Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Imposters in the Temple. Martin Anderson. Simon & Schuster; $22. In one of the many tales of academic foolishness chronicled in this exasperated book, Martin Anderson...
...Rice very cheap,” he tells her to explain his remarkable frugality...
...Eek...
...who drops out of school and joins a gang...
...In his acknowledgements, Olasky cites the Heritage Foundation (for providing financial support and a “stimulating research and writing environment”), Milton Friedman, and God, “who had compassion on me almost two decades ago and pushed me from darkness into light...
...It is a place that immigrants come to because it welcomes them...
...So few whites hang around Chinatown that any who do are assumed to be there on police or government business, and people shut off automatically at the sight of a white person-particularly one asking questions,” she writes...
...Nevertheless, Anderson claims to be fighting politicization, which he says (quoting fellow traveler Harvey Mansfield) “comes from the Left...
...Meanwhile, “they marry, they have children, they grow old-and yet they are still students...
...The exploitation of graduate students in American universities is the mental equivalent of the old sweatshops...
...Did anyone really believe that the convenience of today’s credit cards and universal ATM machines would come at no price...
...He picks his example shrewdly -we are obviously supposed to equate this kind of direct marketing with racism-but a check-cashing joint in a poor neighborhood does no less to rob from the already disadvantaged...
...Taking your business to another government isn’t, after all, an option...
...He dons two dirty sweaters, removes his wedding ring, puts dirt on his hands, and walks “with the slow shuffle that characterizes the 40-year-old white homeless male...
...Rothfeder’s worries on this front seem entirely justified, as the feds have resources, powers, and channels of inlbrmation that are not open to private groups...
...This is no longer the grim enclave of bachelors who dug their heels into lower Manhattan because they were prevented from assimilating...
...Jeffrey Rothfeder...
...Chinatown’s got gangsters, hit men, and heroin traffickers...
...The term “compassion’’like “democracy” and “fatfree”is gradually losing its meaning through overuse...
...Working for a Korean grocer and living in a crowded, filthy hovel with nine men, he had already saved $70,000 toward a business-but had never visited Central Park-when Kinkead met him...
...Third, we should do everything we can to shorten the time needed to get the degree and to free up the student’s time...
...Politicians invoke it...
...Yes, computers have been eroding much of the privacy we used to take for granted...
...But rather than regarding this transformation as a ground-level fact that establishes the parameters of any proposal for reform, Anderson sees it as a wrong turn taken by history...
...The word ‘compassion,’ which once had the power to compel action, is now merely a rhetorical device trotted out regularly by Republicans as well as Democrats,” Olasky writes in his introduction...
...In a chapter entitled “Children Teaching Children,” Anderson mounts a persuasive critique of the use of teaching assistants at the majority of our campuses...
...Struggling immigrants making good...
...Just Ibecause Oral Roberts sends you a sympathetic note about the hard time you’re having paying off your credit card bills doesn’t mean he’s been discussing your troubles with God...
...And we’re going to start worrying now...
...Kinkead is a gregarious guide who can mix it up with the locals enough (thanks to her translator) to give her readers a glimpse of this forbidden city and its “invisible people...
...In perhaps the book’s most charming section, Kinkead pays a boisterous visit to an elite group of Chinese chefs who share secrets about preparing satay, whole fish, bear paw, and armadillo while gambling and downing beers like the Romans at Saturnalia...
...This is Huxley turned on his head, a sort of Brave Old World, where a few shining principles reign insulated from the challenge of dissident ‘hew comers...
...To the rapidly growing community of Chinese immigrants and their children throughout the metropolitan area, Chinatown is more than just a place to eat, shop, find work, or bunk down on the cheap...
...Simon & Schuster, $22...
...The] average graduate student is 34 years old before he or she breaks free of the cocoon of dependency that is the Ph.D...
...Imposters offers little by way of original research...
...Is it right to force them to take bad risks...
...End of analysis...
...Charles Peters Privacy For Sale: How Computerization Has Made Everyone’s Private Life an Open Secret...
...Kinkead already knew this...
...There is a less tangible point to be made here as well...
