Editorials
Words from the future e have a communication from a friend who was/is caught in a time warp. She now occupies a niche in the very late nineties, from when she sends these observations: You should...
...About capitalism, too, free enterprise, the sacredness of the market, the triumph of the human spirit manifested, say, in the infant mortality rate in Harlem, considered in the context of pay scales for CEOs, rock performers, designated hitters...
...Sludge in the ocean, chemicals in the aquifers, nuclear garbage piling up, people living on the streets, drug gangs with Uzis, babies starving in so many countries...
...he ordered an invasion: massive, life-threatening surgery to remove a thorn in his side...
...American media, and the American public, tend to judge foreign policy initiatives by their short-term consequences...
...Homes, stores, whole neighborhoods are ruined...
...So also some 23 U.S...
...Not while it still counted, anyway...
...It may even be that U.S...
...Nobody was serious enough...
...That's what I mean about not being serious...
...Like other ACT-Up efforts, the demonstration was consciously designed to be provocative and excessive...
...More of us could have seen, should have seen, the cracks in our own walls...
...George Bush's foreign policy vision does not respond to what is happening in the world now...
...She now occupies a niche in the very late nineties, from when she sends these observations: You should realize that I'm not allowed to tell you-at least not directly-what's happened between your Now and mine...
...Defenders of the demonstration isolate as excessive and unacceptable what went on in the cathedral...
...But I can give you a ringing, if partial, endorsement of an inanity Ronald Reagan once uttered during a speech at the UN (he thought it was a profundity): "I believe that the future is far nearer than most of us would dare hope...
...Using that criterion, Mr...
...In the papers I read and the conversations I heard, there was too much easy gloating...
...And those who did see what was happening could have said more and done more...
...But when the main result is simply a new cloud of bigotry and bitterness that will add to what already surrounds this issue, observers should say so clearly...
...What I know now tells me I was right then...
...Acid rain, the hole in the sky, the gunk in the air, the forests, kid prostitutes...
...UNHOLY PROTEST On Sunday, December 10,1989 demonstraters surrounded New York's St...
...It follows that the hindsight you'll get will be my very own...
...Bishop Richard Grein of the Episcopal Diocese of New York summed up the views of many: "regardless of how we may feel about the reasons underlying the demonstrators' protest or about their right to exercise free speech, we cannot condone and must condemn this interruption of a service of worship, this denial of religious freedom...
...Bush has announced victory...
...Nonsense...
...hi consequence, at least four hundred Panamanian civilians are dead...
...soldiers went to war...
...The posters and advertisements for the event, as well as the flyers distributed on Fifth Avenue and in the cathedral, were hate-filled and inflammatory...
...I'm staying away from end-of-the-century and end-of-the-millennium stuff, so that I can sort out my own memories of the eighties...
...It wasn't just the media...
...Even to Ollie North, they tell me, it came as a ++11...
...says: That's what we've always said-but not in our back yard...
...Having ourselves taken issue with the bishops' statements on public policy concerning abortion and AIDS, we detect not a protest over policy issues but a scape-goating, even demonization, of Catholicism, of the bishops, and of O'Connor in particular...
...The demonstration outside was kept under control only because a considerable force of New York police was on duty...
...It was a terrible struggle to find out what was really going on anywhere our own government was involved-Nicaragua, for example, or El Salvador: you almost had to go there yourself to find out, and when you came back nobody would believe you...
...The bad guys and their bad ideas were defeated, which was true enough...
...So here goes, hi my new Now, my lead thoughts about the eighties are just more intense versions of what I was saying and thinking ten years ago-and that's not because I'm set in my ways, being ten years older (it seems I'm not...
...What went on in St...
...I came here partly for that anonymity, and partly because it's healthier here since the @@@@!@@@@@ #@@@&@@] {?@@@ and the ####**########+#Kx...
...The old China hand publicly frowns at gory suppression of the student uprising, while privately winking at its planners...
...The demonstration and the desecration are of a piece...
...I was troubled then, and am more so now, by our response to the fall of the Wall and all that...
...Russell Baker was maybe an exception, but everybody thought he was joking...
...Not even Commonweal...
...The U.S...
...maybe in five years or so...
...Our debt, Brazil's, Mexico's...
...People who feel the shadow of the disease fall directly on them may understandably strike out in frustration-whether at the government, at medical science, or at the church...
