Correspondence
Correspondence Elitism and Campaign Reform Your editorial resignation toward our electoral system reveals a disturbing elitism behind your populism ("Campaign Reform: Leave Bad Enough Alone," Nov....
...Joseph P. Cincotta Brookfield, WI Rehabilitating Communism The hope of John Haynes and Harvey Klehr ("Messages from Moscow: What the Secret Cables Say," Nov...
...In fact, these hardline socialists are peddling a "new" line, neatly summed up by Theodore Draper in a recent New York Review of Books essay titled, "Communist History as Soap Opera...
...Joy Anthony Newport Beach, CA TyrannyoftheMajority In response to Richard Parker's avowedly populist attack on those who oppose a flag-desecration amendment ("Old Glories in Tandem: Flag and Constitution," Nov...
...20) but sidesteps the question of the legal prohibition of economic discrimination against gays in employment and housing...
...Bob Steward Harrison, MI Color Blindness Backfires My contempt for Columbia and other OPUs (overpriced, private universities) notwithstanding, when George Jochnowitz claims that the open admissions policy of the City University of New York (CUNY) is color blind ("More Tests, Nicer Campus," Nov...
...This form of discrimination has been the main target of gay and straight liberal activism since Stonewall, and has been implemented by the addition of "sexual orientation" in the non-discrimination statutes of nine states and over a hundred municipalities...
...in this case, Protestant English-Americans...
...a corrupt criminal justice system that made the world unsafe for young talent...
...Open admissions was devised in the 1960s as a color-coded plan to admit less qualified blacks and Puerto Ricans to City College...
...Robert Berman Far Rockaway, NY Economics and the Gay Agenda Hadley Arkes provides a welcome summary of the implication of Romer v. Evans ("The Gay Agenda Advances," Nov...
...20) is a disgrace...
...Surely you are aware that the notoriety you are providing the killer is exactly what he sought...
...The use of WASP is always evidence that the user harbors the sentiment that Christianity is a gutter religion...
...The achievement of economic non-discrimination would do well to mark the end of "gay politics...
...Perhaps the most brutal though least obvious were: strong unions that limited competition...
...13) that the anti-anti-Communists and the socialist intellectuals are going to admit their scholarly sins is, of course, ironic...
...But to reduce that idea to one of a nation defined by "popular sovereignty based on political equality," and then to strip that equality of all content save the single right to vote, as Parker does in principle, is to gravely misstate the substance of our aspirations...
...20) in an otherwise unexceptional article by John Podhoretz about Woody Allen...
...This is no more unnecessary or complex than the inclusion of religion or gender in such statutes...
...As a result of such social progress, CUNY (specifically, LaGuardia Community College and City College) has already had its share of Sharod Baker-type incidents, years ahead of Columbia...
...Robert Lyon Philadelphia, PA WASPs as the Other Iwas stunned to read the demeaning word WASP ("Mighty Pretentious," Nov...
...an enticing welfare state that destroyed initiative...
...30) is one of the most provocative pieces I have ever read on that topic...
...All but ignoring the problem of majoritarian tyranny-which he reduces to repeated sneers about "governing elites"- Parker elevates "popular sovereignty" to the bedrock principle of our political order...
...The name of the assassin should not be mentioned in the same breath with that of Yitzhak Rabin, a man of character and accomplishment, attributes that the extremist traitor who wickedly and wantonly snuffed out his life will never know...
...His first job was as the seeing-eye boy for a street singer, Blind Sol...
...As time went on, a CUNY degree became worthless, and the city's school system was destroyed by illiterate black and Hispanic school teachers with CUNY degrees...
...Conservatives who believe in the potential of the people to vote smartly betray their beliefs by throwing in the towel on money in politics...
...Why not clean up a few other inconveniences while we're at it...
...13), I have to wonder whether elves drugged him 30 years ago, and he just woke up...
...And so, in a conscious plan to reduce the percentage of white (Jewish) students, and score points with poverty pimps, they gutted it...
...That's it...
...The United Nations is certainly a poor means of keeping the peace anywhere...
...If the Supreme Court stands athwart "our" effort to protect the flag, let's just exercise "our" constitutional sovereignty and explicitly protect it...
