The Washington Monthly, 2019
Easterbrook, Gregg
The Washington Monthly, 2019 From the editor-in-chieF: It's finally here—the 50th anniversary of The Washington Monthly! Who would have thought, when this little periodical began publication half...
...Kennedy seemed kind of a pathetic character, slinking away into the night, alone with his data set...
...Sadly, Keisling became the fourth U.S...
...Levy admitted that he had not even watched the game...
...He was checking out the new Tru-Feel-lt (TM) CD-ROM that creates a fully interactive actual-size simulacrum of the 1977 UCLA cheerleaders' locker room...
...Easterbrook was accidentally crushed when enraged divinity students and representatives of the American Inappropriate Speech Suppression Union surged to cut off the microphone...
...Charles Peters, our founding editor, had the vision to create the Monthly...
...Soon after becoming a justice, Kaus wrote the Court's landmark decision in Hillary Rodham Turner v. Physicians Offshore Assets Protection Board (formerly Health Care Financing Administration), in which the former First Lady, since remarried to cable magnate Ted Turner after Jane Fonda left Turner to cyber-meld with Ross Perot, had sued insisting her 1994 health care reform legislation had never been intended to grant doctors a constitutional right to bill all hotel, cruise, and vacation-home expenses directly to the U.S...
...At a grim press conference announcing the fiasco, Fallows protested that "the Pentagon assured me this weapons system was accurate to within three microns and 100 percent reliable...
...At last year's POC national convention, NTALTRIFCA delegates shouted down the gray eminence, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., when he tried ;to reminisce from the podium'about the days when public schoolteachers read aloud to schoolchildren, rather than running books through digital voice scanners...
...TAYLOR BRANCH: On completion of his work on Martin Luther King, decided to write a biography of the biographer Robert Caro...
...These were the boxes that succinctly explained the Monthly to be a product of Washington Monthly Co., which was a subsidiary of Washington Monthly Partnership, which was a joint venture of Washington Monthly Subordinated Debentures Fund, which was a wholly owned division of Washington Monthly Realty Trust, which was an affiliate of Washington Monthly Bank of Credit and Commerce...
...As the Monthly's editor since Charlie retired, I am pleased to present this issue, which reviews some high points since the January 1994 25th anniversary...
...Peters realized a moment of national notoriety in 2012 when he attained his lifelong goal of being appointed head of the federal General Unac-countability Office (formerly General Accounting Office...
...It made me wonder if the old days of a lunch and a dalliance weren't so bad...
...the training of Buckingham Palace guards...
...Since all admissions requirements were abolished at U.S...
...Susan Threadgill WHERE ARE THEY NOW...
...CHARLES PETERS: It's hard to believe this today, but Charlie once had trouble making ends meet...
...M. ROBERT KAUS: Named to the Supreme Court in 2015 when William Rehnquist expired after 43 years of service, the final seven of those years conducted via holocom from Rehnquist's suspension chamber at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where his prefrontal cortex was connected to maintenance devices following the death of his cardiovascular system, digestive system, and brain stem and the inadvertent erasure of most of his personality by a poorly trained night shift technician...
...JAMES FALLOWS: Elected President in 2004 running on the independent Neocrat ticket, Fallows was swept into office on a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment following the 2003 incident in which the Nakamoto Corporation purchased the entire state of Illinois and then leased it back to current residents...
...His administration was rocked with scandal nearly from the beginning, however, especially since just a few days after Fallows was sworn in, The Washington Monthly published a cover story headlined, WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE CORRUPT, VENAL, BASE, INCOMPETENT, HORRIFIC FALLOWS ADMINISTRATION...
...president to resign the office (following Richard Nixon's first resignation, Nixon's second resignation after his second election, and the resignation of President Naomi Wolf to head the Chanel fashion empire) when he was enmeshed in the Upgrade-gate scandal...
...For instance, every week he flies one of his private jets to Charleston, West Virginia, to report to the Veterans Administration hospital for free treatment of injuries suffered in his 2006 stun-phaser duel with Norman Podhoretz regarding the honor of a certain 1948 Columbia University coed whose exact name neither could remember...
...If a no-nonsense, down-to-Earth person like Al Sharpton were still president, they'd never get away with that...
...Joe Nocera BRING BACK KENNEDYS SEX LIFE I guess I've got nothing to complain about, since I passed a happy youth when it was still legal to have actual relations with other human beings...
...How did Peters leap from penury to wealth...
...Last year the Foreign Service was forced to admit to its translator corps 16 people who only speak one language, since in 2004 a federal court ruled that asking applicants if they speak more than one language is "disguised cultural bias...
...Now government agencies are forbidden to use tests or background information, too...
...Nicholas Lemann IMPOSE TEACHER LITERACY TESTING I guess I've got nothing to complain about, since my kids attend the Hapsburg Country Day School of South Northampton, but somehow the idea that public school teachers need no longer be literate rubs me the wrong way...
