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LaRouche Back in the News

Lyndon LaRouche has been back in the news. Not only is the leader himself on trial for the political equivalent of credit card fraud, but in Illinois the two LaRouche candidates who managed to torpedo Adlai Stevenson’s gubernatorial campaign are both running again. LaRouche is, so far as we can tell, an unlikable crank without...

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Noah’s Ark or a Nation State?

A Noah’s Ark or a nation state? seems to be the question posed by the U.S. immigration policy. “Eviction[s] because of building charcoal fires indoors or slaughtering animals in the bathtub” are only some of the problems facing immigrant Hmong and Mein tribesmen in California. Others are “their medicinal use of opium, their capturing of...

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“Professional” Street Person

Billie Boggs used to be a bag lady—although she preferred the term “professional” street person. She slept in front of a vent outside a New York restaurant, ran out into traffic, screamed obscenities at passersby, and defecated in her clothes or on the sidewalk outside the Chemical Bank. She begged for money, then burned it...

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Discipline By the Wayside

Brats—now we call them hyperactive children—used to be disciplined; these days they are given drugs. Many psychologists and school officials insist that Ritalin is the best treatment for children suffering from hyperactivity, or the “attention deficit disorder.” As a matter of routine, 15-year-old Rod Matthews of Canton, Massachusetts, was put on Ritalin as a means...

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A Good Side

Nuclear disarmament has its good side. Europeans and Americans have been sheltered by the nuclear umbrella so long that they have begun to dream of a world without war. That sort of Utopian rubbish is not only demoralizing for the soft, welfare state inhabitants of the Western democracies, but—even worse—it also compels our leaders to...

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Lavender Liberals

Lavender liberals recently held the National Conference of Openly Lesbian and Gay Elected and Appointed Officials in Minneapolis. Graced by the presence of two delegates from Canada’s New Democratic Party and one from the British House of Commons, the conference adopted a resolution (supported by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Senator Paul Simon) calling for further...

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Glasnost American Style

Glasnost American style is all the rage among the nation’s literati. At over a dozen universities, American academics are now waking up to the Soviet equivalents of Good Morning America and Richard Simmons. After years of watching our own People’s Broadcasting System, students and faculty alike may now get a glimpse of the real thing....

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Betraying His Country

Convicted traitor Clayton Lonetree wept as he described his upbringing on an Indian reservation orphanage and with his father, a brutal alcoholic. The Marine Corps was, he said, a way out of his misery, although his principal reasons for joining were patriotic. The military jury, unmoved by his arguments and those of his celebrity lawyer...

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James Burnham, R.I.P.

He was a controversialist. As a literary critic he argued with T.S. Eliot, and as a Trotskyist he quarreled with Trotsky himself. Almost alone among the ex-Communists, he made the full journey to a conservative world view, and before his death he returned to the Catholic faith. He wrote many books, some of which will...

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The “Contragate” Hearings

The “Contragate” hearings have been a poor substitute for daytime soap operas and do not begin to match the thrills of Watergate. Perhaps it is because we have heard them before: arrogantly inarticulate congressmen scoring points off frightened bureaucrats, an administration that turns to private contractors to carry on apparently illegal activities, and an imperialist...

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A Crazy Dance of Technicalities

Dressed in a dark business suit, wearing a tie and a brand-new trenchcoat, Troy Canty was led manacled in front of New York State Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Crane. His head clean-shaven, Canty looked sullenly at TV cameras, out in force to register the latest twist in the Bernhard H. Goetz case. On December...

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Source of Great Expectation

The Reagan Court has been a source of great expectation for conservatives. If only a few more superannuated justices would retire (or die), then we could have the court’s unchecked authority in our own hands. A favorite target of pious hopes and voodoo dolls is the apparently senile Thurgood Marshall. An example of tokenism at...

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Russia by Numbers

USSR Facts & Figures Annual is an excellent source of current statistical and factual information on the Soviet Union. Since 1977, Academic International Press has published an annual volume for anyone who needs to keep up to date on developments in the Soviet Union. The updated as well as new information covers such topics as...

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Pedantry and Progress

He wrote one of the most distinctive and original prose styles of his time, paralleling the techniques of his Yankee contemporary, Henry James, anticipating those of Pound and Eliot. But he used that style to write Greek grammars and commentaries on obscure Greek and Latin poets and page after page of “brief mentions,” mini-reviews, of...

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An Untimely End

There used to be two Daniel P. Moynihans. One wrote interesting essays on the foibles and pitfalls of crafting public policy. While seldom mistaken for a rigorous social scientist, this Moynihan had a gift for translating the esoteric findings of the research sociologists into the vernacular. He saw through the pretentions of political hubris and...

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The Man of Mode

“Man at his best” is both the slogan and promise of Esquire magazine. “Best,” in this context, turns out to mean all that money can buy in the way of automobiles, wristwatches, adoring women, and clothes. Fernando Lamas’ paradoxical aphorism (taken seriously by a dull-witted comic who parlayed it into a career) sums it up:...

