Prostitution may not deserve its reputation as the world’s oldest profession, but it has been around for millennia, appearing in virtually every society. In this revised edition of a book originally published in 1978 (under a slightly different title), Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough document the ubiquity and diversity of prostitution, tracing the practice from...
Year: 1989
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Arms and the Man: Clint Eastwood as Hero and Filmmaker
A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of the picture it has of itself. High art and popular art are not in competition here. Both may and do help citizens decide what they are and admire. In...
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Adverpop Rock
Doctors are prohibited from hawking products in television commercials. It’s a question of ethics. So, since the real ones can’t do it, stand-ins are asked to fill the prescription. Marcus Welby was never jumpy—and probably wouldn’t have been even if he had accidentally reversed the electric paddles used to jump-start a heart—so Robert Young became...
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Good as Goldwyn
“They designed an entire solar system in just six seconds. It took God six days, if you believe the Old Testament.” —Gene Roddenberry in an interview “It’s not his life, it’s a fairy story,” wrote John Dos Passos of the life of Sam Goldwyn in a documentary section of Mid-Century (1961). Even though Dos Passos...
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“Affirmative Action Curriculum” Returns
The “Affirmative Action curriculum” returns east: T. Edward Hollander, New Jersey’s higher education chancellor, has argued that college teachers should “rethink what they teach and . . . seek ways of bridging the gaps between their areas of expertise and the diverse student populations in New Jersey colleges and universities.” What this obscure language means...
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The Bull’s-Eye of Disaster
For over a decade now, it’s been commonplace for our leaders to urge us to put Vietnam behind us. My wife, Sybil, and I were face to face with our good friend George Bush when he said it again at his Inauguration in January. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society has front row seats at...
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Waking Up Middle-Aged in the New Age
There I was, nearly 36, being paid to do mundane work (but not paid nearly enough), unable to finish any of the large writing projects I’d been working at, and victim of a series of professional disappointments. This was a far cry from the international literary fame I’d envisioned at age 19. I was old,...
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The World’s Best Bad Magazines
The below are little collections of information I picked up from, respectively, Esquire and GQ. The world’s finest ready-made suits are found in America. The world’s most intriguing men’s store is in Italy. The world’s best harmonicas come from Germany. Fifteen percent of all furs in the United States are sold to males. Some...
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Gary, Martin, and John
I started this letter back when David Garrow’s biography of Martin Luther King appeared, with its revelations about Dr. King’s sexual habits, just in time for Christmas 1986. I put it aside because I wasn’t happy with it. In the summer of 1987, the Hart and Bakker scandals made me dust it off and try...
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High Times: The Late 60’s in New York
As 1969 rolled around and the decade was ending, I was six years old and living in a temperate Southern city a thousand miles from New York. Conflict came from wanting to stretch my feet into my brother’s half of the backest-back of our fake wood-sided turquoise station wagon; Vietnam had no meaning for me....
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LA’s Cult of the Dead
One of the many hearses that ply Hollywood Boulevard is different from all the others. The long gray Cadillac sports a sunroof, air-conditioning, and a cargo of live bodies, not dead ones. The vehicle is the flagship of Grave Line Tours, and every day its driver leads his seven passengers, each with a window seat,...
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Waters of Life
The Arkansas River is born from melting snow on Mt. Arkansas at 13,795 feet above sea level in the state of Colorado. Rushing down through cataracts and gorges, it gathers strength from a multitude of rivulets and creeks to burst free from the mountains laden with silt. Across the Great Plains of eastern Colorado and...
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Yuppie Cons
In the 1950’s, American conservatives, subscribing to what Clinton Rossiter called the “thankless persuasion,” were a hard-shelled, pig-eyed lot who took no prisoners and asked no quarter. National Review, in a once-famous but now largely forgotten editorial in its premier issue, vowed that its mission was to stand athwart history and cry stop. Admittedly, this...
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Our Postmodern Age
Eliseo Vivas once said, “I would not for a minute pretend solidarity with men who do not realize that one of the essential marks of decency today is to be ashamed of being a man of the twentieth century.” He had no desire to turn the clock back; he was simply advocating that rather than...
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Rock and Roll Never Forgets
In the 1950’s any real American boy knew that whatever he wanted to be when he grew up, it was not an underemployed television father like Ward Cleaver or Ozzie Nelson. Our fictional heroes were from another time. They were the cowboys, frontiersmen, and pioneers who had taken risks that seemed inconceivable to a generation...
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Novel Ideas
“Nigger” is the word upon which Bill Kauffman balances and dances his first novel, Every Man a King. It is, to say the very least, a difficult word. It is a word denied to white lips in polite society, and is now heard only coming with any frequency from trash-mouthed blacks. The saying of the...
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Glasnost in Chile?
Glasnost in Chile? Pinochet is getting no credit for it. Yet at the same time General Secretary (and now also President) Gorbachev’s policies are being hailed as major breakthroughs, departures from the previous (Brezhnev) era. They are deemed to hold out great promise for the people of the Soviet Union, if only they can succeed....
