POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES With All Disrespect: More Uncivil Liberties. Calvin Trillin. Ticknor & Fields, $14.95. Columns are the awkward invention of editors with infinite faith in the...
...Interspersed are boilerplate quotes from AT&T chieftan Charles Brown, presented in a style that can charitably be described as fawning...
...Second, has anyone else gotten skeptical of authors who claim to have started their books with one bias and in the course of their research become converted to the opposite one...
...Sometimes it is in delicious description, such as that of Rich Creep, the Manhattan megadeal cutter, who "eats breakfast at the Regency, where deals are made so quickly that a careless conglomerateur could find himself swallowing up a middle-sized corporation while under the impression that he was just mopping up his egg yolk with the end of a croissant...
...Nicholas Lemann Disconnecting Parties: Managing the Bell System Break-Up...
...Or he may simply lack personal experience with those patients affected by deinstitutionalization...
...In this book of columns, Trillin does not begin with a premise and then beat it to death...
...Perhaps Brown assumed his stance of sociological detachment in an attempt to produce a "respectable" academic tone...
...Trillin leaves the reader in exceptionally good humor...
...D'Souza has good fun quoting Respectables being horrified about Falwell, but that's the result of a game that Falwell plays to the hilt—he likes to provoke, and he says equally silly things about his critics...
...But Brown has not provided the impetus for policy changes...
...Columns are the awkward invention of editors with infinite faith in the compressibility of thought and utter contempt for the patience of readers...
...Gordon Rayfield...
...They didn't pretend they knew Kierkegaard ." Falwell's and D'Souza's constant defense of the Moral Majority's excesses is, essentially, so's-your-old-man-ism...
...Recruit top former policymakers from abroad, says Ledeen...
...Ledeen gets it wrong because he lacks the courage of his convictions...
...of how he watched the 1963 March on Washington on TV in a Louisiana jail...
...The author, a leading French sociologist, has produced a profound analysis of what ails us...
...And he gratuitously puts words into the mouths of the famous and the fantastic, crediting Charles deGaulle, for example, with the thought that something was "uncool ." Unlike most columnists, Trillin feels no compulsion to prove he is wiser or more in the know than anyone else...
...Ledeen insists that such a design exists, even when he timidly offers the heresy that Cuba acted in Africa not as Moscow's proxy but in spite of Soviet misgivings...
...Apparently, according to this account by W. Brooke Tunstall, an AT&T vice president and top-ranking participant in divestiture planning, whose "inside view" is as fresh and frank as a court stenographer's...
...They are too short for any significant complexity and apparently too long for the concepts the typical columnist wishes to convey...
...How many writers can attack their editors in print for paying them in the "high two figures" or ruminate on how someone named Hamilton Fish III ("with two last names and a number") can get to be publisher of a left-wing magazine...
...He attributes this to the unpredictability of American and Soviet foreign policy...
...American incoherence, he argues, results from nothing more than a loss of "credibility," a hoary idea that prolonged the agony in Vietnam...
...Okay, Bailey Smith said God does not hear the prayers of the Jew—well, William Sloane Coffin visited the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...Which is one reason to read this book...
...It can, and does, offer policymakers new alternatives and choices...
...What nagged at me, reading the book, was the fear that no human anecdotes were being related because in truth none had occurred...
...An Inside View...
...For all his own confusion, Ledeen occasionally offers glimpses of his imagination, as in a fanciful proposal that the White House contract out for foreign policy advice...
...He consistently retreats from the implications of his analysis to the safety of neoconservative nostrums...
...All that exists is occupying the proper chair at the proper meetings properly convened in accordance with the officially sanctioned "managerial process" If that's the way it really is at AT&T, it's the best argument I've heard for breaking the company up...
...And another is that the laughter doesn't die...
...Sam Smith Falwell—Before the Millenium: A Critical Biography...
...Thus it is easier to identify with him...
...In some cases you can't even be certain what the premise of the column was...
...D'Souza is right that Falwell and his colleagues on the religious right have changed the terms on which American politics is conducted...
...No matter...
...James Farmer...
...Dinesh D'Souza...
...This unpredictability results, in turn, from the internal incoherence of both superpowers...
...Calvin Trillin, bless him, rises above the limitations of the genre because he is, among other things, an epigrammatist of the first order...
...Historically, when great powers clash over fundamental ideals and interests, they go to war...
...Yet it is curiously desiccated— blood and flesh are subs sumed by bar graphs and statistics...
...Andrew Young would not be mayor of Atlanta, nor Harold Washington mayor of Chicago, if people such as James Farmer had not gone before them, leading the way...
...Or his dissection of the Mid-Life Crisis: "When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him ." And Trillin can ask the tough questions: "If law school is hard to get through . . . how come there are so many lawyers...
