TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...Of course you can...

...People this close usually tend to agree on most matters, and we at the Monthly are no exception...

...If you lived through the fifties, as I did, one scene you'll never forget is the picture of those nine black students walking bravely through that angry mob in Little Rock to enter Central High School...

...The people who have worked for The Washington Monthly usually maintain strong friendships with one another through later life...

...At the very least I hope it influences the way the Israelis approach the Arabs...

...Denny Harrah was a six-time all-pro football player with the Los Angeles Rams...

...It seems that BMW has a 12-cylinder model that can do 155 mph...

...Today there are 500,000 in these grades with average salaries ranging from $31,000 for the Ils to $46,000 for the 13s...

...Do we really want people out there shooting guns when they don't know where they're shooting...

...But occasionally we do see things differently...

...Would it have been worth the lives it would have cost...

...He says that he saw many hovels but none that had to be entered on hands and knees...

...Responsible Senators simply can't believe George Bush selected Dan Quayle...

...Guess what he was talking about...

...George Bush, according to Ronald Reagan's speech to the Republican National Convention, had led a task force that "reduced by an estimated 600 million man years" the burden of paperwork imposed by the federal government on American citizens...

...Because we don't want to interfere with the right of rich tobacco company and newspaper owners to get richer by luring people into addiction with advertising that glamorizes smoking...

...That's arguable, but it does show that decent men, not obsessed with a monolithic view of communism and not dedicated to American imperial expansion could have had a point in assisting the South...

...The weakness of the Viet Cong at the end of the war (by the admission of North Vietnamese generals themselves, the Viet Cong played no significant role in the final victory) also suggests that the Viet Cong was not the overwhelmingly popular manifestation of the South Vietnamese sentiment that the left wanted to imagine it was...

...I hope their new game sweeps the world...

...This surely would have saved the lives of the great majority of those who died in the war...

...A few months ago Seth Mydans of The New York Times reported from Manila that the people who inhabit one of the city's leading slums, Leveriza, "live in tiny hovels that can only be entered on hands and knees...

...Recently that bond has been illustrated by the roster of contributors to the campaign of one of our alumni, Phillip Keisling, who is running for the legislature in Oregon...

...But I'm convinced that if we avoid the mistake we made with cigarettes and alcohol and don't permit drugs to be advertised, that if instead we make a major national effort to deglamorize them, legalization will stop the crime and corruption without increasing addiction...

...I hope so, because legalization remains the only answer to ending the terrible wave of crime and corruption that is drowning many cities and even entire nations...

...And with wise diplomacy that played on the natural hostility of the Chinese toward the Vietnamese, it might have produced a stalemate that would have allowed a noncommunist South Vietnam to continue to exist...

...This could have kept the supply of fuel from building up to the dangerous extent it had reached by this summer...

...Kaus wrote in a recent issue of Newsweek that in the late sixties and early seventies the young antiwar protestors, simply by opposing the war, had done the most effective thing they could do to save the poor blacks and whites who were doing the dying in Vietnam...

...That's why there may be some secret Republican ballots cast for Dukakis by those who know Dan Quayle the best...

...Can you believe that the Department of Transportation allows these vehicles on public roads...

...It might even decrease addiction by taking away the incentive for the pushers to get their customers hooked...

...At the height of the counterculture during the late sixties, the hippies came up with a game that delighted me...

...What the Park Service did was go from one extreme policy, noburn, to another, let-it-burn, without considering how the old policy could have created conditions that made strict adherence to the new policy very unwise...

...It includes: Timothy Noah, Emily and Jonathan Alter, Mickey Kaus, Jason DeParle, Michael Kinsley, Carol Trueblood, Jonathan Rowe, Deborah and James Fallows, and Beth and Charlie Peters...

...Canada has prohibited all forms of cigarette advertising and required that every cigarette pack contain a leaflet with a detailed warning of the dangers of smoking...

...They regard him as an immature lightweight who would rank among the worst presidents in American history...

...But again that great Republican faith in individualism triumphed to protect the liquor manufacturers' freedom to endanger all the people they want to...