...I wish I could tell you what finally came out about Iran-con/ra, right after A&A&A%A&A&A& left office...
...I can't...
...Under the pressures of reality, Central American leaders have desperately sought means of solving regional disputes through diplomacy and negotiation...
...That's even more the case because shortly after switching decades I moved to New Zealand, where nobody knew me before or knows me well enough now to change my thinking...
...Not even Woody Allen was really serious...
...We agree...
...I wish I could back it up by sending you a picture of Pretoria today, or of the Florida keys, or of Jerusalem...
...But there is more to say...
...The U.S...
...Twenty-five thousand U.S...
...Actually that's how I'm learning about the nineties: reading end-of-the-decade books and articles, all the while pretending to people that I lived through it as they did-even though it was only weeks ago, on your calendar, when I did my skip...
...Buried...
...Inside the cathedral some of their number disrupted the 10:15 Mass by lying in the aisles, by chaining themselves to the pews, by interrupting and finally bringing O'Connor's homily to a halt, by tossing condoms in the air and sticking them in Mass books, and by throwing the Communion Host to the floor...
...Their contradictions caught up with them first...
...combatants and 297 Panamanian military...
...Hardly a ripple...
...The groups summed up their argument: "The intrusion of O'Connor and the church hierarchy into politics and public health guarantees that ALL people will suffer from the murderous policies of the church...
...People with AIDS have claims on our compassion and care-as the bishops have said repeatedly...
...Out of it...
...PATTERNS FROM THE PAST George Bush's vision of foreign policy is, among other things, dated...
...Not even me...
...The fifty-organization Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Rights-among the demonstration's cosponsors-condemned the disruption of Mass...
...When sound complaints are raised, they should be heard...
...Only hope is not the right word...
...I remember checking the price of Exxon shares for a while after the accident...
...But don't bet on it...
...Removed...
...Even when they got the story straight, people believed Reagan, and then Bush, because it was easier...
...Patrick's Cathederal chanting and carrying placards: "Curb your dogma," "Condom O'Connor," "Teach safe sex," "Stop the church...
...I wish I could tell you what's now housed in the New York Stock Exchange, and what people are trying to grow in Iowa...
...From me, as I said, this is hindsight...
...The demonstration's chief sponsors were AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-Up) and Women's Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM) who passed out flyers accusing Cardinal John O'Connor of "genocide" for opposing "education about AIDS and safe sex in public and parochial schools...
...The Kremlin, has belatedly proclaimed that the use of murderous force to achieve foreign policy aims is no longer appropriate...
...People did complain about the sleaziness of politics, but not (or not enough) about its emptiness...
...About anything...
...Or consider the Valdez oil spill...
...of intolerance for urging Catholics "to escalate their attacks on abortion rights and women's health care facilities...
...policy can turn from unilateral intrusion and military invasion to more democratic means of promoting democracy...
...It does appear at this writing that Manuel Noriega-who was, indeed, a tyrant-may have been permanently demobilized...
...not only dissents from but undercuts these efforts...
...The city's four daily papers said so, as did civic and religious leaders...
...Faced with a problem in one of our Latin American dependencies, he did what frustrated gringo presidents have so often done before...
...Patrick's was an outrage...
...It may also be that the popularly elected government of President Guillermo Endara will take hold, that the Panamanian economy will recover from the effects of U.S.-imposed sanctions, and that the Panamanian people will at last take charge of their political life, their canal, their political destiny...
...And people talked about the "sensationalism" of the media, or the nosiness of reporters, but not about their nationalism, their establishmentar-ianism...
...it rather reflects his personal experience and the spurious "expertise" he has gained from it...
...You'll get only gibberish if I get too explicit about anything that, from your perspective, is still going to happen but is now history to me...
...and questioning his Christianity because he "opposes antidiscrimination legislation that would protect the rights of lesbians and gay men...
...A tiger that prefers, as in Grenada, to feed on mice...
...It wasn't so true that we were, therefore, certified good guys with pure hearts and sound understanding of how the world works...
...their arguments tortured and distorted...
...And because most of us were nationalists too, even jingoes, and not just about America...
...Welcoming the Soviet Union into the twentieth century, he dwells, equably and affably, in the nineteenth...
...Daniel Ortega, along with legions of other prideful Latinos, is furnished with yet more evidence that the tiger has not changed his stripes...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 1