...Regnery Gateway, $21.95...
...Elliott Beard The Tragedy of American Compassion...
...The thesis of this wide-ranging-if somewhat paranoid-survey is that our country needs new laws to protect its citizens’ privacy against the now-overwhelming powers of computers and other technology...
...Small, inner-city grocery stores that charge more than suburban supermarkets are no friends to the poor either...
...As everyone knows, the Review has a political agenda, which it does not hide...
...In one of the many tales of academic foolishness chronicled in this exasperated book, Martin Anderson rails about the praise showered by Stanford University leaders on a deceased scholar alleged to have molested the son of one of his students...
...Olasky cites them in neither the text nor the footnotes...
...Describing a breakfast at a Congregational church, he writes, a sweet young volunteer kept putting food down in front of me and asking if I wanted more...
...There are also admirably detailed discussions of Chinatown’s family associations and its criminal syndicates, or tongs, which now rank just below La Cosa Nostra on the Justice Department’s list of organized crime groups...
...As much as I enjoyed the vignettes, the book would have benefited from providing a stronger sense of Chinatown’s impact on the larger Chinese-American community and its place in New York immigrant history Seclusion within a protective ghetto is hardly unique to the Chinese, yet Kinkead never clearly makes that point...
...This makes solving the problems themselves wiser than trying to legislate them back to the precomputer age...
...and when he does cite a source it is often some third-hand report of a story in The Wall Street Journal...
...Anderson is by no means unaware of the larger changes that have produced our current situation...
...Direct marketers can come up with some pretty .venal uses for that information, and that’s where this book comes in handy-after reading it, you’ll know to look out for phone calls or letters from people who seem to know things about you that only a reputable firm or your bank might know...
...To his credit, he goes beyond the usual complaint against turning over students to other students and details the effect of the practice on those who become its conscripted laborers...
...The preface is by conservative scholar Charles Murray, who made a name for himself by attacking welfare mothers...
...For Olasky, the sweet young volunteer embodks the false sense of compassion permeating modem America...
...Consumer databases made from checkout scanner records are up for sale to, as he puts it, “any customer-a catalogue company, a telemarketer, a fringe political group...
...And if you, sensibly, have a hard time trusting the legitimate institutions that make those records, you should really be worried about the marketing agents and con artists who can access those same private files...
...That is the double-edged nature of immigrant communities: What makes them seem closed to outsiders is also what makes them nurturing to those within...
...Yet what’s missing in this book is a sense of balance...
...In 1698, we learn, Cotton Mather warned his congregation, “Instead of exhorting you to augment your charity, I will rather utter an exhortation . . . that you may not abuse your charity by misapplying it...
...Computer records-medical, credit, bank, tax, what have you- have proliferated in scope and accessibility...
...He really loses me when he goes on to complain that these same poor residents will never have the chance to be offered a “preapproved” credit card, as if it were somehow a good idea to give credit to people who could easily use it to ruin their lives with debt they can never pay off...
...every economics treatise should be more like the ones he writes...
...But to suggest that they are put off by the presence of white people is a stretch...
...The issue of privacy looks as though it’s going to be a big one in the next few years, and justifiably so...
...It was only after the Immigration Act of 1965 that the gender gap closed, families multiplied, and significant numbers of Chinese began moving beyond Chinatown’s protective borders...
...who has no skills and hence can find no work...
...The fact that companies can make a profit selling each other this kind of information leaves me nonplussed-in fact, I kind of like the idea of throwing them into turmoil by buying Mr...
...Thus, every diffident shopkeeper and suspicious waiter fits into her larger concept of Chinatown as a clausti-ophobic, jail-like place from which the immigrants would flee if only they had the chance...
...That act, and subsequent laws that existed until World War 11, prevented most Chinese from bringing their wives and children to America...
...Though Chinatown remains the economic engine for working-class Chinese, its growing service sector is likely to delermine the community’s future...
...These are people who deal daly with the outside world, namely Wall Street and City Hall, and who know something about the American system and how to use it...
