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Comment_ Beauty and the Beast Why is Ronald Reagan so popular? All of the major polls show him enjoying an approval rating of about 65 per cent—an extraordinary, almost unparalleled endorsement....
...Louis Giuffrida, who headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, preferred the title General...
...A Credit to the Law The late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once called Antioch Law School "the most innovative law school ever to be accredited by the American Bar...
...In this context, the Challenger's demise takes on even more grotesque overtones...
...The charge of flakiness falls flat coming from a man whose general knowledge of current events can safely be stored on a few three-by-five cards...
...First Victims With, the media wallowing in patriotic bathos over the hideous death of Christa McAuliffe and the six crew members aboard the Shuttle Challenger, foolishness polluted the airwaves and fatuous fervor clogged the newspapers...
...Suppose he had invited the Soviet Union—and all of the other nuclear powers— to embark on a step-by-step process of diminishing nuclear stockpiles so that they would be entirely gone by the year 2000...
...Of course, it didn't happen that way...
...According to his obituary, Nick Patargeas, a longtime printer striking the Chicago Tribune, died at age forty-eight while walking a picket line in the January chill...
...No wonder blacks are the only group that consistently opposes his record...
...This People magazine view of politics, though, just doesn't wash...
...weapons are tested underground...
...And the standard answers of the pollsters and pundits aren't much help either...
...On one level, we can take comfort in the finding that conservatism, per se, has not won the day...
...The Right has swept the country," they mourn...
...The White House issued a flurry of clarifications that only made matters worse...
...A better indicator of Reagan's popularity can be found in almost any bar in the country, for the roots of his appeal lie deep in our cultural soil...
...Though his aides tried to gloss over their boss's indiscretion, they could not hide the implications: Law and order is all right in its place, but there are causes that deserve the help of just a bit of terrorism...
...As Andrew Kopkind has argued in The Nation, Reagan's appeal to patriotism, bigotry, and patriarchy cannot be underestimated...
...Dan Rather blathered on about "the right stuff," Chuck Yeager drawled that we must take it all in stride, John Glenn heralded progress amidst the flames, Ronald Reagan anointed the dead, and the ubiquitously unctuous George Will exalted the can-do American spirit...
...The American people are stupid...
...The final decision will be made by the ABA's House of Delegates early in 1986...
...The prisoner's family is reportedly destitute...
...News of a contract settlement has not...
...Certainly the ABA has the right to insist that standards be maintained by accredited schools...
...Richard Nixon must be laughing himself sick...
...Qaddafi is no likelier than Reagan to sustain an edifying international debate...
...If there has been a second glance, we haven't heard about it...
...There was instant talk of military retaliation...
...Darrow "Duke" Tully often sported uniforms and medals around town...
...General Tran Cong Man, editor-in-chief of Vietnam's army newspaper, says 'Cambodianization' will begin soon, with Cambodia's military gradually taking over anti-guerrilla fighting from Vietnamese troops in Cambodia...
...That's all there is to it...
...By trying to understand the bedrock of Reagan's appeal, we can more effectively chart a course of social change...
...Conservatives would like to think that Reagan's appeal reflects the triumph of their creed and the death of liberalism...
...Secretary of State George Shultz hinted darkly that the use of American force might be appropriate in curbing further Libyan aggression...
...Instead it's business as usual at the Pentagon and among the military contractors, at the weapons labs and in the Congressional appropriations committees, at the White House and in the desert where new U.S...
...Lyndon Johnson wasn't elected for his kindness, and Richard Nixon didn't reach the Oval Office because of his great personal warmth...
...Confronted, however, with a notably cool response by America's allies—even the Israelis were inclined to blame the attacks on Syria rather than Libya—Washington confined itself to economic sanctions and menacing military maneuvers—and to street-corner tough talk...
...But two anti-abortion leaders insisted they had, in fact, received such assurances from the President at a January meeting...
...Or he's "avuncular," a pet adjective that used to be exclusively reserved for Walter Cronkite...
...He resigned when his charade was discovered...
...Another, adopted by pseudoscientists, blames a glacial or tidal shift...