...All the labels would have done was to warn pregnant women not to drink and to advise others that alcohol may increase the danger of hypertension and diseases of the liver and other organs...

...Perhaps the ABC special in September will revive interest...

...The "let it burn" policy of recent years is widely derided...

...One would think that their concern about the rights of the unborn would cause conservatives to worry just a little bit about what alcohol does to a baby in the womb...

...Take two recent disagreements of mine with two of my most respected former colleagues, Mickey Kaus and Taylor Branch...

...Eight went on to college, seven graduated, three got master's degrees, one a Ph.D...

...If you recall the film you will know that the similarity is more than physical...

...You might also be interested to know that the number of whitecollar civilian federal employees has increased by 102,000 under Reagan and Bush...

...A bill to permit the blind to hunt deer and other game...

...In fact, the paperwork burden—the time you take filling out tax returns and other government forms— under the Reagan administration has grown from 1.47 billion hours in 1980 to 1.88 billion last year...

...But as I contemplate the possible dialogue between hunter and lighter—"Point it this way, George...over to your right ...down a little bit...no, not that far...

...Both my father and mother were Democratic politicians, as was I when I was practicing law in West Virginia...

...The challenge to one's skill was still there— but instead of joy through beating the other guy, the pleasure came from cooperative effort...

...For this reason, I have learned to advise our Republican readers who have prudent regard for their blood pressure to skip this column during the months before an election...

...Perhaps Mr...

...Charles Peters...

...There were far more of them than the small gang of corrupt officials, Chinese merchants, and Catholic mandarins, whom the American left likes to imagine were the only opponents of the Viet Cong...

...It is also true that too many of the antiwar protestors chose to demonstrate with flag burning and similar Jerry Rubin-esque gestures that offended millions of moderates who might otherwise have joined the struggle against the war...

...You guessed it...

...If it doesn't work, we can make drugs illegal again...

...James Fallows's forthcoming book, from which his article, beginning on page 10 of this issue, is adapted, celebrates the flexibility that has been a unique strength of American life...

...And Corvette plans to offer its ZR-1 that will whoosh by you—pray that it's not into you—at 180...

...It's just good old Republicanism to let the rich individual do what he wants, regardless of the danger to the rest of us...

...an accountant, an economics teacher, a real estate broker,' and a vice president of Shearson Lehman Brothers...

...He now lives in my hometown, Charleston, West Virginia, where not long ago he volunteered to help coach a local high school football team...

...In 1980 there were 420,000 federal employees in the GS11-13 range, making salaries averaging from $23,000 for the lls to $33,000 for the 13s...

...Jason DeParle lived in Leveriza for several months before joining the staff of this magazine...

...Our error in Vietnam was not in wanting to help or in thinking help was needed but in the way we chose to give that help...

...This is why I think Branch and Sheehan—are much too niggardly in conceding the possibility of benign or rational motives on the part of at least some of those who wanted to help the South Vietnamese avoid communist rule...

...Yet it is the natural way and would make at least some sense were it not for the fact that the Park Service's previous no-burn policy—in force for half a century—had left so much "fuel" on the floor of the forest in the form of underbrush and dead, fallen trees and branches that the stage was set for a major conflagration, which this summer's dryness, high winds, and a few sparks combined to produce...

...Our bond, I suspect, is the affection and esteem that come from working hard together in what we believe is a good cause...

...Now I have learned that in recent years the Israelis have adapted the idea to a beach game, with a larger ball, paddles, and no net, but with the same object--cooperative effort to keep the ball in play...

...To the people who fear that legalization will lead to an increase in addiction, I say let's at least try it...

...As William Drake, the deputy director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, was preparing to testify before a congressional committee in support of such labels, he was overruled by the White House...

...The mass bombing of nonmilitary targets and the mass deployment of draftees resulted in countless unnecessary deaths...

...And Reagan has recommended that Congress increase those salaries by 4.1 percent in January...

...I think there was a point in trying to help the Vietnamese who did not want to live under communism...

...That wouldn't have been a bad result...

...These are but two recent examples of the way the credential rather than the ability to perform determines the opportunity for talented men and women to function in America today...

