POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES City Slickers. William E. Geist. Times Books, $19.95. With his "About New York" column, William Geist had the best beat at The New York Times. While other correspondents...
...She also contends that social currents reflected and shaped standards of family behavior by creating narrowed emphases for agency workers, sometimes to the detriment of the very families they were trying to aid...
...Americans tend to think that domestic violence is an isolated, recent horror...
...Adding to the shock over the Steinberg case was the fact that the family was part of New York's upper middle-class, a segment of society believed to be civilized and kind...
...She shows how the four types of crimes are often linked and simultaneous, particularly wife-beating and incest...
...There he bides his time and as usual comes up with some killer quotes: the wife whose husband has "personal comfort down to a science" notes, "I honestly don't think running would be good for Ralph...
...He gave Chicago the treatment in Towards a Safe and Sane Halloween written while he was covering the suburbs for the Chicago Tribune...
...It has lost something rarely seen—or perhaps, rarely encouraged—on its fact-filled, reporter-driven pages: a gifted stylist...
...How certain must verification be...
...She argues that agency procedures often forced victims back into their situations...
...Geist understands New Yorkers, especially their pride in presenting the outrageous as commonplace...
...When we are able to assess threats to our civil liberties as clear-headedly as Forer wants us to discuss solutions, we will be getting somewhere...
...Not everyone will agree with all of the solutions proposed...
...How does he do it...
...Wife-beating sends `messages' to all who know about it or suspect it: it encourages timidity, fatalism, manipulativeness in women...
...My name is Sharon," she replied) Sure, Geist has his occasional conventional story, like the interview with Donald Trump, but those are the dues a reporter pays to sit in with the real powers that be—like the hat check man at Carnegie Hall...
...He recognizes their need to make the commonplace seem extraordinary, like the story on the Emergency Expresso Squad...
...These include apologies, retractions, disclaimers, labeling, and even courtesy...
...Oxford University Press, $24.95...
...Everywhere thinskinned, humorless, avaricious people are suing...
...Time is short—a matter of months in an election year—and if liberals blow the opportunity offered by conservative dissension, they could be in for another long wait...
...The United States teeters on the brink of becoming "an enormous silent gulag patrolled not by government agents but by private persons...
...As a description of a country where judges have long made a fetish of protecting freedom of speech and where an unprecedented amount and variety of information is available to all, it is balderdash...
...The world portrayed by Judge Forer will be familiar to the reporters, authors, professors, and lawyers who make up the free speech lobby...
...Following World War 11, fascination with the science of psychiatry often resulted in workers making diagnoses that dismissed women in abusive relationships as masochistic or the stories of incest victims as fantasies growing from their neuroses...
...Even its best efforts have led only to a hopeless profusion of arcane legal distinctions that produce uncertainty and invite the kind of litigation that chills speech...
...It was a real train wreck and jolly good fun for conservatives...
...In fact, battering, child neglect, abuse, and incest (the four types of domestic violence as defined by Gordon) are ancient problems, and the United States began actively trying to control them 100 years ago...
...Some are aimed at encouraging private methods of prevention or correction...
...Geist's best columns are collected here, in City Slickers...
...According to Forer, we live in a world where private censors relentlessly cut off access to ideas...
...Norton, $18.95...
...Consumers boycott products advertised on controversial TV shows...
...For instance, around the turn of the century, when feminists decried "drunkenness" and believed that brutality was inherent in men, social workers, who then were mostly affluent do-gooders, focused on the father or husband, often naively blaming everything on the influence of liquor...
...She would, in effect, deromanticize libel law, substituting precise statutory definitions for confused judicial doctrine...
...Why should anyone give two hoots about Americans for Democratic Action...
...There are also tidbits about the evolution of well-known phrases, such as "dirty old man," which referred to a sexual assailant, often a shop keeper, who would bribe his poorer employees with candy...
...she becomes that because of her socially determined inability to resist or escape: her lack of economic independence, law enforcement services, and, quite likely, self-confidence...
...More broadly, this book—as the subtitle indicates—provides an instructive look into the postwar crisis of American liberalism...
...How much is "taken as a whole...