...Of ail the years between the Depression and 1980, only two— 1975 and 1976—had an annual unemployment rate that high,' economist Alan S. Blinder wrote in a recent Business Week...
...Where does that leave us...
...A few weeks earlier, the publisher of the Phoenix newspapers admitted that he lied about being a retired Air Force combat pilot...
...Military men, not men of science, are increasingly calling the shots in the U. S. space program," The Wall Street Journal reported two weeks before the disaster...
...There's no doubt," says White House communications director Patrick Buchanan, "that Congress has shifted toward the President's position...
...He is ignoring it the way he is ignoring the Soviet disarmament proposal...
...Who's a Barbarian...
...Grating as it may be, the Ronnie-and-Nancy show plays in Peoria...
...At this point, attitudes and beliefs must be challenged...
...This spring, the President is planning to propose a $ 100 million aid package to the contras—$60 million of it for lethal aid...
...One aide quoted Reagan as saying he "may get a review" on the case of a man who kidnapped a physician who performed abortions...
...a 50 per cent reduction by each superpower over the next few years in the number of missiles capable of reaching the other's territory, followed by reductions in intermediate-range missiles and tactical nuclear weapons, and finally, procedures for the destruction of all weapons so that by the end of the century "there would be no nuclear weapons on Earth...
...The responses showed no consistent evidence of change, certainly not in a conservative direction," The New York Times survey analysis found...
...If all this represents a trend, it's an old one...
...He invokes the First Lady's name at virtually every public occasion, waving his traditional monogamy for all to see...
...Christa Mc-Auliffe's death was about as useless as any imaginable...
...The average unemployment rate in 1985 was 7.2 per cent...
...Suppose he had said, "We propose that we enter the third millennium without nuclear weapons, on the basis of mutually acceptable and strictly verifiable agreements...
...On the President's urging, a civilian—and yes, how quaint, a schoolteacher—was sought for the mission...
...It's fashionable to be prejudiced," says Cor-etta Scott King...
...The problem with Antioch, according to the ABA, is that the law school doesn't meet its standards...
...Joe McCarthy, for example, was never a tailgunner, except on the Senate floor...
...Everyone in Washington is obsessed with Gramm-Rudman...
...After a six-month examination of agricultural life on Virginia's Eastern Shore, state officials reported their findings in January: substandard housing, low wages, unsafe working conditions, "phenomenally high" rates of alcoholism, infant mortality, and malnutrition...
...Fully 66 per cent think the Government should spend money now on efforts similar to those of the Great Society programs to help the poor people in the United States...
...Faced with the vexing but incontestable fact that most people think Reagan is doing a good job, some leftists resort to varieties of counterproductive—and regressive—rationales...
...On another level, our task is more challenging, for deep-seated emotions stand in the way of a more progressive America...
...The invasion of Grenada and the hoopla over the Olympics, the Pentagon build-up and "It's morning again in America," all reinforce the almost reflexive impulse to love America and its leader...
...Laws prohibiting child labor and requiring a minimum wage are not enforced...
...Confronting cherished-but-pernicious mores was one of the most noble efforts of 1960s radicalism...
...But heaven forbid that the growers should have to cut into their profits by providing adequate labor camps on their own...
...And the head of a regime that terrorizes Central American villagers, perpetuates the arms race, and deepens the misery of its own poor is in no position to call anyone a barbarian...
...Now, thirteen years after Antioch began training students to fight the legal battles of the indigent and unrepresented, the law school is no less innovative, but the American Bar Association is threatening to remove its seal of approval...
...many are—often before the crime...
...Leave aside the folly of squandering billions of dollars in space when we have plenty of pressing problems to handle here on Earth—hunger, poverty, disease—and just focus on the shuttle program itself...
...Times don't change in the fields...
...Like Brecht's Stalinist, they blame the citizenry...
...Missing from all this bugle-blowing was any serious evaluation of the space program...
...Farm workers, whether day laborers or migrants or relatively stable employees, still seem to have no rights at all—no Federal guarantee that they can engage in collective bargaining, no protection from unfair labor practices...
...Reagan has also cornered the market on residual racism...
...More than any President in recent history, Ronald Reagan has successfully summoned the staples of the American myth...
