Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. James Fallows On the Law of Nations. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Harvard University Press, $22.50. The swift and...
...She plans to go to college, and she has a specific career objective: to be a environmental biologist...
...One strong theme in Russia’s contradictory view of America is that the two national cultures really have a tremendous amount in common...
...For example, women are much more likely than men to leave their jobs so that their spouses can pursue the best career path...
...Woe to those who possess the “wrong” set...
...At the same time, the end of the Cold War is cause for some jitters too...
...The bedrock principle of international law is that any government that controls territory and abides by its international obligations qualifies as sovereign and is immune to intervention in its internal affairs...
...Never having attended Ivy League law schools, the leaders of the new democracies believe that laws democratically enacted, rooted in principle, and faithfully executed can indeed make their societies, if not perfect, at least safer-you guessed it-for democracy...
...Thus, the “cultural model of romantic relationships set[s] men up as the judges of women’s claims to prestige in the peer system...
...Classical liberalism, the revolutionary ideology of the 18th century, has triumphed and is now firmly embedded in the economic and political logic of the world (thanks, in some measure, to the often-ridiculed efforts of Woodrow Wilson, the hero of Moynihan’s argument...
...But for some women their initial escape is illusory...
...Ripp says that he has been continually lectured about America’s refusal to appreciate Soviet sacrifices in World War 11...
...For example, had we played by the rules, Moynihan argues, and held off on the Iranian-hostage rescue mission until the International Court of Justice ruled in our favor on the hostage taking, which it did a month later, we would have been entitled to go to war with Iran...
...Why are women, but not men, being proselytized to reap the rewards of parenting rather than those of a career...
...Gender relations are largely determined by what the authors deem the “cultural model of romance...
...As Ripp points out, the subject of this description was none other than the original Henry Ford-“American to the bone, almost primordially native in occupation and in appearance...
...What happened to Jane...
...But hold on a second...
...The double standard is still influencing these women’s lives...
...Understandably, most find themselves discussing alterations to existing structures-take in NATO a few inches here, let out the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe a bit on the inseam...
...It’s an odd perspective, and like creatures in fairy tales we seem distanced and vivid at the same time...
...While conflicts in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere were agonizing for those who endured them, they were held in check by the superpowers, who didn’t let them threaten the ruin of civilization...
...when push comes to shove, a man’s career is usually more important than a woman’s...
...Amen...
...The truth of these assertions aside-and most rang more or less true-the querulous tone was remarkable...
...James Fenimore Cooper is revered in Russia for expressing “authentic” American values...
...Certainly, as the authors document, there are women who avoid the worst of the psychological and emotional traps set by the culture of romance, do well in college, and begin professional careers...
...International law is not a scheme for surrender,” he writes, but “a framework for deciding how and when to use force...
...Paraphrasing Chesterton, Moynihan might say, international law has never really failed, because it’s never really been tried...
...In this culture, attractive women are treated well by men, and this good treatment is the measure of status and esteem...
...But he says that most Russians also feel that their values and sensitivities are deeper, more refined, more serious than their cowboy image of American life...
...Holland and Eisenhart's "anthropological and sociological analyses" of college women in the eighties provide at least a part of the answer: life at college centers on gender relations among peers...
...But perhaps law can take the place of one of the Cold War’s more reassuring aspects, what Caddis calls “the paradox of order in the absence of hierarchy...
...Yehudah Mirsky Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture...
...John Lewis Caddis has ruefully suggested that future generations may refer to the past 45 years not as “The Cold War” but “The Long Peace...
...And then there’s the whole issue of parenting, the “Mommy-track,” the trials a woman faces in balancing family and career...
...America’s failure to reciprocate the respect, attention, and sense of comradeship is the Russians’ fundamental grievance...
...An inordinately large percentage of these (70 percent in Holland and Eisenhart’s study) who began college with varied interests and ambitions will be forced to neglect their academic potential and abandon their career goals, caught in the snares of the “culture of romance” of their peers...
...Dorothy C. Holland, Margaret A. Eisenhart...
...In this light, the recent invasion of Panama, the Reagan Doctrine’s last hurrah, was in violation of international law, odiou though Noriega was...
...But “women’s prestige and correlated attractiveness come only from the attention they receive from men...
...There are successful, powerful, wealthy career women who feel worthless because they lack a man to “treat them well...
...Since attractiveness to men provides the rewards, being attractive, rather than having good grades or, ultimately, a career, becomes first priority for too many college women...
...As a matter of fact, he looks very much like a sharp-nosed Russian peasant, a self-made inventor who suddenly shaved off his beard and put on an English suit of clothes...
...The film director Sergei Eisenstein was boggled by the skyscrapers of New York...
...Jane Doe is a bright high school senior with a record of strong academic performance...
...Though most Russians rarely see an American, and never talk to one, they have managed to devise a balance sheet of our flaws and virtues...
...The UN, he maintains, was in violation of international law then, most of its members pledging their troth, out of convenience, ideology, or both, to a totalitarian empire that had little use for law, international or otherwise...
...You bet...
...And those who escape...
...Even now, Ripp says, Russians see American quality and American technology as symbols of the best that can be done...
...This in turn makes it meaningful to talk about transnational law in a way not seen since the Christian empires of the premodem world...