...He is to this day a marvelous storyteller, with a double bass voice, a laugh that fills rooms, and a natural sense of drama...
...He would say he's made a great personal sacrifice for the cause, but it's clear that the real reason is that he adores the limelight...
...Charles Peters Another War/Another Peace...
...He repeatedly calls up images in his mind and gets the wrong number, as when he recounts a series of socially relevant seders, including one at a radical feminist collective "where they refused to recognize the killing of the Egyptians' first-born sons as a curse...
...limstall manages to make the boss sound like a block of balsa wood...
...James Farmer was one of the most remarkable of the many remarkable men and women who led the civil rights movement during the 1960s...
...Tunstall always refers to him as "Chairman Brown ." Those who have heard Brown testify before Congress come away impressed with a witty and multi-dimensional personality...
...Joan Peters begins her eloquent defense of Israel by claiming she was initially pro-Palestinian...
...It is a measure of how far we have come that these stories seem like dispatches from another country...
...Deinstitutionalization has been one of the most profound shifts in public policy since World War II, yet has attracted surprisingly little serious analysis, even as hallucinating former state hospital patients crowd our sidewalks and parks...
...The official answer— religion and morality—is partly right, but from reading between the lines it's obvious that class has a lot to do with it, too...
...Univ...
...By the way, can we nip a couple of annoying buds here...
...I'll be a Freedom Rider, till I'm dead and gone...
...Robert Caro tells interviewers that he wanted his brilliant, devastating biography of Lyndon Johnson to be a puff piece...
...Arbor House, $16.95...
...Phil Brown has made the first full-dress attempt to analyze the mass exodus of chronic mental patients from state mental hospitals to "community settings," a euphemism for nursing homes, board-and-care facilities, single-room occupancy hotels, and, frequently, public shelters and the streets...
...He bemoans "the disproportionate influence of lawyers and legal experts in every sphere of activity...
...Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement...
...Several years ago, he writes, he met a young black student at a California college who couldn't quite place the name Martin Luther King...
...Falwell has a huge self-interest in portraying a few nutty liberals as a vast, serried army, just as the left has an interest in making the Moral Majoritarian impulse seem Hitlerian...
...McGraw-Hill, $17.95...
...without clear signals from Moscow or Washington, other capitals cannot be sure of how far to press their own policies...
...Trillin writes this sort of thing in The Nation, and it must be said in defense of any would-be challengers that not many writers work for publications that allow their columnists to describe their journal as pinko and the sort of magazine where "if you make a photocopy of your piece, the copy is a lot better than the original...
...Gregg Easterbrook The Trouble with America...
...At one point his daughter says, "I thought newspaper editors were supposed to be skeptical, Daddy...
...He helped organize the famous Freedom Rides, which integrated intercity bus lines in the South...
...While Ledeen correctly diagnoses the symptom of the growing impact of lesser powers on global politics, he misses the true nature of the disease...
...He does not wear you down with a laundry list of one-liners...
...He uses the column more as a comfortable environment for his journalistic haiku...
...Nuclear deterrence and mutual prudence have prevented a war between the U.S...
...A typical passage: "They [TV evangelists] might be wealthy, but they were frank about it...
...They often consist of a one-paragraph idea being force-marched through 600 words...
...Oxford University Press, $17.95...
...Still, it's nice to find a writer who can calm down about Falwell enough to be able to tell the story of his life...
...The social bond," he writes, "that once enabled people to make constructive compromises as well as to accept the sacrifices needed in the long run, is coming undone?' He says that the army of today is "no longer the army of Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, but an army of callous bureaucrats...
...The really important sentences are in italics to make sure you don't miss them...
...Could the largest bureaucratic reorganization of all time have transpired without generating a single amusing or even interesting anecdote...
...He tells of integrating Chicago coffee houses in the 1940s with Ghandian nonviolence...
...John Lewis, a black Freedom Rider who is now an Atlanta city councilman, remembers Farmer singing this song in a Jackson, Mississippi jail at night: "Which side are you on, boy, which side are on...
...For example: "Technological advance cannot dictate industrial policy...
...In one of the more unlikely political appointments of recent times, he served briefly as an assistant secretary of HEW under President Richard Nixon...
...But this, contrary to Ledeen's assertion, makes both superpowers more, not less, predictable and gives other countries room to maneuver and ways to exploit the competition to their own advantage...
...Certainly D'Souza has lots of company here, but "the media has" and "the media is" are wrong...
...Fuller Torrey Grave New World...
...W. Brooke Tunstall...
...see if Helmut Schmidt of Germany or Adolfo Suarez of Spain would like to sign on as freelance consultants...
...It makes great sound bites for the evening news...