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Trade Surplus Nation
A trade surplus nation for the century before the 1980’s, the US had been the world’s leading industrial power since 1900 and a net creditor since World War I. The apparent reversal of all of these positions in less than a decade has elicited both consternation and controversy. By early 1989, a Washington Post/ABC News...
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The Structure of Meaning
Levy’s latest and very ambitious new book is an inquiry into the fundamental characteristics of political order from two perspectives: philosophical anthropology and the political philosophy of Eric Voegelin. The outcome is a vigorous defense of our institutions and traditions. The anthropological perspective has its roots in Max Scheler’s work in the 1920’s and 1930’s....
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On ‘Bright Shining Liar’
From the May Chronicles, top of the first column on page 31: ” . . . General Vo Nguyen Giap . . . apologized publicly for torture excesses. . . . The Vietcong were ‘forbidden to execute the accused savagely’. . . . “ Russ Braley seems to give the ‘Cong name to all the...
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On ‘A Lot of Americans’
Albert Einstein once noted that a thing should be made as simple as possible—but no simpler. I am afraid that E. Christian Kopff (Cultural Revolutions, May 1989) has reduced my ideas below an acceptable minimum and distorted them in the process. I have said that teaching is undervalued in today’s university, that we do not...
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On ‘Tolstoy Tradition’
Although I enjoyed Sally S. Wright’s “Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition” in the April 1989 issue of Chronicles, I must point out at least one error. The caption underneath the photograph of Nikolai Tolstoy states, “the Macmillan government participated in atrocities in Austria in 1945,” implying that Harold Macmillan was the British prime minister then....
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By Blab Befuddled
Words cannot take us everywhere, nor should they. Before the most sublime truths, we grow reverently still. Confronted with bestiality, we shudder at the unspeakable. But in the Age of Blab, everything must be talked about.” Indeed, modem journalists consider it progress to be able to chat endlessly about depravities our wiser ancestors refused even...
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Just How Monarchical is Monsieur Mitterrand?
Ever since Machiavelli, and probably long before that, successful statesmen have known that a plentiful stock of mendacity, as well as guile, are essential for anyone wishing to get ahead in politics. But what many of them may have forgotten during their arduous climb to the summit is that the often bitter accusations they level...
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A Cultural Cincinnatus
There are passages, even whole poems in Fred Chappell’s new collection for which there are clearly precedents in, or one might say kinships to, the work of other poets. The urbane chattiness of “Subject Matter,” for instance, makes no bones about it. It is nice to imagine how Auden would open a poem about the...
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The Ethos of Freedom
“That’s just rhetoric!” So we dismiss statements we have little respect for. Readers of Tacitus’ Dialogue on Orators will remember that the Roman historians thought that eloquence is a sign of a free state. There was a time when the speeches of Burke and Canning, of Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln were studied in school...
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Liberalism: Collectivist and Conservative
I never exchanged a word with Richard Weaver. I knew him because he was a figure at the University of Chicago. I heard that he was a teacher who expected his students to meet a high standard of intellectual probity and rigor; I think that he expected the same of his colleagues. I was told,...
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The Other Jewish America
From the general media and Jewish weeklies published in most large American cities the reader will learn more than he cares to about the political and social doings of what Ze’ev Chafets calls “federated Judaism,” an interlocking directorate of the leadership of upscale synagogues, the fund-raising community federations, and the inevitable country clubs. These people...
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Merlin of the Woods
The matter of the Celts has had a strong hold on the English-speaking imagination for a long time, at least since the publication in the mid-18th century of the forged Poems of Ossian; but it was a symbolic moment of great importance when Matthew Arnold told his Oxford audience how, on a seaside holiday at...
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Buchenwald’s Second Life
Even in an age of glasnost, hardly anyone troubles to recall that when the Soviet Union occupied East Germany in 1945 it kept two Nazi concentration camps in full use for nearly five years, till February 1950, and at their old task of death. Soviet Buchenwald comes as a surprise, and that surprise is perhaps...
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The God Biz
For some reason (perhaps God knows why) I recently started receiving packets of postcard advertisements from Media Management’s Ministry: Values for Growing Churches. “Dear Pastor,” the top card began. I read that an identical packet had been sent to two hundred fifty thousand other “pastors,” along with a card from Media Management saying, “building? teaching?...
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The Danish Swift
Why, after half a century, Peter Freuchen’s Arctic Adventure has to be rescued from virtual oblivion is one of the true puzzles of literary anniversaries. Not quite a best-seller in its day, it nonetheless went into five printings and then fell, almost precipitously, into its curious obscurity. Retrospective itself as it looked back to Freuchen’s...
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Billy, The Fabulous Moolah, and Me
When I first heard that V.S. Naipaul was writing a book about the South, it made me nervous. What would the author of Among the Believers make of Jim and Tammy? Could we look for Louisiana: A Wounded Civilization? Well, I’ve been reading A Turn in the South, just out last winter from Knopf. I’m...
