Neighbors in Conflict
Kelly, James R.
characterization a compelling and plaus- Lasch claims why do we still care so pieces, why, and to what end? The proj- ible one? Would, or could, it gain ac- much, fret so much,...
...Forest consistently disregards the fact that the truly massive human rights violations in Vietnam were and continue to be those of the United States, which left a devastated land and people...
...He notes that the and that he fails to provide...
...In his interpretation of ethnic conflict Bayor wisely minimizes the significance of psychological factors, such as a putative "authoritarian personality structure" and employs some standard sociological explanations, such as status-insecurity, loss of mobility opportunities, and direct economic competition...
...1929-1941, by Ronald H. most Americans...
...His last and only analytic chapter entitled "On Ethnic Conflict," consists of a scant four pages of some basic sociology...
...The family may be crisis...
...Since 1975 hundreds of farmers have died from exploding ordnance left by U.S...
...paradoxically of precisely that brutaliza- sonal interviews, and some transcribed But Lasch's thesis, if it is to convince tion of social life Lasch himself indicts as interviews from the Columbia University us, requires more and further evidence characteristic of our age...
...JEFFREY MEYERS's books include works on Lawrence and Orwell...
...Lasch's desiccated husk but thus far it but if one has to construct cardboard He observes that many Jews too has stubbornly refused to blow away, people (I think they are sometimes called quickly found anti-Semitic implications despite the chill winds of apocalyptic so- "ideal types") in order to smash them in Italian and German non-political pride cial criticism and abominable public and their entire edifice down (for only of nationality...
...For having in- Oral History Project...
...As a result he knocks mediating agencies, institutions, and re- nearly everything that appears in his text In brief lationships...
...And Kevin Michael McAuliffe's persuasive history of The Voice portrays toughguy-in-print Cockburn as the office toady, constantly sidling up to the most powerful man in the room...
...reader alike: he is treating us to complex, tions...
...The projible one...
...But most will find it a useful reference work...
...Twice a week, on the way from Commonweal to Grand Central Station, I put out 25 cents for the New York Post and feel that I am simply giving the quarter away...
...But what happens next...
...How does the what was meant to be the target of his Lasch...
...evils, but a broadside at anyone disturbed at torture and death under Marxist political sponsorship is an acceptable alternative...
...Jim Forest, will you not get out and protest the human rights violation of the next Loatian or South Vietnamese farmer whose legs are severed by an exploding land mine...
...that guidance to accept Lasch's characterization of Neighbors In Conflict is a social hiscounselors, therapists, and adminis- events and the implications which flow tory of ethnic relations in New York City trators sometimes intrude into the family from them, the result will ultimately be a during the depression years...
...JAMES R. KELLY THE GREAT AMERICAN NEWSPAPER: The Rise and Fall of the Village Voice, by Kevin Michael McAulife, Scribners, $14.95, 473 pp...
...I think some readers will miss a more rigorous connection between group conflict and the economic structure of society which, Bayor observes, is the catalyst of much of the periodic group animosity he reports and anticipates...
...One paragraph can serve as lynch mob, in this case with myself as proposed mobile...
...This is a gross misrepresentation of fact-daily abductions, tortures and killing occur on a large scale, mostly unprotested...
...We should ternalized Lasch's view one will see the papers of Cardinal Spellman are not have meticulous, depth probing and in- world through his eyes...
...In McAuliffe's version, there is the good old Voice, the mirror of the emerg- - ing counter-culture, the "writers" newspaper, where founder-editor Dan Wolf let bright, young, mixed-up, floundering men and women pour out their guts, politics and sensibilities-and thus caught the imagination of a changing America-and the bad, new Voice where a succession of not-to-be-trusted money-men like Carter Burden ("willful...
...Press, teachers sometimes treat parents with de- remain credulous and who are prepared 232 pp...
...But both...
...Have families been drained of self in the later works of Robert Coles, a and contextual look at neighborhood their normative meaning in Midwest thinker and public figure quite unlike ethnic relations, only two are inspected at farming communities as well as urban- Lasch himself but one concerned with length, the Irish-Jewish conflicts in academic centers in the Northeast...
...What "increasingly effective educators, and capitalist invasions...
...Students of ethnic relations will understand their own dilemma -would to be sure, tends at times to be a bit not find much new information nor any he offer them terms of analysis which Pollyanna-ish, but that's all right...
...A second deception is the equating of the Minh case with, say Biko, or the Argentinian torture-killing plague...
...Every Wednesday I hand over 60 cents for The Village Voice, and am beginning to feel the same way...
...an unprovoked assault...
...of family relations as lived,a further ero- such as the ethnic presses, diocesan and that the traditional bases of commu- sion of the family's normative signifi- newspapers, and municipal archives, he nity have broken down or are in peril- cance coupled with the extension, also employs census tract data, some perall this and more is surely correct...
...Are we really, all of nounced as Lasch's impulse to quash will find it a useful reference book...
...While scene armed with well-meaning advice, draining of the meaning of the family and Bayor relies mostly on written sources, well-laid plans and thinly-veiled threats...
...that public school truth or the simple truth...
...I am guilty of bringing aid and comfort to the U.S...
...say why...
...Angst may be "in" this season, either political endorsement or voting...