...It’s an innovative idea, and Olasky’s swipe at both political parties promises a clear-eyed, even-handed approach...
...Her verbal images help drive home her point: Recent immigrants are “prisoners of Chinatown” who are “isolated” and “feel trapped...
...Unfortunately, part of the story gets left in the quicksand...
...Social problems...
...In today’s America, though, the distinction is completely meaningless...
...This is true not only of the material conditions cf the educational experience, but of its intellectual content...
...He strongly suggests obtaining a copy of your credit report often and checking for errors and anomalies...
...Both presidents and their doctors seem to have a gift for deceiving either themselvesas FDR and Dr...
...The source of this quote is a single 1970 article in the Newark Star Ledger-a slender reed indeed on which to support so sweeping an analysis...
...Nothing about the realm of the university, it seems, is as simple as Anderson would have it...
...And her discussion of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act-the only law in U.S...
...This is a critical point, underlying Olasky’s contention that it was a change in values, not socioeconomic conditions, that fueled the rise in welfarism in the sixties...
...Credit bureaus, insurance companies, and government agencies are more capable than ever of keeping and retrieving information about you...
...In the final chapter, Rothfeder offers a short but thoughtful list of actions you can take to keep technology at bay...
...Second, we have to stop this business of professors using students to conduct their research...
...Surveying the current scene, Olasky finds fault with the soup kitchens and shelters set up to help today’s poor...
...Rothfeder says little to persuade me that this is an especially egregious case...
...Olasky would place him squarely in the latter category and, consequently, deny him food and shelter-everything, in fact, but a Bible...
...The governing boards of universities should adopt policies that strictly forbid political bias in either teaching or faculty hiring...
...Michael Massing...
...Instead, we should push for health insurance reform-or better yet, national health care-not computer legislation...
...Like many of his fellow neocons, his chief stock in trade is nojtalgia...
...He makes few points that have not been made by others...
...But above all, Imposters is a paean to Anderson’s memory of happier days, a repository of his cherished opinions, and an occasion for him to settle old scores, most of them with Stanford University...
...True, there are a few more items on Anderson’s list (“universities should expand their loan programs”), but all they do is restate the problem, prefacing it with an urg1:nt imperative (“we have to”) without ever giving us a hint as to how that imperative might be accomplished...
...It seems like a sure winner...
...It is a community where people meet up wi1.h friends, nourish their cultural needls, and refuel in a familiar ambience...
...Noting, for example, that the nation’s welfare caseload more than doubled between 1965 and 1974, Olasky refers to “studies” showing that “the size of the pool of eligible people did not change much during those years...
...And all that information can have its positive uses: In one of the stories Rothfeder recounts, an abusive, alimony-skipping, drug-addicted Satan worshipper is tracked down and brought to justice by a private detective armed with only a PC and a modem...
...history to have excluded an entire people based on their nationalitythat helped to create and shape Chinatowns nationwide is thin...
...Chinese immigrants can be tough interviews...
...Marvin Olasky...
...The eighties are scorned for lacking it...
...This book has infuriated many Asian-American writers who see it as one more act of cultural imperialism by a white author who has painted lovely details only to produce a flawed canvas...
...process...
...where Straussian political scientists join with free-market economists and classics professors to keep the academy safe...
...Because Kinkead’s purpose is to define Chinatown as singularly apart and insula...
...This book couldn’t be timelier considering the nagging concerns about George Bush’s health-see Who’s Who-and the revelation that even the righteous, Paul Tsongas had an undisclosed recurrence scare after he had said his cancer had disappeared...
...Rothfeder wants us to write tough federal laws that will block untoward perusal of medical records...
...But I do think that Kinkead is missing something: namely, that Chinatown is a far more open and cosmopolitan place than it has ever been...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Imposters in the Temple...
...An act of will is all that Anderson has to recommend...
...Perhaps driven by his failure, she leaps with admirable courage into a much changed Chinatown and manages to emerge with some sharply observed and even revelatory anecdotes...
...Pibb instead ‘of Pepsi...
...Perhaps-but health insurance companies, insidious as they are, will find other ways to get at the information...