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A Plea for Choice
It is heartening to learn that economic growth is largest in countries where the government is least meddlesome. Such information is of great significance to the utilitarian argument for liberty, for it hurts the Marxist where he bleeds the most: in showing the material superiority of capitalism, which is constantly denied in the Communist press....
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Five Plays in Search of a Character
In recent years Actors Theatre of Louisville’s artistic director Jon Jory has come under fire for the relative weakness of his new play festival. He should be happy that this year’s season was stronger. Like any other genre, playwriting is a craft, and if nothing else was evident, it was clear from the eight plays...
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Blaming America First
Paul Hollander is dogged, if not downright mulish, in his intellectual focus. As is the case in Soviet and American Society and his celebrated Political Pilgrims, this collection of previously published articles and reviews explores the perceptions and beliefs of American intellectuals in regard to Marxist-Leninist countries. What Hollander lacks in the flourish and breadth...
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The 31st President
George Nash, though still in his early 40’s, has become one of our most prolific American historians. His output consists of a seminal study of the postwar American Right, numerous essays on American conservatism, and since 1975 a multivolume biography of Herbert Hoover. His exhaustive research into Hoover has yielded an introductory volume of more...
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A Zeitgeist of Another Color
Among the many questions about the new presidency of George. Bush with which the lips of Washington were afroth this spring was whether Lee Atwater is for real. The thirty-seven-year-old head of the Republican National Committee who made the name of Willie Horton as familiar to American households as the Domino’s Pizza gremlin is one...
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The Fallacy of Descriptivism
People with more than a passing interest in words fall into two groups: prescriptivist and descriptivist. The prescriptivist believes that there is an ideal of correctness in the use of words, shifting and temporally-based as it ultimately may be. The descriptivist finds the concept of “correctness” elitist at best. More often, he finds it incomprehensible....
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Second Thoughts
These days everyone is having second thoughts—about Vietnam and the 60’s, about American history, about what it means to be a liberal and what it means to be a conservative. Rather than be left out of the rewrite, I too have been having second thoughts about what I did and did not do some 20...
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The Straight and Narrow
“Lessons are not given, they are taken.” —Cesare Pavese Although subtitled The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, Hernando de Soto’s The Other Path is as much revelatory as revolutionary. For one who has grappled with the problems of Third World development, seeking to define and articulate a certain truth sensed to be hidden beneath...
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Soviet Strategy
“He crucified noble, he sacrificed mean, He filled old ladies with kerosene. While over the waters the papers cried ‘The patriot fights for his countryside!'” —Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of Boh da thone” For 40 years two topics have dominated popular discussions of international conflict. The first is the specter of nuclear war...
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Pizza Etc.
On the drive in, there’s no sign saying, “Welcome to Ann Arbor, Michigan’s Boom Town.” But the evidence is hard to miss, especially if you’ve just driven from the war zone that is Detroit. (United States murder capital for years running.) On the outskirts of Ann Arbor there’s a lot of what a horticulturist I...
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Stirring Up Hostility
The March Chronicles stirred up a great deal of hostility in strange quarters, where freedom of expression used to defend everything but unfashionable opinions. The Perspective essay on immigration even attracted the attention of a newspaper editor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, named Paul Greenberg. In an op-ed piece published in the Washington Times, Greenberg applies...
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America’s Great Luxury
Free speech has been one of the great American luxuries, but according to the University of Wisconsin it may prove to be too expensive. In April its Board of Regents passed a rule that would make racial, ethnic, or sexist epithets grounds for expulsion. This does not come out of nowhere: last fall the Zeta...
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A Familiar Phenomenon
Judicial tyranny is a familiar phenomenon as judges routinely take charge of school systems and strike down state laws on abortion, pornography, and murder. Recently, one federal judge has even changed the property taxes in Kansas City, MO, while a federal district judge in Des Moines upheld the right of convicts in Iowa to read...
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A Cause For Concern
Immigration is increasingly becoming a major subject for concern among Americans. In a recent report released by FAIR, 51 percent of 800 Californians surveyed thought the US was accepting “too many” legal immigrants, while only 35 percent replied “too few” or “about right.” Sixty-nine percent thought there ought to be a limit, as opposed to...
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Solving Headaches
Affirmative Action Art was supposed to solve the headaches of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—still reeling from last year’s response to its display of a painting depicting the late Mayor Harold Washington in frilly underwear—when it hurriedly arranged an all-minority show at the school. But instead of peace and quiet, they got...
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Edward Levine, R.I.P.
Edward Levine, professor emeritus of social psychology at Loyola University of Chicago, was an academic and a truthteller, a combination increasingly hard to find in the modern university. His wide range of interests was reflected in his work, from his book The Irish and Irish Politicians: A Study of Social and Cultural Alienation (University of...
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On ‘Historical Revisionism’
A correction on Arthur Eckstein’s excellent essay “Caution: Historical Revisionism at Work.” Eckstein says that Noam Chomsky never visited North Vietnam. That is not the case. The following are excerpts from a speech Chomsky made in Hanoi on April 14, 1970 welcoming the 1970 “spring offensive” of the American antiwar movement. (The speech was monitored...