...President Reagan rushed to seize the moral high ground immediately after the terrorist attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports...
...Democratic acquiescence has turned to Democratic cheerleading, and liberals are enjoying their new role as Reagan's pom-pon girls...
...A historian burrowing in the National Archives recently exposed the Philippine dictator's fabrication...
...But people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...
...Equally scarce are such amenities as drinking water and toilets in the fields, provisions for workers' compensation, and protection from the pesticides growers spray on crops...
...Odds are he'll get at least a hefty chunk out of Congress, even though the Democrats cut off all aid to the contras at one point and then only begrudgingly agreed to $27 million in so-called nonlethal aid last year...
...To explain the discrepancy, much is made of Reagan's personality...
...If that had been the substance of the State of the Union speech, the White House would have pulled out all of the propaganda stops...
...But the data simply don't support that hope...
...Antioch supporters proceeded to find a new home for the Law School, but just when efforts to raise the estimated $2.5 million necessary for renovation got under way in November, the ABA committee recommended that accreditation be withdrawn...
...Pardon Me...
...constructive" in some respects...
...His predecessors all tried it, of course, but they usually projected a dishonest or conniving image when they invoked God, flag, and country...
...The mass media would take up the chorus, proclaiming that it was now up to the Soviet Union to respond affirmatively or to give up forever any pretense of wanting to end the arms race...
...But skeptics will be justified in suspecting that in this case the judgment may have less to do with academic standards than it does with the legal establishment's longstanding antipathy to the ideals promoted by Antioch...
...No time to waste...
...For crass public-relations purposes: to give NASA a boost in the public's by-now-vacant Comment eye, and to disguise the military purpose of the space program...
...This is not news...
...they present an opening for more profound change to come...
...Crew leaders "keep workers in a virtual state of peonage through physical abuse and an ever-mounting cycle of illicit debts,"the report noted...
...Without waiting for details or documentation, the Administration blamed the assault on Libya's Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who had, Reagan asserted, permitted if not masterminded the ugly incidents...
...The United States is so deeply committed to developing more and greater weapons of world destruction that we wouldn't abandon the process even if the other side offered to quit...
...The world would rejoice at the prospect of ending the threat of nuclear annihilation, and all eyes would be on Moscow to see how the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, responded to the President's extraordinary proposal...
...Decent housing for farm workers is a rare exception, not the rule...
...He's a nice guy, we are told, and the voters like that...
...what do you expect...
...Indeed, if he were to champion black causes, he would lose his appeal with many whites, who see in his Administration a way finally to put blacks back in their place...
...At about the same time, "60 Minutes" aired a story showing that President Reagan's frequent anecdotes about wartime heroism are drawn not from history but from the silver screen...
...goes one line of delusion, favored by an-tidemocrats...
...Reagan himself did not come forward to denounce the anti-abortion terrorists...
...Qaddafi is certainly not one of the great statesmen of our age, and he has contributed his share and more to brutal terrorism around the world...
...According to a January New York Times/CBS News survey, 52 per cent of the people approve of Reagan's handling of the economy...
...His aides said no—Ronald Reagan had not promised "pro-lifers" that he would consider pardons for those convicted of bombing abortion clinics...
...We can't afford to lose so rare and valuable a resource—even if the mighty ABA has to bend its rules in a just cause...
...Everyone, that is, save Reagan...
...His age, his woodchopping, and his horseback riding serve to reinforce his linkage to a romantic, vanished past...
...The President's proposal would have been hailed as the greatest advance toward peace ever put forward: His aides would clamor for a Nobel Prize...
...Fully 34 per cent of shuttle payloads through 1994 will be military, with many of the missions scheduled to deliver and test hardware for the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...More and more, it has become the sixth wing of the Pentagon...
...Yet it need not be...
...Qaddafi, Reagan declared at a news conference, is "not only a barbarian, but he's flaky...
...But life goes on as usual for the one group specifically excluded from NLRA protection...
...But this interpretation does not account for the 13 per cent who support Reagan while rejecting his economic record...
...Representative Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey, who opposes lethal aid, agrees with Buchanan's assessment: "Support for the Administration's position has been slowly building...
