Scrapbook
Scrapbook Hate Speech in California Amid all the Republican gloom and doom, there's one development from California that's causing GOP spirits to brighten. On February 21, supporters of the...
...The rally was billed as a free concert, with bands performing all day, but apart from the bongo drums, stony silence reigned...
...But things aren't going all that well for them...
...But give McGovern credit: He has handed some revisionists a new myth they can try to peddle for the next couple of decades...
...But it may be a sign of Dole's troubles that the same number of people who thought of him as a "leader" and a "good man" also thought of the word "pineapple" when they were asked about him...
...There's a movie that hypnotizes everyone who watches it, and an addict who goes into drug treatment...
...He has no ethnic pride...
...Partly because of the political disaster they see coming in November due to CCRI, and partly because an attack on racial preferences is so deeply threatening to the Democratic party's coalition in general, leading California Democrats have already begun an extraordinary campaign of vituperation against CCRI's supporters...
...McGovern Revises Revisionist historians usually wait more than 25 years before coming up with radical new theories to explain old events...
...Hemp Speech, Too With all the hoopla in California about CCRI, other initiatives are getting precious little press...
...Two that deserve more attention concern the legalization of marijuana...
...Actually, it's transliterated Swahili...
...One allows for medical use with a doctor's prescription...
...The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil...
...the other essentially opens the doors for free toking...
...The reason...
...McGovern conveniently forgot to mention some of his less popular positions, ranging from his isolationism ("Come home, America" was the refrain from his convention speech) to his support for decriminalizing marijuana use...
...Why, The Reading List doesn't know, since the List has figured out the truth about Joyce's final work: It only looks like it's in English...
...Several months ago, Willie Brown (then the speaker of the state assembly, now mayor of San Francisco) encouraged his followers to make life personally miserable for the two academics who authored the initiative...
...The book runs more than 1,000 pages and is virtually impossible to decipher-it seems to be about a school in Massachusetts filled with tennis players who do a lot of drugs...
...The top four for Dole were only a little bit better: "old," "conservative," "too old," and "good...
...The Reading List usually hates this kind of Pynchonesque overwriting, but Wallace is an undeniably brilliant writer-so brilliant that it is difficult to put the thing down, even though holding it up in bed is enough to cause wrist dislocation...
...George McGovern, the Democratic party's candidate for president in 1972, has jumped the gun by a few years...
...The answers are, at the very least, illuminating...
...Among them: The failure of the AFL-CIO to endorse him "made it virtually impossible for me to mobilize organized labor," and he wasn't able to deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention "until after 2 a.m., long past the bedtime of all but a tiny portion of the voters...
...In a February 26 letter to the Wall Street Journal, he cited six reasons he lost 49 states to Richard Nixon, all of which he says "had little to do with ideology...
...But Infinite Jest does bring to mind some great, brilliant, immensely long novels that only a maniac (or a reviewer) can actually finish: Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Alfred D?blin...
...President Clinton has made much of denouncing hate speech...
...Now, if you drug-war hawks out there are worried that one of these might pass, rest easy: The potheads have been trying to get both on the ballot since 1970 with no success...
...Now, Democratic state senator Diane Watson of Los Angeles has attacked Ward Connerly, the distinguished businessman who chairs the initiative campaign, for being married to a white woman: "He's married to a white woman...
...He wants a colorless society...
...Dole Pineapple, Wishy-Washy Clinton The Washington-based Pew Research Center recently asked 750 people for one-word descriptions of Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Pat Buchanan...
...This year, though, after a medical-use bill passed the state legislature twice, only to be vetoed both times by Gov...
...California is a must-win state for Bill Clinton, and he will probably be in the position of opposing the widely popular initiative...
...Tied for fifth were "honest" (no kidding) and "wishy-washy...
...People have been arguing about it for years...
...The Reading List The Reading List has a headache this week, because for almost a month now it has been attempting to plough through the Big Novel of 1996, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest...
...He doesn't want to be black...
...Only it isn't Massachusetts, because Massachusetts has been taken over by Quebec...
...On February 21, supporters of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which would eliminate race and gender preferences in state programs, submitted over a million petition signatures...
...An international conference, a lot of people, some amazing satirical set pieces, but incomprehensible...
...And who could blame him...
...One of the organizers admitted that the sound equipment had never arrived, probably because the guy who was supposed to bring it in his van stopped en route, got stoned, and fell asleep...
...Pete Wilson, they really think they have a chance...
...Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce...
...Nor should it be forgotten that his party had adopted a platform that was pro-busing and that called for amnesty for draft dodgers, ending capital punishment, and forbidding the sale of handguns...
...That was more than enough to qualify for the November ballot...
...This is a dopey way to run a campaign, fellas...
...The four words most frequently used to describe Clinton were "good," "trying," "okay," and "fair...
...What does he-and for that matter, what do California senators Feinstein and Boxer, or White House chief of staff and former California congressman Leon Panetta-think of this hateful statement by a fellow Democrat...
...The elaborate, Joycean account of an ex-con making his way through late-1920s Berlin, made into an unwatchable 13-hour movie by the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died soon after...
...Much discussed last year because of a new edition, this unfinished 2,000-page novel about-well, it's a little hard to say what it's about, exactly...
...More reports as The Reading List nears the conclusion...
...At a recent rally in Los Angeles-on the grounds of the Federal Building, ironically, which is required by law to allow non-profit groups to assemble there-fewer than 100 people showed up and hardly anyone stayed for long...
...For Buchanan, "extreme," "radical," "conservative," and "ultra-conservative" rounded out the top four, with "racist," "scary," "jerk," "crazy," "nuts," "dangerous," and "frightening" also placing in the top 20...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 25
