Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" FATHERLESS POLICIES: From reading this version of TRB's column one would never guess what presidential administration or what ideologues introduced American agricultural programs that pay farmers...
...The 42nd Year of Mrs...
...Churchill should have allowed a few more bombs to fall on Wales: What sane man, for instance, bred in the bone by sentiments of honor and fair-mindedness, could have said of the Germans in 1939, when Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, "They must bleed and burn, they must be crushed into a mass of smouldering ruins...
...Jerry Brown, a political equivalent to Gracie Allen: The political process is like a piece of ice on a hot stove...
...Was it a simple exercise in hyperbole, his usual rodomontade, heavily sententious and magniloquently idiotic, or was it what he actually meant...
...This is no new thing...
...Miss Marconi said the redwood trees of the north coast were beautiful and she thought, "Redwood—oh, that's me too...
...Brattleboro (Vermont) Reformer November 19, 1974 BANANAS: Mr...
...She is an outcast who has lost everything, including her daughter, and all emotional and economic support...
...In thirteenth-century England, Jews were treated as men ferae naturae , protected by a quasi-forest-law, like the roe and the deer...
...We slaughtered calves the other day too...
...In Roman law the father had jus vitae necisque—the power of life and death—over his children...
...So, too, it is only through begrudged evolution—that is still in progress—that rights have been accorded the insane, blacks, aliens, fetuses, and Indians...
...Christopher D. Stone, author of Should Trees Have Standing...
...Charles Prescott Harper's Magazine Press...
...Nixon loses none of that...
...I depend on The Nation to be thorough and thoughtful...
...The Nation September 7, 1974 PUBLIC NOTICE: The notable Mr...
...We'd be glad for people to send material on her, and tax-deductible donations for the filming and distribution of our Law Microfilm to Women's History Library, 2325 Oak St., Berkeley, Calif...
...Richard Burton proves that Mr...
...947.08...
...As we move from a free society into more complexities, we need to control and legally help to insure the perfectibility of man...
...Was it the child Churchill wrestling out of the womb, babbling of annihilation and havoc or was it the man Churchill—if he can ever be said to have left the nursery—trying to breathe dreadful life into those terrible words...
...It rides on its own melting...
...The entire history of the law has been an , ever-widening extension in those "things" accorded legal rights, and thus constituted "persons" within the law...
...New Republic November 30, 1974 RAVE NOTICES: Another yahoo is loosed on the correspondence page of The Nation: Dear Sirs: How could you forget Martha Mitchell in your editorial list of credits...
...FATHERLESS POLICIES: From reading this version of TRB's column one would never guess what presidential administration or what ideologues introduced American agricultural programs that pay farmers not to grow crops: Little nations like Yemen and Upper Volta regard us askance...
...New York Times December 1, 1974 TRUE CONFESSIONS: Mrs...
...Hail the new age!: You have to compare the rights of the individual with the needs and rights of other individuals...
...Women, particularly married women, only recently were recognized as persons fully capable of holding legal rights...
...The whole universe is vibrations," she said...
...After all, when half the world was hungry, imperial [sic] America paid farmers not to grow food...
...But I was not—am not—for excluding him from the human race...
...Psychology Today October 1974 THE USES OF HISTORY: Hard times for the black man are not over yet as becomes dear in this forward-looking commentary from Dr...
...The trouble with the drunk-driving laws is that drunk and sober are metaphysical concepts...
...At least she has a place in our files which we are trying to microfilm for use in public libraries (because we are going out of business due to lack of funds...
...What man of sanity could say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, "We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children...
...Chicago Tribune November 23, 1974 PATTER OF GENIUS: Political reflections from the new governor of the sovereign state of California, the Hon...
...Charles Prescott, heroine of the literary masterpiece The 42nd Year of Mrs...
...Charles Prescott, essays the turning-point of the twentieth century: To give an idea of how retarded I was about sex, I didn't really know much about the clitoris until Eisenhower was elected...
...Miss Marconi, a law firm employe and a native of Illinois, said in a Superior Court petition that she wants her name changed to California Redwood Lady...
...Benjamin W. Partridge, has the courage to look beyond...
...Toward Legal Riglus for Nataral Objects and other goof-ban stuff: The notion of extending legal rights to environmental objects—oceans, rivers, forests—sounds absurd and unthinkable when first encountered...
...Names have certain vibrations...
...Martha Mitchell was the first to shake us out of our complacency and blow the cover on the thugs by calling them by their rightful names...
...No one in Watergate has suffered as she has, and no one has had less credit—a terrible kind of snobbery...
...That's why I can sit with millionaires at the Bohemian Grove one day and George Meany the next...
...But viewed historically, it is not so...
...Nome-eel November 25, 1974 DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: The former Grand Panjandrum of Vermont's Environmental Board, Mr...
...But when it was only a woman that they abused, it was discounted...
...Yet so terrible a personification of evil cannot fail to raise every long-gone atavistic hair down the length of my spine...
...My new one does...
...Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity—but then so am I awed by Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane the Great, Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin...
...There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth...
...Humani nil a me alienum put° (Nothing human is alien to me...
...New York Times August 29, 1974 REPORT FROM MORONIA: The famed Chicago Tribune preserves for future historians the complicated reflections of an emigre metaphysician: Francine A. Marconi, 25, has become so enamored of California's majestic redwood trees that she decided she wanted to be named after them...
...James David Barber delivers up a reassuring pronunciamento to the loyal readers of Psychology Today, the magazine for the enlightened gossip: I was urging his impeachment or resignation from Cambodia on—his removal from an office in which, I thought, he was doing great harm...
...My old name didn't have good vibrations...
Vol. 8 • March 1975 • No. 6