...some terribly important truths in the control" of the family and private life Lasch, I fear, has forgotton precisely hands of a provocative thinker like does Lasch have in mind...
...RONALD DE FEO writes for The National Review, The Nation and other journals...
...significant re-interpretations of the might enable them to see beneath the Coles's thirst for moral uplift is as pro- material...
...His latest is A Fever at the Core: Six Studies of the Idealist in Politics...
...Even Forest does not claim that Minh was tortured or killed, whereas Biko and literally thousands of Argentinians and Chileans have been...
...What magic there is in words...
...wimpy...
...The real mystery of The Voice seems to be how a group of people who disliked and mistrusted one another so much could put out a paper at all...
...If the dreadful available and that he was disappointed terpretations of the self-understandings has already happened, it should not sur- with the sources housed at the Brooklyn of real families in a variety of social con- prise us that it happens again, everyday, Diocese Archives, although he does not texts in order that the discussion might be over and over...
...I hang on for the Off-Off Broadway reviews-and above all for Andrew Sarris, whose just-published collection of film reviews, Politics and Cinema (Columbia University Press, $12.95 [206 pp.] marks him again as a toughminded,independent critic I should not try to do without...
...If the family had indeed been as catastrophe can justify the anguish one among ethnics for the anti-Semitic drained of its emotional intensity as feels) who will come to pick up the movements of the period correlated Commonweal: 156 strongly with economic variables such as unemployment, relief work, and job insecurity...
...DENNIS vEU.UCCi has taught English and American Studies at the University of Southem California and is presently an editor for New York University publications...
...government's long arm extend into the book in his headlong plunge into critiinterstices of inner life-through what cism and despair...
...But While his quoting of the Brooklyn Tablet instead the case that the argument for our Coles offers one enormous advantage to during this period seemed excessive to one-dimensionality is a one-dimensional the political thinker and the average me, Bayor makes the requisite qualificaargument...
...He observes that conflict can be based on rational andvirrational grounds, that not all conflict is bad, and that ethnicreligious conflicts will persist: ". . . America will probably see these conflicts, in varying degrees of intensity, wax and wane many times in the future...
...Would, or could, it gain ac- much, fret so much, lament so much, ect of depicting one-dimensional people ceptance in the eyes of social participants rejoice so much-despite the social and then wiping them out can be great themselves...
...I used to hang on for Alexander Cockburn's Press Clips hoping to glean, beyond his cynical snickers and pet hates, some useful background stuff to share with my journalism classes...
...scholars and others surface of things...
...One of his recent columns made a joke out of Karen Quinlan...
...ipulate the American economy in ways that we are reading some things that are GERMANS, JEWS, AND ITALIANS OF NEW that constrain and control the lives of true but are by no means either the whole YORK CITY...
...It is not merely a question of neglect-this selfrighteous focus on a few selected and privileged individuals, in a complex and difficult environment, has contributed to the further savaging of a huge army of victims (still denied even the right to trade, let alone to rceive aid for the victims o1...
...JAMES R. KELLY teaches in the sociology department at Fordham University...
...many of the same issues of the family, Washington Heights and in the South Would Lasch's discussion help them to social relationships, and politics...
...shifted from its depersonalized abstrac- Lasch would do well to immerse him- While the book's title suggests a close tedness...
...16 March 1979: 157...
...bombers, and the prostitutes, drug addicts and diseased in body and mind have been left to suffer unaided by the former invader.The neglect of the human rights issues involved here (including problems of survival and rehabilitation) by people like Jim Forest is scandalous...
...sneaky...
...That government and big flat, but by the book's end Lasch has not business have long collaborated to man- so much frightened us as put us on guard NEIGHBORS IN CONFLICT: THE IRISH...
...FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., is associate editor of Commonweal and the author of The Eagle and Brooklyn (Greenwood...
...Coles, Bronx...
...us, one-dimensional persons or is it not each and every hint of solace in sight...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH Correspondence (Continued from page 130) in South Africa, Chile, Argentina, or South Korea...
...rision or sugary contempt...
...The implication is that peace organizations regularly respond with energy to ordinary imprisonments in Chile, Argentina, etc...
...government, all for regretting REVIEWERS FATHER DONALD SENIOR, C.P., Associate Professor of New Testament Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, is the Editor of The Bible Today...
...No more...
...supine...
...EDWARD S. HERMAN The author replies I imagine Mr...
...spoiled"), Clay Felker and Rupert Murdoch have changed it into a packaged commodity written to match the editors' notion of what will sell...
...He observes that Catholics in genFor most of us most of the time thickly textured portraits of real human eral did not support Franco, that many families, for better or for worse, remain beings, men, women, and children, in Catholics opposed Father Charles E. the locus of our most powerful, ambiva- real social locations, living in and Coughlin, and that ethnicity and religion lent, and meaningful emotional ties and through genuine political and moral were never the sole determining factor in self-identities...
...JEAN BEIHKE E SHTAIN is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...For those who Bayor, The Johns Hopkins Univ...
...He observes that support policies...
...Herman sleeps best at night if first delivered of a fresh indictment of U.S...
...Let's look a bit closer at his workers, bureaucrats, officious fun, I suppose, and it may even illumine views...
...GEORGE EL LARD teaches in the philosophy department at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania...
Vol. 106 • March 1979 • No. 5