...The radicals, many of them Jews, were particularly distressed that so many gifted, working-class Jews were climbing the social ladder through City College...
...Roger Pilon Washington, DC Keep theTroops at Home Regarding Robert Kagan's article "America, Bosnia, Europe: A Compelling Interest" (Nov...
...Political decision-making shifted via campaign finance to quarterly-report-driven oligopolists is inconsistent with a constitutionally based vision of our republic...
...Bar owners let him practice whenever business was slow...
...But as Arkes points out, such activism should not serve as a springboard to the transformation of American social and sexual mores...
...If Irving Berlin had been a child today, he would have faced at least three enemies: cutthroat gangs, dumb and dumber school officials, and bumbling bureaucrat-salesmen from the welfare state...
...But why stop with the flag...
...In all likelihood, our troops, were they to engage in the Bosnian conflict, would soon be greeted with "Yankee Go Home" rhetoric...
...May the Lord forbid that we send in troops to peoples in other lands and put them under the umbrella of the U.N...
...It is incomprehensible that any responsible publication would choose to glorify a cowardly, two-bit thug whose act of slaughtering in cold blood one of our most courageous heroes will forever change the course of history and the rest of the world...
...Skeptics will note the circularity-and will note too that if the bonds endure only as long as their symbol endures, by force of law, they cannot be very strong...
...It could be implemented today without federal laws if citizens simply refused to vote for candidates who accepted (willingly or otherwise) money or other assistance from interests outside of their districts...
...A single play does not have the power to kill an entire art form...
...Haynes and Klehr know that the academic apologists for the American Communist Party are still around, arguing that the members were just idealists who wanted to build a better, and socialist, world...
...Well-to-do radicals who sent their children to private schools declared that City College's success in building itself up into the finest undergraduate institution in America, and perhaps the world, was racist, because there were too many white faces on hand...
...and a public school monopoly that killed the artistic if not the technical spirit...
...6) it would appear to me that our troops have no more business in Bosnia than we had in Somalia...
...Arnold Beichman Palo Alto, CA Israel After Rabin Your cover ("Israel After Amir," Nov...
...By not titling the article "Israel After Rabin," you attempt to minimize Rabin's accomplishments and diminish his stature...
...Fearing race riots, CUNY's board of trustees accelerated the plan's implementation from 1975 to 1970, after small groups of black and Puerto Rican students took over some City College buildings in 1968...
...There is, Draper wrote, "clearly an attempt to rehabilitate communism by making it part of the larger family of socialism and democracy...
...However, Company is more of a symptom than a cause of Broadway's decline...
...Oren M. Spiegler Pittsburgh, PA Killing Broadway Slowly John Podhoretz's article "The Brilliant Show That Killed Broadway" (Oct...
...Eventually it was extended to CUNY's other four-year schools...
...I am a veteran of the Korean War and a flag-waving conservative, but I join with those who protest the folly of the political wars where literally thousands of American boys shed their blood...
...Broadway died the death of a thousand cuts...
...a non-market health-care system that tolerated AIDS epidemics...
...The reason, it seems, is that the flag is unique, "a unique symbol of the bonds that make wide-open debate possible...
...No one would think of doing this favor for fascism, but communism with even more millions of victims and a much longer life span is the beneficiary of this sustained effort of historical rehabilitation in-of all places-American colleges and universities...
...I recognize that there are righteous wars in our sinful world, but it is not always clear who is right...
...Bo Sears San Jose, CA John Podhoretz responds : Oh, please...
...Take-no-prisoners capitalism may be great in proper measure, but it does a crummy job of picking political leaders...
...Limiting campaign influence to those who can actually vote for a candidate is a solution that is both powerful and intuitive...
...for some foreign general to command...
...We are not, after all, an unbridled majoritarian democracy...
...Search the essay as you will, that's the closest you will get to an argument...
...WASP is evidence that the user has strong, biased, negative feelings about the Other...
...Anti-Christian bigotry comes in many packages, but the most recognizable package of all is WASP a term coined explicitly to disparage Christian Americans...
...13), it is doubtless true that the flag symbolizes, among other things, our "aspirational bonds as a people...
...Irving Berlin left home at the age of eight, in hopes of easing a widow's burdens...
...Before the age of nine, Berlin taught himself the piano...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 12