...Giving no quarter to women's rights or gay rights, he stands for a bygone era that many recall with fond nostalgia...
...Pom-Pon Girls Ronald Reagan has only two-and-a-half years left to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, and he's beginning to get a little anxious...
...Fortunately, such responses don't come close to solving the riddle...
...The Progeny of PT-109 More proof that a hero ain't nothing but a sandwich: Ferdinand Marcos was not the military leader in World War II that he says he was...
...More than his economic program and his ideology, it is his cultural profile that Americans find attractive...
...He'd be on solid ground if he simply said, "You're another...
...Individually and collectively, we need to take our politics back into the bars and movie theaters, the playgrounds and schools, the churches and work places and living rooms...
...His obituary appeared in the Tribune...
...It made a dent in the cultural armor of America, but the armor remains in place...
...He and the other veteran liars acquired power through rank dishonesty...
...Or by paying workers enough so that they won't need the services of state and Federal welfare programs...
...Reagan, by contrast, is perceived as too dumb to lie and too simple to dissemble...
...The suggestion that all nuclear arms be eliminated in the next fifteen years came not from Reagan but from Gorbachev, and like the Soviets' unilateral and voluntary moratorium on all nuclear testing, it has already been forgotten—if it was ever comprehended—by most Americans...
...True to form, Virginia officials recommended that the state spend a bundle of money—in this case, $3 million—to improve housing and "services" for farm workers...
...Was the President of the United States sanctioning terrorism...
...Trapped on the Treadmill Suppose that President Reagan had devoted his State of the Union address to a sweeping new disarmament proposal...
...Amid suitable fanfare, the Sixth Fleet steamed into the Gulf of Sidra...
...On issues of family and sexuality, Reagan embodies the old order...
...Suppose the President had fleshed out his dramatic offer with specifics of a disarmament program: an immediate nuclear test ban...
...Changes in policy will follow...
...After a visit to the Washington-based school a year ago, the ABA's legal education committee lodged several complaints, chief among them that the Antioch library and classroom facilities are inadequate...
...When the rest of Washington is haggling over school lunch programs, he is happily babbling about sending $ 100 million to the Nicaraguan contras, as if Gramm-Rudman were not on the books.' —Mary McGrory The Washington Post January 23, 1986 Just looking at the polls, while interesting, doesn't reveal the whole picture...
...Rotting in the Fields More than fifty years after passage of the National Labor Relations Act, the Board that is supposed to enforce it is in the hip pocket of union busters...
...It has and we won't...
...His Justice Department can succeed in launching an all-out assault on the civil rights laws because he doesn't need black support...
...John Steinbeck told us about it in 1939 with The Grapes of Wrath...
...Since its founding in 1972, Antioch Law School has been the model for public-interest legal education in this country, turning out a generation of lawyers committed to the advancement of social justice...
...He is an honest patriot who believes the United States is the last, best hope of mankind, and his faith strikes a primordial chord with the American people...
...Conventional wisdom, uttered by the David Broders of this world, has it that the economy dictates the level of a President's popularity...
...Not long before that, one of Reagan's appointees quit after it was disclosed that he hadn't earned the stars he claimed...
...For those of us who find his politics obnoxious, who see in his rhetoric and his programs a danger to world peace and a threat to justice and freedom, Reagan's popularity stands as a constant, nagging rebuke...
...As Ben Hecht said of journalism in general, it's like trying to tell time by watching the second hand of a clock...
...The Pentagon, for example, is the largest single user of the space shuttle...
...President Reagan, obviously caught off guard by Gorbachev's January 15 proposal, said it appeared "at first glance...
...If Christa McAuliffe's death has any meaning, it is in foreshadowing the fiery end in store for all of us if the space program and the arms race are allowed to continue unchecked...
...In 1960, Edward R. Murrow put the "Harvest of Shame" on television, and his network revisited the same scene a decade later only to find the same story: that farm workers are the most disadvantaged group in America...
...Their rah-rahs may not stop until American boys start coming home in body bags...
...Since the majority of Americans still believe in social programs to help the poor and unemployed, the limited reforms of the New Deal and the Great Society are not doomed...
Vol. 50 • March 1986 • No. 3