...Gordon doesn't just recount poignant family histories...
...The most distressing aspect of her story, of course, is that home is not the proverbial calm harbor...
...Nevertheless, by proposing that these problems be resolved tentatively through the political process, the book takes a large step in the right direction...
...By 1968, Humphrey had become a pariah within ADA due to a firestorm over the morality of Lyndon Johnson's war policies...
...The challenge of communism has been a common denominator in the current fratricide on the right and in the birth of ADA out of a postwar liberal schism over the Soviet Union and its domestic symoat hizers...
...Robert Nagel...
...Because these afficionados find it congenial to think that the First Amendment is under ferocious attack by the forces of darkness, they may even find her description believable...
...Hubert Humphrey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, Joseph Rauh, Walter Reuther, and, yes, Ronald Reagan all helped give substance to ADA when the organization was important enough to be denounced with passion by the likes of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon...
...Forer suggests, for instance, that defamation be defined as "a statement that taken as a whole makes a verifiably false charge that the subject committed a specific criminal or other degrading act ." Lawyers can find much to litigate about here...
...Geist can find the silliness in his subjects yet portray them sympathetically, and he can do so in a way that says much about class and culture in New York...
...When asked to write a column on the New York marathon, Geist abandoned the pack of reporters interviewing racers and t-shirt vendors...
...Instead, she proposes a new federal statute incorporating a host of specific, commonsensical solutions...
...or Bob Redman, another of the city's outsiders who has lived most of his life in treehouses constructed in Central Park, and who finally gets the job of his life, pruning trees for the Department of Conservation...
...But read the book anyway...
...The consensus, which was shattered by a generational struggle, was probably inevitable but it happened to collide with the civil rights movement and Vietnam...
...Citizens pressure schools about book selection...
...troduction and Geist's swipes al Abe Rosenthal) has forced Geist to leave the paper for on-camera feature pieces and commentaries on CBS...
...Of spouse abuse, Gordon writes: "One assault does not make a battered woman...
...Her narrative is scholarly, thick with professional research, and not for those uninformed about the basics of family violence...
...Wife-beating arose not just from subordination but also from contesting it...
...It's a loss for all of us, and especially for the Times...
...Gordon is a professor of history at the University of WisconsinMadison...
...She believes that family violence is a social problem: "Its causes and solutions have been beyond the means of individuals alone...
...On the other hand, she does think that the role of the Supreme Court should be greatly restricted...
...From its inception through the early 1960s, ADA helped keep those forces in harness and exerted a political influence out of all proportion to its puny membership roll...
...There's a gentle humor here...
...His victims were not tempting or even pubescent...
...And it's about time, too: we fans have gotten pretty sick of having his clipped columns littering our desks, memo boards, and refrigerators, not to mention the mounting costs of sending his columns to friends...
...people die running and dogs bite them ." And Bernie Berger, a La-Z-Boy enthusiast says, "When I get the urge...
...Last November, the country was shocked to learn of the death of seven-yearold Lisa Steinberg in New York City—police evidence indicated that her death resulted from beatings by one or both of her adoptive parents...
...Judith Newman Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947 - 1985...
...What is a "degrading act...
...Instead, he headed to the La-Z-Boy Showcase Shoppe in Queens to discuss the race with people who have a different angle on running—horizontal...
...Because incest victims were subjected to pelvic examinations to prove their allegations and were often taken from their families and placed in foster care situations, many preferred to remain silent...
...It is, however, fascinating reading for historians of social work and feminism and for those interested in patterns of socialization...
...And he recognizes, too, that New York is often a world of little triumphs in the face of overwhelming difficulty: Mr...
...Perhaps the most important message in Gordon's book is that family violence cannot be dismissed as one family's sickness: it is, instead, she says, a result of "normal patterns of parental and male domination reflected in a distorting mirror...
...Even her general strategy of reducing timidity by reducing uncertainty is in many respects doubtful...
...Finlay Lewis Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880-1960...
...It's hard to think of a reporter as gracious a3 William Geist...
...Lois Forer...
...Their average age was 10 years old...
...It's not...
