The Upside of the Cultural Revolution
Scrapbook The Upside of the Cultural Revolution As readers may have noticed, THE SCRAPBOOK generally refrains from tales of academic horror—not because we’re not concerned, but because...
...Ice, Ice, Baby Of the many benefits to living in a warmer world (a longer planting season, lower heating bills, fewer polar bears), the opportunity to cruise the icefree Arctic in the summer months may be the most tantalizing...
...Hagen who composed the diabolically memorable title tunes for The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gomer Pyle USMC, That Girl, I Spy, The Mod Squad, and his unquestioned masterpiece, The Andy Griffith Show...
...That also seems to be what the brave souls aboard the “massive Russian icebreaker” Kapitan Khlebnikov were thinking when they set sail last week to see the fruits of global warming for themselves...
...It was Mr...
...Scrapbook The Upside of the Cultural Revolution As readers may have noticed, THE SCRAPBOOK generally refrains from tales of academic horror—not because we’re not concerned, but because there are so many of them...
...Hagen labored in a certain anonymity, enjoying considerable professional success while remaining almost wholly unknown to the public at large...
...Describe the course in Transgendered Semiotics at Ivy U one week, and we’d be tempted to reprint the syllabus for Post-Christian Eco-Hermeneutics at Valley State in the following issue—and there wouldn’t be much room for anything else...
...The Whistler THE SCRAPBOOK notes with regret the death last week of 88-year-old Earle Hagen, the title of whose 2000 autobiography (Memoirs of a Famous Composer—Nobody Ever Heard Of ) summarized his career with economy and precision...
...Their journey turned out to be more Endurance than Love Boat...
...Only time and tide can free us...
...Guess we’ll have to suffer through another summer, hoping Al Gore’s prophecy will come true and the Arctic will finally assume its rightful place among America’s favorite summer playgrounds...
...In Earle Hagen’s case, can there have been any greater reward than furnishing the sound track for Rob Petrie tripping over the ottoman, or Sergeant Carter berating Gomer Pyle...
...In a long, successful, and rewarding life in music, Mr...
...To which THE SCRAPBOOK can only shake its head in wonderment...
...The national parks have become so crowded with bitter gun-clingers, and the Caribbean was too hot and humid in summer even before President Clinton (and Vice President Gore) failed Gaia by refusing to submit the Kyoto treaty for ratification...
...Hagen composed innumerable pieces, including the jazz classic “Harlem Nocturne,” but his greatest gift to posterity, in THE SCRAPBOOK’s considered opinion, was the abundance and quality of the television theme songs he wrote and, in one immortal instance, performed...
...So THE SCRAPBOOK now looks north, where one day soon we will be able to cruise the deep blue waters of the Bering Sea, enjoy the sunny port of Nunavut on Resolute Bay, and perhaps don our finest cruise wear at the balmy resorts of the Arctic...
...Let it be recorded here that the whistler who carries the melody while Andy and Opie are seen walking down toward the Mayberry fishin’ hole is Earle Hagen himself...
...It is time that we recognize the positive lessons of Chinese revolution, particularly the Cultural Revolution...
...In this respect he bears some resemblance to the great Vic Mizzy, whose theme songs for Green Acres and The Addams Family will live as long as Americans pay for cable and watch reruns...
...Today more and more Chinese working-class people look back at the Cultural Revolution years with fond memories...
...As one of the passengers reported in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, What irony...
...Since China abandoned socialism, it has been faced with the spread of drug abuse and prostitution, worsening environmental degradation, official corruption and other crimes...
...But not Professor Dongping Han of Warren Wilson College—whose unique perspective on the North Korean miracle, or paradise Mugabe-style we can’t wait to read...
...Like the unheralded Madison Avenue geniuses who wrote the advertising jingles the whole world sings—“Plop Plop Fizz Fizz / Oh what a relief it is,” “By the hour by the day / By the week or any way / Just let Hertz put you / In the driver’s seat today,” “Winston tastes good / Like a (clap clap) cigarette should”—Mr...
...I am a passenger on one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world, travelling through the Northwest Passage—which is supposed to become almost ice-free in a time of global warming, the next shipping route across the top of the world—and here we are, stuck in the ice, engines shut down, bridge deserted...
...Sentences We Didn’t Finish ‘So I prefer, as Barthes once said in a lecture, to entrust myself to the banality within me, and thereby be restored to the sort of reflection that does not await the evening news to . . .” —Leon Wieseltier, ‘New Republic...
...But every rule in journalism needs to be broken now and then, and so we offer one morsel that grabbed us by the lapels in last week’s New York Times Book Review...
...To be sure, Warren Wilson is a self-consciously left-wing institution which requires its students to perform community service and indentured labor on campus in order to graduate, and the Sierra Club magazine has hailed it as one of America’s “10 Coolest Schools” in the struggle against global warming...
...It seems that the NYTBR had run a review which had some uncomplimentary things to say about the Cultural Revolution in China—you know, that decade-long orgy of revolutionary violence (initiated by Chairman Mao) in which thousands of uniformed Red Guards, waving their pocket-sized editions of the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, were unleashed to humiliate, beat, torture, and send into internal exile tens of millions of innocent victims (and kill an estimated 4 million) with the wrong ancestry or links outside China, or who harbored “bourgeois” thoughts about literature or liked the wrong kind of food, music, or haircut...
...All of which prompted Professor Dongping Han, who teaches history and political science at Warren Wilson College in western North Carolina, to write to the Times in indignation...
...Despite some shortcomings of the Cultural Revolution, China was a socialist society that was overcoming inequality with full employment, free medical care and free education for its citizens...
...It was during the Cultural Revolution that China’s schools and universities were shut for nearly a decade, millions of city dwellers were forced into slave labor in the countryside, and historic art and architecture were destroyed in every province in huge quantities...
...But imagine, for a moment, a professor of history and political science who extols the achievements of Stalin’s Russia (industrialization, the Moscow subway, acquisition of the eastern half of Poland) or Hitler’s Germany (national unity, the Autobahns, acquisition of the western half of Poland) while dismissing the Holocaust or the death by starvation of millions of Russians or the Nuremberg Laws or the Moscow Trials or the Second World War as “shortcomings...
...It was a country that had largely eradicated deeply rooted problems of homelessness, prostitution, bandits and drug abuse...
...He or she would probably think twice before publishing such opinions in the New York Times Book Review...
...And so a three-hour tour became seven days adrift in the pack ice, with no entertainment but booze and happily marauding polar bears...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 37