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Fathoming Seas of Red

Unlike the world of democratic politics with its ever-present television cameras and investigative reporters, the world of communism is a realm of mysteries and shadows, understood by few who do not actually hold power. Richard Staar and the 79 regional specialists who have contributed to this encyclopedic volume have performed an invaluable public service by...

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True Grit

Tuska’s thesis is that Westerns are not attempts to portray the old West with documentary fidelity, nor do they merely reflect the attitudes of the American public. They are the creation of directors and producers, great and insignificant, men indifferent to historical accuracy and full of their own insights and biases. Furthermore, these insights and...

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Parent Abuse

As tales of child abuse are screamed out on the nightly news, pressures mount for a national policy. Adolescent children are taken away from parents who appear “too strict,” and state after state have passed laws on child abuse that include vague provisions for “mental health.” Parents are beginning to wonder exactly where they stand....

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Rights of Clergy

Any sensible kid in America wants to be a newsman when he grows up or, better still, when he doesn’t. Politicians may have the power to make laws and budgets, but it’s the journalists who make the politicians. Besides, even Presidents have to obey the laws. Journalists, on the other hand, are exempt—or so they...

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Natural Philosophy

At last there is a scientific work that justifies the term natural philosophy. In every discipline there should eventually come a time when it is possible to repeat the words of a great historic occasion in America: the man and the hour are met. Such events are increasingly rare in the sciences, where specialization and...

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Muffled Voices

“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...

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More Than Monkey Business

Human beings are alternately ashamed and amused by the spectacle of their closest connections on the scala naturae. Behavior that we find unremarkable in dogs and cats—sexual promiscuity or self-abuse—seems grotesque in chimpanzees and baboons. Looking at apes and monkeys in the zoo is a little too much like looking at ourselves in a fun-house...

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Laborious Hedonism

In America, speaking out against work was once like saying nasty things about motherhood. Even now that attacks on motherhood have become common. Perry Pascarella makes it clear in The New Achievers that work is still sacred to the yuppie mentality. No longer, however, is work the spiritual exercise it was in Calvinism; restraining the...

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Who Will Censor the Censors?

Who will censor the censors? That is a question asked increasingly by librarians and other defenders of pornography in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin, at least, we know the answer: it is the Board of Regents, who recently ordered the Union Council (a predominantly student or ganization) at the Madison campus to return...

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Affirmative Action in the Arts

Affirmative Action Art is all the rage in California. Recently, the California Arts Council decided that, because of ”social conditions which have historically denied some groups access to the mainstream and . . . complicated patterns of cultural bias,” race-blind awarding procedures were no longer adequate. A new “cultural outreach” was called for with hundreds...

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Perversion of the Law

“Perversion of the law” took on new meaning recently when homosexual groups forced Georgetown University—a Catholic school—to grant them official recognition. In a 2-to-1 decision handed down with the unusual stipulation that the case must be reargued before a full appeals court, a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed a...

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The Cultural Alienation of the Press

The cultural alienation of the press was recently seen in its least flattering light, when the Associated Press distributed a picture of a grief-stricken father beside the body of his drowned five-year-old son. Originally published in the Bakersfield Californian, the picture provoked a storm of local outrage: within two days 500 people had called to...

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Behind the Pogonias

In 1922 The Literary Digest asked selected American poets and novelists to name “the most important” living American writer: Joseph Hergesheimer finished first and Eugene O’Neill Second; Sherwood Anderson edged out Willa Cather for third. For fifth place James Branch Cabell tied Robert Frost, who first gained wide attention in 1915 with the American publication...

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Scientism’s Sins

Few theologians have influenced the spiritual life of the West as profoundly as the lay physicist Galileo Galilei when he successfully challenged the Church’s geocentric world view. Though the Copernican doctrine he championed was originally discovered by a devout Christian, Galileo redefined it within a mechanistic world view which exiled God to the periphery. Shaped...

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Paparazzi

Andy Warhol used to say that the day would come when every American would have his five minutes on the Tonight Show. Warhol, although he squandered his talents on films and interviews with nonentities, was still a prophet of sorts: he must have realized that nothing drives a decadent society so much as the hunger...

Renaissance in Education
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Renaissance in Education

When I accepted President Reagan’s appointment to be chairman of the National Council on Educational Research, I did so because I welcomed the opportunity to learn firsthand how professional bureaucrats approached America’s many and increasingly serious educational problems. After some time spent at my appointed task, I realized that bureaucrats were not capable of solving...

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Religion is out, fashion is in

So, at least, we might conclude from a poll conducted recently by Starch Advertisement Readership Service, which has been doing door-to-door opinion surveys since the l 930’s. The results of a poll taken in 1953 indicated that the top five areas of interest for American women at that time were: (1) religion, (2) food, (3)...

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Where are the poets?

We asked conservatives that question in June. And hand in hand On the back steps,   my pregnant sister and I Wistfully remember summers here – warm and long ­ A life this awful August will deny Her baby, whose presence now is slightly wrong. Cool wind moves the little field of loosestrife. Their lavender...