...That there were such people, and a lot of them, has been demonstrated by the tremendous number who have chosen to risk dangerous escape rather than to live under the communists...

...So even on my most benignly objective days, a nonpartisan approach to public affairs does not come naturally to me, Quadrennially, in the autumn, my condition worsens with an increasing tendency to find the evil in men's souls rooted in the policies and practices of the GOP...

...I hope that Fallows's book is as successful in awakening them to the problem and their responsibility for it as his National Defense was in the face of another great concern of the Monthly, the liberal elites' post-Vietnam indifference to military effectiveness...

...His review in this issue (page 39) strongly implies that there was nothing good about our effort in Vietnam...

...My son, Christian, has gone out to Oregon to work in Phil's campaign...

...If you are planning to travel in rural Wisconsin during the game season this fall, you may derive some comfort from the law's stipulation that the blind hunter must be accompanied by someone who can assist in sighting the weapon...

...It was, I realized, the way I had always most enjoyed tennis, diving back and forth across the court trying to keep the ball in play and finding the greatest delight in the points that took the longest...

...We probably should have done no more than give aid to the South Vietnamese...

...This ignores the fact that few in the antiwar movement pointed out the class distinction in who was doing the dying and that, if the upper classes had been drafted, their influential parents would have brought the war to an end fast...

...He was told that he couldn't coach because he wasn't "certified ." In Lexington, Kentucky, a Spanish teacher who was found not to have the proper credentials was fired even though, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader, "everybody agreed she was doing an above-average job" and her students "scored higher in almost every category" than students from other Spanish teachers' classes...

...The brief flurry of interest in the legalization of dope that occurred last spring seemed to have subsided, if not completely disappeared, during the summer...

...This flexibility is threatened by new barriers of class and credentialism that have grown up in this century and that have become especially costly to us, economically and spiritually, in the past 25 years or so...

...If you want to know how deglamorization would work, remember the antitobacco TV commercial in which a bunch of Marlboro-type cowhands burst through a saloon door, drew their six-shooters from their holsters, and suddenly doubled over in a spasm of coughing...

...This is a matter that has been a prime concern of this magazine from our earliest issues but that we have had only the most modest success in communicating to people who most need to understand it—the liberal intellectual elite...

...My expression of concern about the Mercedes that can hit 120 miles per hour prompted our readers to tell me, as they so often do in other respects as well, that I don't know the half of it...

...After the disastrous fires in Yellowstone, most people seem to want a return to the old Park Service policy of putting out forest fires as quickly as possible...

...I wonder if the whites in that mob did half as well...

...Mydans relied on A.M...

...Rosenthal once wrote, "There's not much to see in Leveriza...

...the senator asked...

...Rosenthal as his guide on how to report on the Manila slum...

...The sad fact is that this accumulation of fuel could have been prevented if the Park Service had followed a policy of "controlled" or "prescribed" burning, which is recommended by many naturalists and practiced by many private ranchers and timber growers in the West...

...His logic, although compelling to me, failed to persuade his colleagues, and the bill passed...

...Sometimes readers send me clippings that are not identified as to source or author...

...It was called zen pong, which was ping pong in which the object was not to win but to keep the ball going, back and forth, as long as possible...

...You may be interested to learn, as I was through an article in a new magazine called American Visions, what has happened to them since...

...My disagreement with Branch is more one of emphasis...

...Why don't we do the same...

...If any military action made sense, it would have consisted of no more than a blockade of the North (which was highly effective when we finally used it in 1972, at a cost, by the way, of zero lives) and the kind of guerrilla-antiguerrilla campaign that John Paul Vann spent most of his time advocating...

...Fifteen minutes, half an hour, is more than enough time to look around and escape...

...Today, they are variously an editor of a computer magazine, a social worker, a farmer, an assistant dean at UCLA, a talk show host...

...One that I wish I could credit is from a columnist, probably in California, who points out that the movie actor whom Dan Quayle resembles is not Robert Redford, but Robert (Bobby) Morse, the star of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying...

...Well, I guess Rover was getting pretty old anyway"—I think I'll go to Minnesota instead...

...The Reagan administration has once more failed to support warning labels on alcoholic beverages...