...As I checked out my own simulacrum package, a little diversion that recreates the closing arguments in the 1997 Lorena Bobbitt-Mike Tyson divorce trial, I wanted to touch his hand and say, "It's OK, Ted...
...If I hadn't gone after Jim, Paul Warnke would have been furious," Peters explained...
...Charlie is now one of the world's richest men, having purchased Microsoft, Boeing, Limbaugh's Double-Fried Steak franchise, the Hyatt Interactive Tru-Feel-lt (TM) No-Risk Simu-Tryst chain and other important properties...
...Now every first-year business student knows that Peters was patiently using this elaborate ruse to take over Berkshire Hathaway, Quantum, and other corporate targets...
...PHIL KEISLING: Keisling, a Western populist, instituted many government-openness programs...
...The project evolved into an 11-volume epic whose second volume, Caro: The Rewrite Years, Branch is just now completing...
...The Fallows administration hit rock bottom in 2007 when a military strike against a terrorist camp in Koromo-Taji-Karastan, a newly independent republic of 800 people in the territory of the former Turkic-Russo Transitory Alliance, went awry...
...SUZANNAH LESSARD: In 2004, became the final editor of The New Yorker, shortly before the magazine ceased publication after a corporate auditing team from Disney Interactive, its owner, declared the typical New Yorker story length of 275 words "far too long for the modern reader...
...MICHAEL KINSLEY: In 1997, replaced Sally Jesse Raphael as host of a morning talk show...
...TOM BETHELL and THOMAS N. BETHELL: Made national tabloid headlines in 2011 when they jointly married Patty Duke...
...Charlie, though, remains a man of the people...
...I guess it just shows what vision can do...
...establish hourly first-class sleeper train service from Washington to Charleston, West Virginia, at an average public subsidy of $287,000 per passenger...
...By chance I bumped into former Senator Ted Kennedy at the Blockbuster Sprawlplex the other day...
...That was before the 2003 day when he completed simultaneous hostile takeovers of Berkshire Hathaway and the Quantum Fund, ousting the somewhat better known investors Warren Buffett and George Soros, both of whom later became Salvation Army officers...
...Fallows attempted a program of neoliberal reforms, asking Congress for legislation that would limit physician incomes to $29 million per year...
...Lessard replaced former editor Tina Brown, who was dismissed after she inadvertently activated at a corporate board meeting a prototype Tru-Feel-lt (TM) virtual-reality centerfold mannequin system that Brown had programmed to enact one of her own fantasies, which cannot be described here except to say that it involved Prince Charles, Diana and Fergie...
...Looking back on the fates of Monthly contributors from the 1994 anniversary issue masthead...
...disciplinary procedures at British girls schools...
...Fallows declined to stand for reelection in 2008, handing his party's nomination to the former Oregon governor and Monthly contributor Phil Keisling...
...He hadn't invited me to the White House for a state dinner yet...
...close the Superconducting Supercollider, restored by Congress in 1995 following its 1993 cancellation and expanded into a six-county combination science project and theme park employing 625,000 supervisory personnel...
...The rest, as Charlie recently told me by holocom from one of the many resort islands he now owns in the South Pacific, was publishing history...
...Admitting the article had been committed to type even before Fallows was sworn in, Peters added, "It's his own fault...
...All major news organizations called for Keis-ling's resignation within 45 seconds of the acknowledgement...
...All existing actual physical relationships between people were "grandfathered" under the Abolition of Even the Slightest Hint of Sexual Harassment Through Abolition of the Sex Act Act of 1998...
...Switched from tortoise shell to red-rimmed glasses...
...But it does make me wonder whether today's generation isn't missing out on something...
...Art Levine BAN THE NO HUDDLE OFFENSE Last January the Buffalo Bills lost the Super Bowl for the 29th consecutive year...
...And he had the vision to be the first respectable magazine to offer the new CD-ROM virtual-reality "centerfolds" with Tru-Feel-lt (TM) interactive sensory-experience data-based sexual mannequins, fully adjustable for all 308 affectional preferences registered with the Federal Commission on Protected Lifestyle Choices...
...make public schools and the draft mandatory for everyone except children of Fallows' friends and members of his administration...
...Keisling was forced to disclose that he was once upgraded from coach to first class on MegaAir (formed by the 2006 merger of the sole remaining U.S...
...GREGG EASTERBROOK: Perished tragically in 1999 when, speaking to an environmental forum at the Harvard Temple of Goddess Ob-sequence (formerly Harvard Divinity School), he criticized the proposed Moss and Lichen Preservation Act, which would ban all human activity within 500 miles of federally protected fungus...
...carriers, Southwest Airlines and Air Lorenzo), yet did not declare the difference between the fares as income on his federal tax returns...
...After the game Buffalo coach Marv Levy, the first 90-year-old ever to coach in the Super Bowl, maintained that he "never thinks about the previous 28 losses" and that "next year we'll be back and we'll try to get it right...
