Editorials
CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 19 Correspondence 626 Editorials 627 Hey, Bishop!: Bridget Balthrop Morton 629 Danger, boys at work: Donald Haynes 630 The high cost of gold: Steve Ellner...
...unquestioned belonging...
...632 The can-do Quonset: Abigail McCarthy 633 Sexton's last tapes: James F. Keenan 635 Dead, but still with us: Paul Giles 637 Poetry: Anne Porter 641 Conservative opportunism, liberal cowardice: Fred Siegel 642 Doing for ourselves: Paul Baumann 647 Media: Frank McConnell 652 Stage: Gerald Weales 654 BOOKS Saint Maybe/The Night Travelers: Crystal Gromer 656 Which Side Are You On?: George G. Higgins' 658 Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby: Don Wycliff 659 Catholic Bishops in American Politics: James T. Fisher 660 Rights Talk: David Hollenbach 662 Regulating Death: Martin E. Marty 665 Signposts in a Strange Land: Victor A. Kramer 666 Shattered Hope: Paul Kantz 667 STAFF Editor: Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editor: Paul Baumann Production Editor: Jacqueline Dowdell Senior Writer: Robert G. Hoyt Staff: Harriette Balsky, Carmen Alava, Pamela Quatse Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christmas, New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Foundation, 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y...
...CONTENTS Volume CXVIII, Number 19 Correspondence 626 Editorials 627 Hey, Bishop!: Bridget Balthrop Morton 629 Danger, boys at work: Donald Haynes 630 The high cost of gold: Steve Ellner 631 You ain't seen nothin' yet: David R. Carlin, Jr...
...Finally, the peace-keeping forces of the UN and the role of international law must be enhanced as arbiters of international disputes...
...Representative democracy necessarily entails a respect for the values of a self-governing people, and elections are designed to bring those values forcibly to bear...
...Democrats, led by black Americans themselves, deserve most of the credit for this progress, and for the opportunities Clarence Thomas now extols...
...Here was further proof that the world's reliance on nuclear weapons has meant their gradual spread, via a chain reaction between rivals: U.S.USSR...
...Now, however, I find myself perplexed and angry: What do I tell her...
...defense policies predicated on truly defensive rather than offensive war-fighting capabilities...
...Whatever his personal failings, Thomas may represent something much more substantial than the mere "Uncle Tom" or flamboyant opportunist his critics would have us think he is...
...a] public cultural affirmation of what had already been politically achieved: unambiguous inclusion...
...As a political appointment, Thomas may be a very hopeful sign indeed...
...Nuclear proliferation-the bastard child of the superpowers' love affair with nuclear weapons--was making its claims...
...628: Commonweal truth, he writes, is that "America, while still flawed in its race relations...is now the least racist white-majority society in the world...
...Further nuclear reductions should be coordinated and verified, and the ET CETERA HE SHOULD MAYBE SUE The "Metropolitan Diary" column, appearing Wednesdays in the New York Times, sometimes tempts us to larceny, this time (October 2) irresistibly...
...Antiballistic missile systems must adhere to the ABM Treaty until reduced nuclear stockpiles are at such levels that the systems would actually diminish the threat of nuclear exchange...
...HEY, BISHOP...
...In his September speech, President Bush made no reference to America's most deadly and least-vulnerable, first-strike force, the Trident submarine fleet...
...Her old one was costume jewelry...
...and limitations on conventional weapons...
...The price of building down and verifying will not be cheap, and the final standards agreed to---an adequate minimal deterrent and eventually, we hope, abolition--will take years to hammer out...
...selling a record $18.5 billion...
...Designing foreign and domestic policies in keeping with such a formula will be a major challenge...
...Americans have lived through a revolution in race relations that would have torn most societies apart...
...Several years ago, when our parish did not have enough boys willing to serve on the altar, our pastor began training girls...
...Thomas's challenge to traditional black leadership and by extension to the liberal Democratic agenda cannot easily be dismissed...
...The nuclear era has so skewed our perceptions--moral as well as political and military--that it will take time to fight them...
...Ever since, they have served responsibly and well...
...Last year, according to a report of the Congressional Research Service, $41.3 billion in arms sales were made to third-world countries, with the U.S...
...The rhetoric of competing grievances must accede to a rhetoric of partnership and assumed inclusion...
...To underscore the need of a universal test ban treaty, the U.S...
