Author: The Archive (The Archive)

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...

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...

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...

The Closing of the American Mind was last year’s liberal cliche of the year. This year, the left’s answer may well be I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. Billed as an exercise in investigative reporting. Stone’s book does to Athens what I.F. Stone’s Weekly used to do to the United States. Stone’s “original” thesis is...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...