WISDOM
Jackasses, Assorted
C U R R E N T W I S D O M Chicago Sun-Times Charnel drolleries from Miss Cathleen Falsani, obituarist from the Windy City: When doctors pronounced the Rev. Jerry Laymon Falwell Sr. dead...
...BEA published nonsense worthy of submisSPECTATORACTIVIST...
...The Sopranos,” the richest achievement in the history of television, comes to an end June 10th, after eighty-six episodes...
...of Current Wisdom 1611 N. Kent Street, Suite 901 Arlington, VA 22209 C U R R E N T W I S D O M depicted in that movie has two incontrovertible advantages over Kozol’s kids: it’s digital and it’s white...
...May 7, 2007) Courtesy of longtime AmSpecsubscriber Ned R. Anderson of Sand City, California...
...April 16, 1987) New Republic In the New Republic, citadel of clear-headed liberalism, the rich imaginations of Miss Barbara Ehrenreich and Mr...
...Gracias...
...Inflation was eliminated—but all this proved was that inflation was not the source of the underlying problems...
...Several thousand people turned out...
...His goal was to persuade more than 7,000 residents of this very Roman Catholic country to disrobe in front of God, one another and a media army perched on the roof of the downtown Holiday Inn...
...Within minutes, the square was filled with pink flesh and dark hair, a chanting, shouting, gleeful party in the light of dawn, the gathering framed by the Metropolitan Cathedral, City Hall and the National Palace...
...May 7, 2007) *MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (CNN): Columnist and author Eric Alterman has been released after being arrested Sunday night inside the debate spin room...
...But Isaac Esquivel and thousands of other Mexican men and women dropped their clothes in neat piles early Sunday and pranced naked around the main plaza of this capital just for the heck of it...
...It wasn’t the Abraham Lincoln Brigade...
...New York photographer Spencer Tunick, famous for rounding up people to pose naked in cities around the world, brought his fetching artistic gimmick here...
...The Gipper laid out a program that, he said, would restore prosperity and boost incomes...
...How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all...
...But it’s always going to be the right wing that is going to make the most noise...
...In fact, my very first thought upon hearing of the Rev...
...Yes, we make progress in some areas that are thought to be areas of liberalism...
...Underneath the electronic brouhaha there is a faint beat of drums, an unconscious echo of puberty rites and purification huts, an anxious reclassification of women as Woman, the polluter of clear masculine minds...
...It was the Ku Klux Klan that marched up Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1920s...
...By fits and starts, human rights is one of them...
...May 12, 2007) 84 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 New Yorker In the lush pages of the New Yorker, David Remnick’s reverie of the evanescing Sopranos is rendered nightmarish by the arrival of Him and His Administration: And so began Tony’s quest for a renewed sense of family, heritage, coherent truths, mental health, and a prime cut of the Esplanade construction projects...
...On a more somber note, how can the “argument from design” (that only some kind of “intelligence” could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all...
...Fox’s journalistic transgressions are legion and need not detain us long here...
...Sam Donaldson: “The left wing has never been in the ascendancy in this country...
...June 4, 2007) The Nation Righteous indignation from Professor Eric Alterman upon discovering that there are organizations that do not goose step with him*: Fox, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Washington Times, is a conservative counterestablishment institution designed to ape the functions of the real thing, doing double duty by firing up the troops with custom-crafted ideological spin, “analysis” and phony scholarship while confusing the rest of the world with nonsense disguised as news...
...The American Spectator/Dept...
...I am very much aware and very grieved as well...
...The numbers don’t lie: economic growth, investment, productivity, employment, wages, every important indicator of economic vitality has taken a turn for the worse...
...Tribal warriors eschewed connubial relations before a battle, and modern men in public life may soon be required to demonstrate an immunity from women far greater than anything vulcanized rubber can provide...
...But it is, as we need no reminding these days, clearly not safe...
...Being naked is being in the moment, and being naked in the Zocalo gives everyone a chance to celebrate our culture...
...EST Tuesday.… my first thoughts were not of what to say or write...
...In fact, vast areas of the economy were much better off with inflation than without it...
...Garret Keizer, contributing editor of Harper’s and militant philatelist: Am I too irreverent...
...dead at 12:40 P.M...
...Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift...
...I meant “good” as in “Dingdong, the witch is dead...
...If you come across sion for this page, send it on to us at “Department of Current Wisdom,” and if we agree and entomb it on this page we shall send you Politics & More, a collection of AmSpec hits from the past decade...
...The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever...
...Falwell’s passing was: Good...
...Nudity is part of human life,” said Liliana Velasco, 30, an anthropologist...
...C U R R E N T W I S D O M Chicago Sun-Times Charnel drolleries from Miss Cathleen Falsani, obituarist from the Windy City: When doctors pronounced the Rev...
...It has been with us a long time—longer than the Bush Administration (and nothing seems more interminable than that...
...June 1, 1987) J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 5...
...Okay, the nation gave it a shot, and it didn’t work...
...It’s always the right...
...He was charged with criminal trespass after police say he refused repeated orders to leave.—June 4, 2007 Monterey County Herald From Mexico City, adumbrations that the Mexicans may be keeping the most delightful illegal immigrants for last, and who can doubt that they will head for California, probably Berkeley: People usually strip for love or money...
...As she says in her profile on an Internet dating site, she’s “just another San Francisco trans-woman with the uncanny ability to get myself into trouble...
...Am I not aware that polar bears are drowning in the Arctic...
...Whether sallies like these give pause to the believer is a question I can’t answer...
...Perhaps the ominous fact explains the primitive subtextual imagery underlying the present overblown coverage of what are, after all, sex scandals of a fairly routine sort...
...But this week Sparks started what could be one of the most important chapters in her life when she was voted president of the San Francisco Police Commission...
...May 18, 2007) San Francisco Chronicle A cheeky news story in the venerable Chronicle dispels the hoary notion that to be San Francisco’s Police Commissioner takes balls: If ever there was a real-life, rags-toriches fairy tale, Theresa Sparks’ story is it...
...This country is basically a conservative reactionary type of country...
...Jane O’Reilly sweat and lunge: Sex, whether as relaxation, snare, or even reproductive function, is clearly not dead...
...but I do not recall anything like the universal lament that has met the drowning scene in An Inconvenient Truth...
...It’s not the way Sparks, 58, ever thought her life would turn out...
...June 4, 1987) Dallas Morning News Scholarly sociopoliticohistorical insights from Prof...
...And I didn’t mean “good” in a oh-goodhe’sgone-home-to-be-with-the-Lord kind of way...
...Then again, the polar bear New York Times Book Review Amuck in a review of Christopher Hitchens’s God Awful book, young Michael Kinsley waxes dithyrambic, paralogistic, and even Jesuitical: Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist, standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church...
...Only, this being San Francisco, Cinderella used to be a man and went from riches (traveling in a corporate jet) to rags (driving a taxi and sleeping on friends’ couches) to prominence again by becoming a pioneering transgender activist and the chief executive officer of a multimillion-dollar sextoy company...
...May 13, 2007) Harper’s Pietism, as practiced by the Rev...
...I am also aware, thanks to book after book by Jonathan Kozol, that children are drowning in our inner-city schools and have been drowning there year after year and decade after decade, (June 2007) From the Archives Timeless Tosh From Current Wisdoms Past (July & August 1987): Rolling Stone The Stone’s incomparable William Greider sings for his supper: Liberals are making a comeback because Reagan failed to deliver on his economic promises...
...The state of Reagan’s economy in the 1980s is even more troubling than Carter’s in the 1970s...
Vol. 40 • July 2007 • No. 6