...Clearly Thomas, only the second African-American to sit on the Supreme Court, is a powerful symbol of black achievement and status, and his almost ritualized trial-by-ordeal brought to the surface profound and contradictory forces at work in race relations in the United States...
...The paradoxical "If you can put your complaint in the form of a constitutional amendment and get two-thirds of the states to approve of it, we may be able to help you...
...POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 15 Dutch St...
...Wycliff quotes Professor Carter: "In an era in which a third of black people still live in poverty, when the inner cities are besieged by drugs and crimes, when nearly a quarter of our children are themselves having children, we cannot afford the luxury of insisting, in the name of solidarity, that any of our problems has a single, unchallengeable answer...
...But Bush and Gorbachev have taken a new course...
...AN IMMENSE STEP George Bush's historic September 27 nuclear-arms reduction announcement, and Mikhail Gorbachev's positive response eight days later--pushing beyond the Bush proposals in significant respects--signify an immense step for humanity...
...The nuclear cleanup will take decades...
...Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney put it succinctly: We "have taken a different approach than I would have advocated even a few months ago...
...Indeed, the Thomas hearings brought before the nation representatives of a new generation of black Americans whose professional achievements and political diversity made a profound impression...
...But now, the new bishop of Orlando, Norbert Dorsey, has told the pastors that female servers are no longer welcome on the altar...
...Justice Thomas likes to say that "only in America" could the grandson of a black sharecropper rise to the highest court in the land...
...04106 (207) 799-4387, classified advertising correspondence to 15 Dutch St...
...It tells the story of"Tamara Pristin's friend from abroad" who, while visiting New York, was confronted by a mugger...
...Much remains to be done about racial and social injustice in the United States, and contrary to Republican claims and Clarence Thomas's rhetoric much must be done by government...
...India-Pakistan...
...should abandon its first-use policy and join Gorbachev's call for halting the production of all fissionable materials for weapons...
...weaponry in the Gulf War--a war that compellingly demonstrated the danger of such arms sales...
...As Don Wycliff notes in his review of Stephen Carter's Reflections o f an Affirmative Action Baby (p...
...In defending his "good name" against Hill's allegations, Thomas seemed to regain his own voice and to speak in a language that many Americans viscerally understood and sympathized with...
...To be sure, the nomination of a black conservative was a cynical act by a president who, lest we forget, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964...
...Telephone: (212) 732-0800...
...But we have seen that immense steps are possible and that a few more are needed...
...For four days, fortyfour UN inspectors were held hostage because they had verified that Iraqi nuclear capability was imminent...
...10038...
...Display advertising correspondence should be sent to Ruth E. Taylor, 11 Graffam Rd., So...
...He simultaneously grabbed for her gold chain and gave her a push...
...As the recent Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty demonstrates, it is now possible to have more defense with fewer arms and at less cost...
...should join the USSR and put an end to all nuclear testing...
...to steady herself, she grabbed at him and inadvertently pulled off the gold chain he was wearing...
...NO ALTAR GIRLS...
...Doubtless his rejection of the rhetoric of victimization as well as affirmative action and other liberal remedies for discrimination smacks of betrayal to the Democrats...
...One first step in dealing with this massive and dangerous trade is to take up a recent UN recommendation to register all arms transfers with the UN...
...Simultaneous with Bush's announcement, a nuclear-era subplot was being acted out in a Baghdad parking lot...
...Congress has rightly challenged the rationale for both expenditures...
...As if from habit, in his September 27 speech Bush called for additional funding for both the B-2 Stealth bomber and SDI...
...My friends, many of them women, remind me that the church 8 November 1991:629...
...When Bishop Dorsey made his pronouncement, our parish had twenty-two boys and eighteen girls serving regularly at Mass...
...10038...
...His reason: The faithful must align themselves more fully with the teachings of Rome...
...So I was delighted when my Ellen, six years old, asked not if she could serve on the altar, but when...
...To add further momentum to nuclear disarmament, the U.S...
...But if history tells us anything, it is that the politics of race is never simple...
...Many black Americans think that story desperately needs to be heard...
...Seeing them has been a source of grace for me, an outward sign of growth in the church, in its acceptance of women...
...But that need not have been the case...
...Democrats who favor racial preferences in employment and schooling were faced with a racial standard themselves...
...USSR-China...