...Rothfeder discusses the fact that, because medical records are not federally protected, rapacious insurance companies, using computers to access medical files or pharmacy records, can find out about applicants’ preexisting medical conditions with much more ease than ever before...
...Such conclusions only highlight the shallowness of Olasky’s analysis...
...While Wilson, Cleveland, Harding, and Reagan (or their physicians) emerge as deceivers, the shocker of this book is that Eisenhower’s medical team, which had heretofore been thought to be honest almost to the point of excess, with its daily reports of the general’s bowel movements, was also guilty of concealing important medical information from the public...
...During his two days on the street, Olasky receives plenty of food and clothing...
...Her father, a New Yorker writer himself, tried to report on Chinatown in the thirties and was thwarted by a wall of silence...
...This is, after all, a neighborhood that endures thousands of tourists tromping through its streets and gawking in its windows each year-the overwhelming majority of them white...
...In its own way, The Tragedy of American Conzpassion is an illuminating book...
...Anyone curious about these “studies,” though, will come away frustrated...
...This is the rallying cry-back to the future-of every professional who finds that the assumptions and methods that presided over his education are being challenged by another generation...
...Fundraising letters appeal to our sense of it...
...Lin, a civil engineer in China who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and came to America on a tourist visa in 1986...
...To a publisher hungry for that quintessential New York story, a proposal about Chinatown must seem like a fat pitch...
...His diatribe is supposedly aimed at the “intellectual elite”-well in advance of Dan Quayle’s revival of Spiro Agnew’s rhetoric-but it proposes a rather facile solution to academia’s current woes...
...That’s what Ronald Reagan did to the American economy, and enough’s enough...
...Kinkead is a sensitive and observant chronicler, and the book is valuable to anyone who wonders about Chinatown...
...By the 19th century, however, relief groups tried to do “too much too fast” and did not “sufficiently discriminate between the needy and the lazy...
...The things that would fix it are simple: ]First, we have to stop this business of students teaching students...
...Its chief novelty is that it attacks the discipline of economics rather than literary studies, although Anderson does take a couple of potshots at deconstruction (with some of my own work getting caught in the crossfire...
...Seeking to recover that meaning, Marvin Olasky, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas, traces our changing understanding of the concept from colonial days...
...Anderson has every right to be an ideologue, but he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with disclaiming ideology at the very moment he is practicing it...
...Stanley Fish Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society...
...In Olasky’s view, the reprobates, like alcoholics arid drug addicts, should be made to tak:e spiritual nourishment before being offered the physical kind...
...The image of a small, quiet, rarified institution where he was one of the select few being taught-he pays rhapsodic tribute to his days at Ilartmouth in the fiftiesis so much before his eyes that the only thing he sees about anything else is how far ,it falls short of what he remembers...
...They get into the quicksand and they disappear...
...The differences matter and are worth arguing about, but what will be at stake in the argument is the question of which political agenda is to prevail...
...James Dao Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust...
...It was a period, Olasky writes, when young men came to feel that “shining shoes was demeaning” and that accepting government subsidy was a way to keep one’s “dignity...
...The inner-city resident who is beaten as a child and left unattended as a teenager...
...Predictably, Olasky traces the change to the Great Society years, when “it became better to accept welfare than to take in laundry...
...No telemarketers in business today carry guns and badges, and you don’t file your tax returns with them...
...That’s it...
...At its best, the book reads like a travelogue...
...who lives in a garbage-strewn, ratinfested, violence-swept neighborhood...
...The question is an important one that’s not really asked in this book, and many of the privacy issues with which Rothfeder concerns himself have long existed-they’ve only been exacerbated by machines...
...Much of what he has to tell is frightening indeed...
...Urban dwellers suffer fatigue from it...
...A bag?’ When I responded, “A Bible,” she said, politely but firmly, “I’m sorry, we don’t have any Bibles...
...Puzzled, she tried to figure out what I had said: “Do you want a bagel...
...Limiting the personal information that the FBI can get its hands on is also a good thing-uh-oh, I’ll bet I just rated an entry-and it’s easy to imagine government databases getting way out of control...