...While other correspondents attended City Hall briefings or followed the rise and fall of the dollar, Geist exposed puppy playgroup sessions, zoomed through Manhattan traffic with a Kamikaze messenger, and eavesdropped on pickup lines at the city's hottest spa, The Vertical Club...
...Preachers sue over cartoon parodies in raunchy magazines...
...Forer's approach is unusual in that she does not distrust juries or the general public, and she does not propose excluding them from free speech issues...
...As such, her book is excellent cautionary reading for policymakers entrusted with making the American home safe...
...Predictability and speed having been restored to the judicial process, authors would have less to fear and more to write...
...Gordon also believes part of the reason many women and children stayed in abusive homes was a lack of adequate support programs for single, working mothers...
...Television is not Geist's canvas—the pieces are by necessity too collaborative, and Geist's unique voice, generosity, and oddball humor don't come through...
...Perhaps, for example, a variety of solutions might be more practical than a single national statute (which Judge Forer would justify—good grief!— as a regulation of interstate commerce...
...Generals sue over criticisms of their leadership during wars...
...For American liberals there remains, as Gillon observes, the unresolved conflict over the politics of vision, animated by a commitment to a just society and a desire to propose politically workable solutions...
...Disappointed professors sue over their colleagues' assessment of their scholarship...
...Gordon traces the history of family violence and society's response to it through case studies taken by Boston's child protection agencies from 1880 to 1960...
...In fact, one could plausibly argue that the tensions—at first creative and later destructive—that defined the fate of liberal aspirations are generic to American political movements and therefore equally important in understanding events on the conservative side of the ideological aisle...
...Gloves, an off-beat philanthropist who gives away thousands of gloves a year to the cold and homeless on the Bowery...
...This, Judge Forer adds, "is not an imaginary fancy...
...Although Gillon does not carry his argument to this point, liberals may have the next laugh—not the last if one believes in political cycles and alternating periods of right-left ascendancy...
...That would be a pity because Steven Gillon has produced a solid, unpretentious account of ADA's first 40 years that has significance beyond the organization...
...The ferment on the left provided fertile soil for the flowering of American conservatism...
...Damages would be limited to actual harms and would be recoverable without regard to the writer's state of mind...
...If current relevancy is the test, the book is going to be a very tough sell indeed...
...Recovery would generally be easier but would be permitted for a more limited range of statements...
...I climb into one of these chairs until it passes...
...Others are aimed at bringing the law of libel and privacy more into line with other areas of law, like trade disparagement, that are less glorified but seem to work better...
...Like one of his subjects, the man who gets paid to stand on lines, Bill Geist is a man of infinite patience...
...Thus, the dead bodies on a New York City public golf course elicit this offhand comment from the grounds supervisor: "I try not to be the first one on the course in the morning...
...But, alas, a brouhaha at the Times (don't skip the book's in...
...Somehow, Judge Forer, starting from a grossly distorted description, ends up with a sensible prescription...
...Geist rivals Calvin Trillin for the crown of journalism's premiere humorist...
...Gordon's book shows how cultural attitudes, "everyday structures of society," and governmental policies can inflame "human foibles...
...Faced with the task of balancing principle and power, Gillon writes, "Liberals must confront the travail of redefinition...
...Battered behavior is also socially determined by a husband's expectations of what a woman should do for him and his acculturation to violence...
...Viking, $24.95...
...Yogurt is mucus-forming," he said softly...
...Laura Elliot A Chilling Effect...
...Off we go again...
...Steven M. Gillon...
...Linda Gordon...
...The particular struggle that haunted ADA from its earliest moments was between forces that wanted to create an American version of the Fabian Society as a politically unadulterated, visionary keeper-of-the-faith and pragmatists who sought to preserve ADA's influence through accommodation with the centers of real political power...
...Thus, when Howard Phillips christened Ronald Reagan a "useful idiot" for communist propaganda, it surely signalled the breakup of the marriage of conservative pragmatists and right-wing zealots over fundamental issues of political morality and survival in the post-Reagan years...
...ADA became the vehicle for liberals pledged to a continuation of the New Deal at home and antagonism to Stalinist expansionism abroad...
Vol. 20 • February 1988 • No. 1