...Michael Ledeen is a foreign policy analyst with impeccable conservative credentials: senior fellow at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies, former editor of The Washington Quarterly, former consultant to Alexander Haig and Richard Perle...
...Peter Grier The Transfer of Care: Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization and Its Aftermath...
...Phil Brown...
...They didn't drink gin and tonics like the liberal clergymen...
...Such glimmers of iconoclastic thinking suggest that Ledeen might have written a far more provocative book...
...And though he constantly complains about being "misunderstood," it's a fate he has tempted by being outrageous in public...
...This sort of license clearly frees the spirit...
...As a resource book on deinstitutionalization, this is the best we have...
...It should be noted that Trillin is far from the Neo-Carson school of social and political satire...
...Another is that you will laugh a lot...
...His description of Ronald Reagan at a news conference is complete and correct: "He sucks up some facts from the briefing books like a giant turkey baster and then squeezes them out over the Washington press corps...
...Michael Ledeen...
...They didn't wear tweed coats...
...His humor constantly changes form...
...A six-foot, broad-shouldered pacifist, Farmer helped pioneer the use of sit-ins to fight segregation in public places...
...Of course, the final joke is that Trillin is wiser and more in the know than many columnists...
...Routledge and Kegan Paul, $22...
...of the fear he felt rolling towards Mississippi on the Freedom Ride...
...In any case, the book lacks a sense of immediacy...
...Deinstitutionalization is so public a policy and so prominently a failure," in the words of the author, that this should be an important book...
...At least they built prayer towers and cathedrals...
...What's the deep lode in American life that Falwell has tapped...
...Otherwise, his observations are useful more as an example of how the fundamentalists think than as an explanation...
...Don't take the "critical" in the title too seriously...
...this is a view of Falwell pretty much as he must see himself...
...Few writers can say so much in so little space...
...domestic politics and the growing power of the media make it impossible for our leaders to design or conduct effective foreign policy, while Soviet leaders are forced by their continuing domestic failures to prove the virtue of communism (and their own rule) through foreign triumphs...
...D'Souza insists he at first had "problems" with Falwell but given that D'Souza has long written for conservative publications and that his publisher is the country's most venerable conservative house, I don't know if I buy it...
...Why are we conditioned to admire a changing of the mind and to mistrust long-held conviction...
...He explains how the protection given workers by union contracts can have "perverse effects," which often include putting the rights of the senior members above the interests of the young and the unemployed and the long-range interests of the company and the country...
...As the author notes, the "sheer numbers are shocking: close to one million mentally disabled persons live in nursing and boarding' homes," compared to only one-seventh that number remaining in the state hospitals...
...In considerable part, his diagnosis is neoliberal...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...Ronald Glasser...
...The anarchy of world politics grows out of superpower stalemate, not unpredictability...
...On the evidence of this confused book, he has lost his faith in the gospel according to Commentary but isn't ready to face the world without the ideology on which he has built his career...
...The notion of Soviet incoherence is incompatible with the neoconservative belief in a grand Kremlin design for world domination...
...A haunting, heartbreaking story about the war in Vietnam, this is Glasser's best book since 365 Days, which was excerpted in these pages under the title "The Burn Ward" in April 1971...
...It turns out that Falwell is a first-generation fundamentalist but a second-generation entrepreneur, whose gifts and ambitions as a builder are enormous...
...The book contains all the data, to be sure, and it is reasonably well written...
...Resentment of the big-city swells who run everything shines through on every page...
...Regnery Gateway, $14.95...
...First, the word "media" is the plural of medium and so agrees with the plural forms of verbs...
...Though he's no doubt sincere, whatever holiness there is in him seems dwarfed by his drive...
...Summit, $14.95...
...Tunstall gives us page after page of acronyms, committee meeting dates, depth charts, and corporate managers' names, but not the slightest sense that human beings played any role in the process, let alone that there were moments of confusion or introspection...
...Trillin will have given you something worth holding on to...
...In the organization lbnstall describes, emotions, jealousies, hopes, and dreams not only play no role, they don't exist...
...Only of people who are not invited to the same dinner parties," Trillin replies, using 12 words to say what other critics of the press have written books about...
...Given that Tunstall has a self-serving purpose—to praise by inference his own performance during the event—perhaps it should come as no surprise that Disconnecting Parties is so bland and scrupulously free of insight...
...In Lay Bare the Heart, his memoirs, Farmer has set down his best stories on paper...
...Michel Crozier...
...of California Press, $16.95...
...Yet Farmer fears that the lessons of the struggle for civil rights are already being forgotten...
...Ledeen describes a world growing dangerous because increasingly aggressive smaller countries are raising the risk of accidental superpower confrontation...
Vol. 17 • May 1985 • No. 4