...We meet Mr...
...And when they do “escape,” they “can’t assimilate because they can’t speak English...
...Gwen Kinkead...
...After all, they’re in it for profit, not for our health...
...A woman equates leaving Chinatown with “an animal escaping a cage...
...From the start, though, the warning flags of partisanship abound...
...Wlill the joy of shopping without being monitored be taken away also?’ one interviewee cries...
...Not only does Anderson believe that “things” were better when times were simpler and colleges smaller...
...Anti besides, the idea of differentiating between worthy and unworthy poor is an undeniably appealing one...
...Unwilling (or unable) to offer a nuanced analysis of the problems he discerns, Anderson is left with the most unhelpful of explanations-it’s all “their” fault-and reduced to recommending the most narcissistic of remedies: replication of himself...
...But it doesn’t make sense for insurance companies to insure people on whom they know they’ll lose money...
...What would it cost to enact and enforce the kinds of laws Rothfeder demands...
...There’s evidence that the president had a heart attack, a stroke, and showed early signs of a serious intestinal disease before a second heart attack, stroke, and a full-blown case of Crohn’s disease became widely known...
...Beyond its restaurants and garment factories, Chinatown has become home to an Asian financial center staffed by an emerging class of lawyers, bankers, and entrepreneurs...
...But we should be careful to choose the correct problems to address: Are we worried about privacy for its intrinsic value to us as individuals and members of a society or are we worried simply about the effects invasions of privacy can have upon us...
...In the 18th century, volunteers distributing aid to the poor diligently checked the character and circumstances of each applicant to make sure that “alcoholism was not contributing to the general misery...
...Though her material on organized crime is drawn from well-publicized court cases, Kinkead manages to breathe new life into it through detailed interviews with law-enforcement officials and informants...
...Why have so few white writers probed Chinatown during its 130-year existence, she asks a local journalist...
...He comes away dissatisfied, however...
...Of course, things aren’t so simple, as New Yorker writer Gwen Kinkead discovered...
...By offering food indiscriminately to the worthy and unworthy homeless, she was only aggravating the problem...
...a lie may be told by silence, by equivocation . . . and all these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded...
...Technology, apparently, is not all bad...
...In the opening chapter, which discusses colonial attitudes toward charity, Olasky writes most approvingly of those with the most skinflinty of views...
...Keep in mind that if you find a company that has done something improper with your name or other information, you can always take your business elsewhere...
...Needless to say, the current welfare system has many flaws, among them the way it discourages two-parent families...
...Crime...
...Rather than distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor, as did an earlier generation of relief workers, modem-day liberals promoted the idea that public assistance is a “right” to which all needy people should feel entitled, whatever the cause of their destitution...
...It shouldn’t be this way,” he declares, and I agree with him...
...Similarly, he refers to “officials” who “observed that a prime reason for the surge [in welfare cases] was a ‘changing outlook among many poor and the near poor.’ They had been taught by organizers that welfare is ‘nothing to be ashamed of...
...Most of the anecdotes presented in this book have been carefully chosen to scare you witless: You could be the elderly cancer patient who discovers that a malicious Harlem resident has found a way to run up huge bills on your credit cards, or the perfectly healthy man who’s denied medical insurance because a faceless, misguided supercomputer thinks you have AIDS...
...His book is less informative than Illiberal Education, less intellectually substantial than Tenured Radicals, and less mean-spirited-and therefore less fun-than Profscam...
...There should be fewer people overall in academia, but more people in it like Martin Anderson...
...Jeffrey Rothfeder, who first began to investigate the subject of computer data-record surveillance as an editor at Business Week, has set out to expose the shadowy world of megadatabases, technospying devices, and international information exchange...
...By the time it enters the 20th century, The Tragedy of American Compassion has become a neoconservative morality tale, full of liberal activists working to hijack the concept of compassion and twist it to their own ideological ends...
...The problem with this piety is that it would have to be administered, and those who administer it would have to decide what is and is not “political bias...
...Every reporter must confront the difficulties of gaining access, so why should she raise the issue here...
