CURRENT WISDOM
c u R R e n t W I s D o M Washington Post Another weird communiqué from the planet Dionne and published on the op-ed page of the prestigious Post under the tantalizing sci-fi rubric...
...For Obama] the real test is yet to come...
...It is time that we recognize the positive lessons of Chinese revolution, particularly the Cultural Revolution...
...Since China abandoned socialism, it has been faced with the spread of drug abuse and prostitution, worsening environmental degradation, official corruption and other crimes...
...c u R R e n t W I s D o M Washington Post Another weird communiqué from the planet Dionne and published on the op-ed page of the prestigious Post under the tantalizing sci-fi rubric “E.J...
...april 30, 2008) newsweek A popular Kultursmog pollutant— that Republicans rely on anger and fear—is pumped into the political atmosphere by a reliable Democratic polluter spreading its own anger and fear...
...assignments...
...I admit now that I deserved them, but at the time I resented the severity of the punishment...
...Bad timing...
...Instead, celebrate Care-Giver’s Day and equality in child-rearing...
...A few years later I got a switching for shooting my sister Gloria in her behind with my BB gun, and another time for hiding in my tree house, refusing to answer Daddy’s calls, and pretending that I had run away from home...
...Gary Stollack heaves his incomparable verbal virtuosity into the cause of gender-free bliss: Gary Stollack says forget Mother’s Day...
...May 25, 2008) the nation Another of the troubled teenagers whose aesthetic rumbles liven up the arts page of the gloomy Nation reveals that illegal aliens were even a problem back in the “false optimism” of the Reagan-Thatcher years: When Nick Cave debuted in 1978, it was as the sallow, possessed frontman of the Birthday Party, gothic shock troops from Australia with orders to antagonize England’s petrified punk circuit...
...Soon after these brutes arrived in London in the early ’80s the national appetite turned to glitzy synth pop, something better suited to the megabucks mood of false optimism that greeted the early days of the Reagan-Thatcher years...
...As the age of four, my first such punishment was for taking a penny out of the Sunday School collection plate instead of giving my offering...
...May 27, 2008) new york times book Review In the correspondence section of a venerated book review, the perfectly preserved celebration of postbourgeoisie progress as sung through the decades to the Moscow Show Trials, the Cultural Revolution, Fidel Castro’s campaign against tooth decay, and the Beer Hall Putsch: I am writing to counter the one-sided and distorted picture of the Chinese revolution, particularly the Cultural Revolution, in the reviews of several Chinese novels in your May 4 issue...
...From An Outdoor Journal, by Jimmy Carter, Bantam Books, $18.95) J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 1 0 1...
...And while you’re at it, forget Father’s Day...
...Today more and more Chinese working-class people look back at the 1 0 0 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Cultural Revolution years with fond memories...
...The writer teaches history and political science at Warren Wilson College...
...Stollack, a psychology professor at Michigan State University, says having a separate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day perpetuates the myth that each parent has a different role...
...With more parents sharing duties and more people other than parents giving care, all could be honored on one day, he says...
...The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middleclass folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities…It is a c u R R e n t W I s D o M sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as “the other”—as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.… The real question is whether he [McCain] can—or really wants to rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet and fund the “independent expenditure” groups who exercise their freedom in ways that give a bad name to free speech...
...to cast him as some sort of alien figure (“You know what his middle name is...
...And some of the things that Jeremiah Wright says he’s held accountable for…but there are things that white preachers said that are just as insane.…There is a place in the world [for] an inspirational, liberational kind of preaching that Reverend Wright does.…I listen to him, and frankly, it made sense to me...
...I have been doing research in China for the last 20 years...
...Woodrow Wilson: For more serious offenses than pranks like these, I was whipped with a spirea or peach switch...
...May 5, 2008) new york Review of books Investigative reporter Michael Tomasky reports on young John McCain’s clever career moves: It is little remembered today that the political career of John Sidney McCain III, a career now thoroughly laundered in mythology, began with the help of several fortuities...
...It was a country that had largely eradicated deeply rooted problems of homelessness, prostitution, bandits and drug abuse...
...I totally understood what he was saying...
...June 2, 2008) the charlie Rose show (Pbs) Quivering and overwrought, the incomparable Sally Quinn turns in another first-rate performance on the Charlie Rose soap opera: “To see his [Jeremiah Wright’s] career completely destroyed by three 20second sound bites, all of the work he has done, his entire legacy gone down the drain, has been absolutely devastating to me—to him, sorry.…We are still a racist country.…I think that so many white people who had never been inside a black church were absolutely shocked by the tone and language that they heard [from Wright]…I think it brought out a lot of latent racism...
...As far as I’m concerned, parenting, in a biological sense, ends when the sperm hits the egg,” said Stollack...
...On Care-Giver’s Day, people could thank neighbors, teachers, Cub Scout leaders, aunts, uncles or even psychology professors who deserve recognition...
...He was one of 591 prisoners of war repatriated early that year as a result of Operation Homecoming, and was selected by the e ditors of U.S...
...Dongping Han Swannanoa, N.C...
...as the one returning POW who would be given a thirteen-page spread in the magazine to describe his ordeal (May 19, 2008) today (nbc) Rosie O’Donnell, shortly after applying bourbon to her cornflakes: Racism does exist in this country and it’s still thriving...
...The few whippings from him—perhaps half a dozen in all—were truly memorable events...
...and to paint him as an effete intellectual out of touch with true American values...
...So unforgettable was the experience that I’ve never stolen anything since...
...In 1973 he returned from his five and a half years of captivity in North Vietnam to Washington, or technically Arlington, Virginia, which had been his childhood home for more years than any other single place as he followed his father, a celebrated four-star admiral, on the elder McCain’s naval (June 12, 2008) From the archives timeless tosh From current Wisdoms Past (July-august 1988) Detroit Free Press Dr...
...I grew up and worked on a collective farm during the Cultural Revolution...
...News & World Report (having a famous father never hurts), which brought him the same kind of attention and acclaim that had earlier, for different purposes, been showered upon the young Hillary Diane Rodham and the young John Forbes Kerry...
...May 7, 1988) the great books series The youthful pleasures that shaped the character of the weirdest rogue to live in the White House since Prof...
...Dionne Jr...
...Ever since Barack Obama took off his flag pin, Democrats and liberals have had a queasy feeling that talk of patriotism would be a covert way to raise the matter of Obama’s race...
...Despite some shortcomings of the Cultural Revolution, China was a socialist society that was overcoming inequality with full employment, free medical care and free education for its citizens...
Vol. 41 • July 2008 • No. 6
