Ask What You Can Do for Your Old Boss
Scrapbook Ask What You Can Do for Your Old Boss When THE SCRAPBOOK has a serious question about history—the disconcerting facts, the complex background, the whole truth and nothing but—where...
...The same book is in the university library...
...the Peace Corps...
...It’s a funny joke...
...More important, “Myanmar” was decreed in 1989 by Burma’s hideous junta...
...Officer, officer,” he remonstrates with the cop swinging the truncheon...
...Yes, THE SCRAPBOOK relents on some adjustments to the atlas...
...But THE SCRAPBOOK has to admire the persistent, tenacious, utterly blindered, and deliberately obtuse loyalty contained in that one word—“speculation”—about John F. Kennedy’s acrobatic personal life...
...THE SCRAPBOOK is pleased to note a new book by WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams...
...He told me, ‘You could be fired,’ that reading the book was ‘like bringing pornography to work.’ ” Happily for Sampson, the university, after a few whacks from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the ACLU, has dropped the complaint...
...Reading a book about the Ku Klux Klan...
...Don’t Forget Leghorn THE SCRAPBOOK noticed a telling anomaly last week: The cyclone which devastated Burma also revealed a fault line—and a gaping one at that— in the world’s news organizations...
...To be sure, with the exception of the Peace Corps, all of Sorensen’s assertions on behalf of his hero are debatable, to say the least...
...President” at Madison Square Garden, 80-year-old Ted Sorensen is still guarding the sand castle against the tide...
...But the jury is still out, as far as we’re concerned, on Sri Lanka for Ceylon and Burkina Faso for Upper Volta—both political, rather than linguistic, innovations—and we are holding the line, by God, on Mumbai, which even many residents of Bombay reportedly refuse to call their city...
...But it puts us in distinguished company as well: On the BBC, in the Baltimore Sun, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph, it’s still “Burma...
...I was reading it on break from my campus job as a janitor...
...My own union—the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—sent an obtuse shop steward to stifle my freedom to read...
...launching the first serious effort to explore space...
...This puts us at odds with Reuters, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal, all of whom refer to “Myanmar...
...turning this country’s direction on its treatment of black citizens completely around...
...so our attention was naturally drawn to the first question: “Do JFK’s personal failings lessen his political legacy...
...Tucker recounts events of 1924, when the loathsome Klan was a dominant force in Indiana—until it went to South Bend to taunt the Irish Catholic students at the University of Notre Dame...
...Half seem to refer to the South Asian state wedged between the Indian subcontinent and Thailand as “Burma,” and the other half call it “Myanmar...
...I’m an anti-Communist...
...As a dedicated stick-in-the-mud, THE SCRAPBOOK insists on the old name of “Burma”—and so does the rest of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Just think about Kennedy’s achievements: resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis without firing a shot...
...Not surprisingly, Sorensen’s response was succinct and vehement: “No,” he said—and you can almost hear the fist crash down on the table...
...Sometimes our inquiries are answered by Parade’s resident brainiac, the aptly named Marilyn vos Savant, and sometimes by everyone’s favorite polymath, Walter Scott...
...Last November, writes Sampson, “I was found guilty of ‘racial harassment’ for reading . . . Todd Tucker’s Notre Dame vs...
...It was an anti-Klan book, of course, but the university didn’t care what kind of a Klan book it was—they were agin it...
...Author...
...Buy this book...
...For all things Camelot, Sorensen is manifestly the go-to guy: He’s the author of Kennedy (1965), The Kennedy Legacy (1969), Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements and Writings of John F. Kennedy, 1947-1963 (1988), and of course, Profiles in Courage (1956), for which John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize...
...We accept, as a fait accompli, China’s 1979 insistence on the Pinyin version of Chinesein-English, which gave us Beijing for Peking, switched Canton to Guangzhou, and replaced Mao Tse-tung with Mao Zedong...
...Kagan begins by observing, “The world has become normal again...
...Author...
...Scrapbook Ask What You Can Do for Your Old Boss When THE SCRAPBOOK has a serious question about history—the disconcerting facts, the complex background, the whole truth and nothing but—where else to turn but Parade magazine...
...But it should have taken them six minutes to do so, not six months...
...We were delighted when the post-Soviet Russians rescued St...
...I don’t care what kind of Communist you are,” replies the cop...
...Weighing in at 116 pages, elegantly written and powerfully argued, this is our kind of book: It can be consumed in one gulp—but it raises fundamental questions that stay with the reader long after the essay goes down the hatch...
...Acting on a complaint from a coworker of Sampson’s, “the Affirmative Action Office of Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis . . . ruled that my ‘repeatedly reading the book . . . constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers.’ . . . I knew that most of the faculty, staff and students at Indiana University were good people...
...Intolerance is unfortunately alive and well in Indiana...
...Forty-six years after Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday, Mr...
...The generals who misrule in Rangoon—or Yangon, as they insist on calling it— may impose misery on the Burmese population, but we shouldn’t allow them to dictate English spelling...
...But the $106,000-ayear affirmative-action officer who declared me guilty of ‘racial harassment’ never spoke to me or examined the book...
...As it happens, “JFK: The Inside Story” consisted of two brief questions, the second of which had nothing to do with JFK...
...He ends by asking, “The question is whether the world’s democracies will again rise to that challenge...
...They stole Klan robes and destroyed their crosses, driving the KKK out of town in a downpour...
...When the KKK tried to rally, the students confronted them...
...None of those is diminished in the slightest by the speculation about his personal life...
...the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan...
...We’re not sure why these other journalistic enterprises have made the choices they have, but we know why we don’t call it Myanmar: In our opinion, the two names constitute a linguistic distinction without a difference (we’ll spare you the details), but one is traditional and easily pronounced by English speakers and the other is not...
...His crime...
...Keith John Sampson, a 50-something janitor and student at Indiana University/Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI, or “ooey-pooey” as the locals say), writes in the New York Post of his nightmare when he ran afoul of IUPUI’s affirmative action enforcers...
...Indiana and the Klan As the old story goes, the police are rounding up Communist protesters in New York when a man who turned out to heckle the protesters gets caught up in the dragnet...
...it’s just that the color of the robes has changed from Klan white to academic black...
...You’re under arrest...
...Not so funny, though, if you’re the victim...
...Petersburg from Leningrad, and the Germans traded in Karl-Marx-Stadt for Chemnitz...
...In between is an enjoyable, thought-provoking, and question-stimulating essay on the world of the 21st century...
...Last week John F. Kennedy was on our mind, so imagine our good fortune when we opened Parade and found a Newsmakers interview—“JFK: The Inside Story”—with Kennedy’s onetime speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, who’s just published a memoir...
...There is one other compelling reason to resist: Readers of a certain age will recall those charming advertisements for a famous brand of shaving cream along America’s roadsides in the pre-Interstate era: Within this vale / of toil and sin / your head grows bald / but not your chin—Myanmar-Shave...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 34