...Finally I asked, mumbling a bit, “Could I have a Bible...
...Rather than seeing change and the inevitable dislodgement of older orthodoxies by newer ones-also fated to fade-the academic Jeremiah sees decline and the end of civilization...
...But it should not, and will not, be the last word on the subject...
...This is a claim, of course, that comes in a book that cites only rightwing authors, lauds only right-wing institutions, and promotes only rightwing ideas...
...Ironically for Anderson and the moral high ground he wants to assume, Ruskin was one of the more notorious pedophiles of his time...
...The major change was that a much higher percentage of those who were eligible suddenly decided to take advantage of welfare benefits...
...Anderson’s favorite mode of documentation is to report “What I have observed personally...
...Many of Rothfeder’s complaints seem so dismally middle class it’s hard to take them seriously, like supermarket checkout scanners that record your name and purchases...
...The reporters get lost,” he tells her...
...Until the fifties, Chinatown was a preponderantly male “bachelor society” whose members toiled arduously to support families in China while dreaming-ften in vain +f returning there to die...
...Ross T. McIntyre did-or the public-as John Kennedy and his physicians did...
...It is fair to say that 80 or 90 percent of the economics you need to know to make decent economic policy in the 20th century was figured out and written down in the 18th and 19th centuries...
...For instance, Rothfeder makes a big deal out of direct-mail companies that now use database profiles to target different neighborhoods for special deals and offers, like the store in a little town in Georgia that placed ads for credit and discounts only in the newspapers delivered to the rich end of town...
...Every institution should be more like the Hoover Institute...
...I don’t mean to suggest that this is all wrong...
...Olasky points to one study showing that during the recession of 1873, more than half the money spent on soup kitchens in New York supported “feckless bums” and “imposters...
...By recapturing the vision of an earlier era, when our concept of compassion “was not so corrupt,” he believes, “many lives can be saved...
...Anderson, however, must ignore this agenda because, in the story he tells, agendas corrupt...
...HarperCollins, $23...
...Fuming at the spectacle of professors “covering up the black deeds of their colleague,” Anderson quotes “the great 19th-century writer and critic” John Ruskin: “The essence of lying is in deception not in words...
...Where else will you find peddlers who have saved up to $50,000 hawking toy phones and cheap socks only months after escaping the clutches of Communism...
...A deeper problem stems from Kinkead’s analysis of Chinatown as a “closed society...
...It is difficult,” he says, “to improve on Aristotle, Shakespeare, or Adam Smith...
...University of Missouri, $19.95...
...Throughout, Anderson is so preoccupied with racking up points against the imagined conspiracy of the academic Left that he fritters away the opportunities opened up by his own investigations...
...The: spectacle of its author sitting in his .air-conditioned aerie at the Heritage :Foundation while condemning S O U ~ki tchens for handing out too much food shows just how corrupt our notion of compassion has become...
...In the book’s most memorable passage, the author, seeking a “first-hand look at contemporary compassion toward the poor,” decides to join the ranks of the homeless...
...he believes that ideas were better when there were not so many of them bombarding us with their novelty...
...where there will be no one like George Monroe, past chair of the Dartmouth board, to question The Dartmouth Review, which Anderson describes, thinly and misleadingly, as “a student newspaper...
...I don’t find this completely fair...
...Its sweatshops rival the 19th-century’s...
...The themes practically leap from the morning headlines...
...A program emphasizing Western values and traditions is no less political than its rivals, only differently political...
...Bean and the American Nazi Party can both find out what kind of foot powder I use...
...But they have their benefits, too, and at any rate, they’re heIe...
...Robert H. Ferrell...
...who, :in his despair, turns to crack or cheap red wine and becomes dependent on these substances, until in the end he loses all his worldly goods and ends up sleeping in sheltersis this person worthy or unworthy of assistance...
...However, she fails to shed much light on the most tragic element of the Chinese syndicates: the disaffected youths who are recruited as street soldiers and become exploited pawns of their adult bosses...
...And the story Ferrell tells is not reassuring...
Vol. 24 • September 1992 • No. 9