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The fighting over Vietnam is not over

Loyal Americans are still winning the battles but losing the war. Fifteen years ago, American troops were victorious in every major engagement in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but all their efforts came to nothing, because the Presidents who committed us to war (Kennedy and Johnson) never formulated a strategy for victory and be­ cause...

Nostalgia Trips
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Nostalgia Trips

“Long ago there was something in me but now that thing is gone…That thing will come back no more.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald   Douglas Unger: Leaving the Land; Harper & Row; New York.   William McPherson: Testing the Current; Simon & Schuster; New York.   It would be off the mark to regard Douglas...

Future Directions?
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Future Directions?

“The way up and the way down are one and the same. “ -Heraclitus   Newt Gingrich: Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future; TOR Books; New York.   Robert Kuttner: The Economic Illusion: False Choices Between Prosperity and Social Justice; Houghton Mifflin; Boston.   The idea of progress provides much of the rhetorical...

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The Natural Man

This issue brings together a number of discussions of man’s place in nature. Stephen R. L. Clark, Tibor Machan, and jay Mechling explore the implications of the animal rights movement. Debating the “moral status of animals” (to borrow one of Prof. Clark’s titles) is interesting not so much for what it reveals about beasts as...

“A Scientific Faith’s Absurd”
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“A Scientific Faith’s Absurd”

Science, that is, natural and physical science, is supposed to be pure. Those who do science keep their work free from any taint of political belief or social prejudice. The scientific method is itself value-free, beyond good and evil. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, however, scientists are not always so pure. They...

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Canned Heat

Ernest van den Haag: Smashing Liberal Icons: A Collection of Debates; The Heritage Foundation; Washington, DC. When the adversaries are aggressive and the topics provocative, debates are stimulating entertainment. And, too, many vigorous minds have shared Samuel Johnson’s relish for “talking for victory.” But for participant and auditor alike,  the excitement is in being there—in the tones...

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Cultural Revolutions

Heroes are back in style. According to a recent poll, the  approval  ratings given to the objects of our admiration are up significantly from a few years back. The official story goes something like this: back in the bad old days of Vietnam and Watergate,  the  Ameri can people lost their youthful idealism and learned to...

Transplanted Texan
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Transplanted Texan

Our literary establishment seems designed to ensure that a writer’s first novel is his best. Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron and J.D. Salinger are only a few of the better-known novelists whose first work defined the acme of their creative careers. (In the case of John Barth, the second novel, The End of the...

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Waste of Money

Not a Prayer by Steven Hayward   Horst E. Richter: All Mighty: A Study of the God Complex in Western Man; Harvest House Publishers; Claremont, CA.   There are several ways of thinking about what has come to be called “the decline of the West.” There are the rather sweeping generalizations about secularism by evangelical theologian...

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Letter From Central America

World attention focused on Managua several months ago, as leaders of the Socialist world, led by Fidel Castro, converged on Nicaragua for the most stupendous Marxist levee since Ethiopia’s $100 million bash for Colonel Mengistu. Meanwhile, thousands of Nicaraguan campesinos, dubbed “contras” by their enemies, continued to risk their lives in a voluntary, patriotic, and...

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Cultural Revolutions

Capitalism is now avant-garde. A recent issue of the New Art Examiner chronicled the pioneering work of two men from Battle Mountain, Nevada, who together constitute United Art Contractors. UAC explains their breakthrough in conceptual art as a shortcut to success:   Every artist wants success and fame and if they could get it easily...

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In the Mail

Science Fiction in America, 1870’s-1930’s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources by Thomas D. Clareson; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Although the first entry is Flatland and the final is Zamitan’s We, the second and the penultimate are more telling: number two, The Man With the Broken Ear, includes a character who believes that “humans are...

Special-Interest Democracy
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Special-Interest Democracy

“Millions endeavoring to supply Each other’s lust and vanity.”    – Bernard Mandeville   Milton and Rose Friedman: The Tyranny of the Status Quo; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA.   Amitai Etzioni: Capital Corruption; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA.   It is a commonplace that modern democracy suffers from a grave malady, namely...

Attacking Conservative Backing
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Attacking Conservative Backing

The selection of William Bennett as the new Secretary of Education came as no surprise in Washington. During his three years as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bennett maintained a firm grasp on the fundamentals of bureaucratic life. Originally the choice of the Administration’s neoconservative supporters, he has gradually gained the grudging...

A Prudent Progressive
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A Prudent Progressive

The longer I watch it at work, the more it seems to me that feminism, as we know it, is into the business of destinies. Destiny is an awesome and enigmatic notion, open to bottomless speculations. Before the recent feminist upsurge, a woman had to fulfill her destiny as a woman, an often utterly ungrateful...

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Interview

CC: One of the really wholesome things about your research is the fact that you are looking at the community rather than the political system for solutions to the problem of urban crime. PJL: Lynn Curtis refers to this as an above-level philosophy, as opposed to the traditional public policy in this area, which has...