...James Fallows On the Law of Nations...
...Of course, it would be much easier on women if the responsibility for parenting were shared equally by mother and father...
...The author is a professor of Russian literature whose parents came from Russia and who has returned there himself many times before and during the Gorbachev era...
...A team of writers, reporting on a coasttocoast drive across the United States, excitedly told their readers about a man they had met in Dearbom, Michigan: “His eyes are set close together, the prickly eyes of a peasant...
...It suggested a boxer who won’t stop throwing punches long after the final bell has sounded, the fans departed, and the stadium locked shut...
...The nadir of UN lawlessness, in Moynihan's view, was its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism...
...This short, wry book is delightfully written and revealing about both the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Is this the same Daniel Patrick Moynihan who spent his memorable tenure as United Nations ambassador denouncing the institution as a pack of scoundrels...
...A recurring theme in the democratic revolutions of 1989 was an urgent call for the rule of law...
...Men are judged by one set of values, women by another...
...What would a renewed American commitment to international law an in practice...
...Because of a culture that esteems one set of virtues in women, another in men...
...Simon and Schuster, $18.95...
...Leave it to the senior senator from New York, whose career has been one long and exhilarating assault on conventional wisdom, to bring order to the chaos with an old but still provocative idea: let there be law...
...Four years later, she graduates from college with a degree in biology, marries a fellow biology student, and within a year is working as a part-time secretary...
...Although the corollary is also true-that is, attractive men achieve some status through receiving good treatment from women-men also achieve status and prestige from success in sports, school politics, and other arenas...
...Ripp says that to some extent Russia is the same: “Always lagging in material goods, almost always a bit backward culturally, Russia has a longstanding inferiority complex...
...Russia has made special room in its heart for the few Americans who have paid the country proper respect-John Reed, Van Clibum, the inescapable Armand Hammer...
...government to seek an opinion from the International Court of Justice on Lithuania's right to self-determination...
...Moynihan is a little short on specifics, but for starters, it would mean considering international law a prime factor in foreign policy decisions and accepting the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and other institutions-something we simply refused to do when the court declared our mining of Nicaragua's harbors illegal...
...In this richly textured, idiosyncratically written (no ghostwriters here), but compelling book, Senator Moynihan argues that international law, often regarded as our century’s answer to alchemy, is in fact a powerful tool for stability and justice, notwithstanding the many perversions and humiliations it has suffered over the years...
...Nonetheless, the study provides scientific evidence (limited though it is-focusing on 23 women in two colleges, both in the South) of the underlying phenomenon: the double standard is alive and well and flourishing on college campuses...
...The United States,” Moynihan writes, “has every right to try to bring about regimes it approves, especially in places we consider important...
...So why do women accept more than their share of responsibility-and guilt-for child rearing...
...But there are rules.’’ Why abide by these hamstringing rules...
...For 200 years, he says, Russians have been far more interested in figuring out the American character than Americans have been in understanding Russians...
...Nervous though the world has been for the past 45 years, it has been stable...
...The swift and merciful end of the Cold War has left many policymakers and intellectuals asking, like Robert Redford’s dumbfounded, victorious candidate, “What the hell do we do now...
...Moynihan concludes, "These most extraordinary events of the year-of the century-argue that the United States, which inspired so many of them, might well pause to consider that this inspiration was authentic, a legacy not to be frittered away by forgetfulness of our own past, or by frustration with the behavior of others...
...Later in the book, he traces some of our more notable foreign policy debacles, specifically the hostage crisis and Iran-contra, to our unwillingness to take advantage of, or heed, the dictates of international law...
...Without driving the point into the ground, he suggests that this attitude may reveal how backward Russia really is...
...Practicing what he preaches, Moynihan introduced a resolution in the Senate last April urging the U.S...
...Let us not take false comfort from the large numbers of young women enrolling in college (6.9 million in 1988, or 54 percent of all students...
...Because, proponents of international law argue, it is in our long-term interest for there to be some kind of international order based on respect for borders and even some basic human rights...
...and therefore the victims of its uninformed whims...
...This conclusion is neither startling nor novel...
...In his rococo early chapters, he recounts America’s sometime commitment to international law through Wilson, FDR, and the early days of the Cold War...
...Marian K. Riedy Pizza in Pushkin’s Square...
...Anastas Mikoyan once filed a detailed, envy-filled report on American burger-frying techniques...
...University of Chicago Press, $19.95...
...On others the lingering effects of the culture of romance are more subtle...
...A Pravda correspondent visited Cooper’s grave in Cooperstown and was heartbroken to see Americans flooding into the Baseball Hall of Fame, totally ignoring his beloved Cooper...
...Victor Ripp...
...They are especially annoyed when America, or the real Americans they now encounter in greater numbers, fail to conform to Soviet expectations...
...Similar complaints-“the Americans don’t care as much about us as we do about them”-are usually heard in the Philippines, Mexico, or other countries that see themselves as distinctly weaker than the U.S...
...Ripp says that under Gorbachev Russians at last are able to admit something they’ve obviously believed for many years: that Americans can somehow do things that are simply beyond Russia’s organizational grasp...
Vol. 22 • September 1990 • No. 8