...Who would have thought, when this little periodical began publication half a century ago, in a dingy loft on Connecticut Avenue, that today in 2019 the Monthly would not only be the sole remaining public policy magazine in the EuroAmerican Union but also a leading corporate sponsor of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Pretoria, South Nigeria...
...Treasury...
...The no huddle offense has become a metaphor for the failed aspects of liberalism...
...three still actually sitting at the Court, five in cortex suspension chambers...
...This year NTALTRIFCA passed a resolution declaring that books themselves are a "repressive cultural artifact" and that all classroom instruction should be based on African oral traditions...
...A dozen complex, billion-dollar Goldfinch wheat-seeking missiles, fired from the sole remaining functional B-2 bomber, missed Koromo-Taji-Karastan by some 1,200 miles and instead impacted in an art gallery in Geneva in the former Switzerland (now a member of the Greater Serbian Alliance...
...Alert readers may recall the small-type ownership statements that once ran in every October issue...
...Peters was later forced to resign from the position when during the course of a televised hearing into $28-a-piece pure-titanium paper clips being used by record clerks at the Superconducting Supercollider, Peters became disoriented and, apparently thinking he was at lunch with a Monthly editor, motioned to the nearest young female congressional aide and declared, "Waitress, I'll have the usual—a double Amaretto martini with a frozen Heineken smoothie and a shot of Galliano on the side...
...In the old days Charlie said the purpose of this elaborate corporate shell was to protect investors from liability, to render Pepco unable to collect on the utility bill, and so on...
...But I've taken a few plane rides since the passage of the Airport Reforestation Act and find the landings terrifying, to say nothing of bumpy...
...and an unnamed 13-year-old boy who filed certain legal charges against the former pop musician Michael Jackson (now known as Michelle Tao-Sig-ma-Rigel) in 1994...
...But should they really have been admitted based on good luck in a lottery administered by Publishers Clearinghouse...
...This time they were defeated 395 to 2 by the Raleigh-Durham Rabid Raccoons thus becoming the only team to lose a Super Bowl to a first year expansion franchise...
...Fallows thus became the first officially neoliberal politician to win national office...
...I must say the fact that actual sex is now abolished, and that men and women are now forbidden by law to speak to each other without at least two witnesses and a legally bonded member of the Gender Police present, does have its advantages in the workplace, especially in a highly charged, competitive environment such as the one I work in, the Washington Interactive News Paragraphs Hardfax (formerly The Washington Post...
...After Mickey Kaus had changed his name for the third time and finally hit on a combination that sounded sufficiently serious, he had become a prominent legal theorist, principally for his advocacy of the death penalty for false statements on public-assistance forms...
...It's time to try a non-bureaucratic offense that would combine the spirit of the old Works Progress Administration with the educational benefits of the Gl bill, the good intentions of the early 1960s Peace Corps . . . (Note to editor: insert standard Monthly dogma) •Jonathan Alter...
...After asking, "Aren't people more important than spores...
...Keisling installed video cameras iri the White House so that all cabinet meetings and staff sessions could be broadcast live on CSPAN-6...
...universities in 2001, it's hard not to feel that standards have declined somewhat...
...Maybe credentialism wasn't so bad after all...
...He allowed himself to be accompanied 24 hours a day by a rotating team of monitors from such good-government groups as the League of Anatomically Correct Voters (formerly League of Women Voters) and the American Inappropriate Speech Suppression Union (formerly American Civil Liberties Union...
...It's true that forested airports subtract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but couldn't we accomplish as much by requiring everyone to save energy by turning off his, her, or their litigation monitors—you know, the new shoulder-mounted devices that record a video image of your entire life, for later use in court—at night or when they're in the shower...
...The National Teachers Absolute Life Tenure Regardless of Incompetence or Felony Conviction Association (formerly National Education Association) has too much influence with the Party of Color (formerly Democratic Party) in this regard...
...Speaking to reporters, Peters noted that it had long been a Monthly tradition to write articles sharply critical of people the Monthly would be expected to like...
...But of course I would have immediately been arrested...
...Kaus used the case as an opening to reimpose the draft, call in the big bills, abolish teacher certification, force Ivy League universities to itemize tuition costs, repeal the Fifth Amendment, establish loser-pays litigation, extend Red Tag postal service to small monthly magazines, charge private pilots per radio call to air traffic control, and increase departures of subsidized first-class sleeper trains between Washington, DC, and Charleston, West Virginia, to every fifteen minutes...
...Katherine Boo REPEAL THE AIRPORT REFORESTATION ACT Former Vice President Al Gore was right to point out that airports are "concrete deserts...
...He had the vision to see the magazine through its numerous lean decades...
...First day's guest: a woman who was her own surrogate mother...
...Keisling returned to his home state to become a minor functionary in the Spotted Owl Defense Force that rings Oregon's forests, off-limits to humans since 2002...
...MY FAVORITE REFORMS, 1994-2019 RESTORE CREDENTIALS I guess I've got nothing to complain about, since both my boys got into Harvard...
...All other eight members of the Court remain the same as they were in 1994...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 3