...Orlando Patterson, the Harvard sociologist, saw the hearings as an indication of the vibrancy of democratic culture, not its nadir (New York Times, October 20...
...Unabashedly "mainstream" values---of hard work, personal accountability, family, religious piety, patriotism--are manifest in the story of Clarence Thomas's life...
...The female servers are young, still in grammar school...
...Furthermore, our vast economy of nuclear enterprises, technicians, and personnel, able to test and develop such weapons, remains intact...
...Anomalies abound...
...the cost: $5-$10 billion...
...The culture of slavery is dead...
...But there was plenty of irony to go round...
...They need to explore what the outpouring of support for Clarence Thomas tells us about racial progress in America, and about the many values black and white Americans share...
...Not noticing his loss, the mugger ran off...
...Not since the end of World War II has there been such an opportunity for progress in disarmament...
...Despite the 1983 call of the American Catholic bishops for the sale of ballistic missiles strictly curtailed...
...The report noted that these are likely to increase because of the success of U.S...
...Furthermore, the funds expended have siphoned offresources from other essential undertakings...
...Civil rights leaders, black and white, need to acknowledge these remarkable realities...
...659), the "black establishment" has routinely suppressed black conservative voices as "traitorous...
...According to opinion polls, traditionally Democratic black voters rallied to Thomas's side in proportions (2-1) similar to whites, and this despite Anita Hill's impressive demeanor and Thomas's Republican politics...
...For anyone with an historical memory, it was an extraordinary, if not surreal sight to see the desiccated Thurmond gumming his praise of Thomas...
...New York, N.Y...
...Clarence Thomas, it seems, is an embodiment of the syncretistic political approach Carter advocates...
...New voices are finally being heard...
...COMMONWEAL i lll , i Courting diversity hatever one's views on the veracity or possible significance of Professor Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, it is widely agreed that the confirmation process showed the Democratic party to be divided and irresolute...
...That's not a lost language for liberals, just a rusty one...
...But it is also true that only in America could a black nominee to the Supreme Court, married to a white woman, find among his principal supporters Southern white conservatives who, like Senator Strom Thurmond, once filibustered for segregation and fulminated against miscegenation...
...the demand for rights must be yoked to the social workhorse of reciprocal duties...
...That politicians and moralists--for decades-----could have threatened global Armageddon to save "our part" of the world may have seemed a necessary evil, but their arguments and legitimations have eroded our sense of moral limits...
...a ban on nuclear and biological-chemical weapons...
...Patterson offers a bold and unorthodox analysis, one that helps make sense of the hearings' compelling drama...
...Portland, Me...
...He described the hearings as a "ritual of inclusion...
...Bush and Gorbachev's "disarmament by example" not only advanced the nuclear meltdown but offered a possible model for other forms of arms reduction: conventional as well as chemical and biological...
...abandonment of our first-use policy, U.S...
...A good deal of the passion attached to the hearings was the result of Thomas's appearing to have turned away from that history, eager to reap the rewards of the civil rights movement without giving due credit...
...China-India...
...EXPLAIN IT TO ELLEN GRACE nly one of my children has ever wanted to serve on God's altar, my daughter, Ellen Grace, who has not even received her First Communion...
...What is still needed is a new way of thinking and acting that sharply departs from the policy and pursuits of the last forty years...
...Next day the visitor consulted a jeweler and learned that her new chain was 18-karat gold...
...On a more subtle level the Thomas hearings may also have been a watershed event in American race relations...
...Only duties seen to be held in common--to uphold the law, to civility, to children---can draw us together...
...defense policy still includes its acceptance...
...But there is also much that has been accomplished, or so an increasing number of black Americans are telling us...
...8 November 1991: 627 That is probably true in Thomas's case as well...
...it] offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa...
...Black Americans have embraced many different strategies to combat racism, from the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington to the separatism of Malcolm X. Ideological labels cannot adequately explain the achievements or shortcomings of such figures...
...Doubtless Thomas's status as symbol of black hopes and aspirations confounded certain liberal expectations...
...Democrats, who have a record to be proud of on this score, must learn to speak on behalf of the disenfranchised in a way that honors what Americans hold most dear...
...The Department of Energy currently wants to build a new reactor to produce tritium...
...The guiding principles should be global cooperation based on the primacy of international law...
...But as one parishioner remarked to me, they have "such grace on the altar...
...No monolithic black community of predictable liberal views exists...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
