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...
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...
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...
A class struggle is going on in the U.S. today, a confrontation between an intellectualized elite and what used to be called the democracy. The upper classes go to good schools—Ivy League or at least Big 10—where they pick up easy answers to the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything,” while members of the...
The wavering course of United States foreign policy and our fumbling initiatives in the world’s trouble spots have turned a brighter spotlight upon governmental decision-making in this vital area. Our performances in Iran, Lebanon, and Nicaragua have raised questions about the capacity of our open government to deal with these recurring problems. And neither our...
Back in 1969 the Violence Commission issued a report which foresaw the urban America of the future as a sort of terrorist Alphaville: high-tech business centers and shopping malls protected by armed guards, fortified apartment complexes defended by sophisticated electronic surveillance, and patrols of armed citizens keeping a vigilant watch over their neighborhoods. As Elliot...
The Reagan Administrationhas been widely accused of hostility to the life of the mind. Cutbacks at the National Endowments constitute, so we are told, an attack on the arts and humanities and reflect the philistine temperament of the President’s supporters, that unnatural coalition of country club Republicans and Moral Majoritarians. Maybe so. On the other...
Jazz is biding its time. It is in a period of consolidation and reflection that began as the 1970’s wound down. 1t may be that the search for roots and basic values presaged, as movements in jazz often have, a change in the society at large. The Reagan years were not far off. The jazz...
French Proscenium William Styron was recently honored by the French government, which made him a Commander of Arts and Letters. In accepting the award, Styron remarked, “Vive la France, Vive l’Amerique and all good things.” Styron may not have a very strong grasp of French, but he loves the country: “I feel particularly good here,...
A Plague on Both Your Houses Women have always been our censors. Mrs. Grundy was a household word for inflexible propriety a good 30 years before Dr. Bowdler produced his expurgated version of Shakespeare. Times and manners change, and the American Mrs. Grundys took up, in succession, Abolition, Women’s Suffrage, and Temper ance,butitremainedtruethat: Many are...
Thomas Sowell: The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective; William Morrow; New York If valley Girls could read, Thomas Sowell’s book would gag them with the facts. The author, a Chicago-educated economist now at the Hoover Institution, presents his readers with a carefully researched book that is replete with facts about economics, politics,...
A Tale of Modern Times William Dear: The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III; Houghton Mufflin; Boston. Dallas Egbert was a genius. At the age of 13 he entered Michigan State University to study computer science. MSU assured the Egberts that the university would take special care of the brilliant but remarkably...
“In the long reach of history, it is the cultural institutions which mark the city of enlightenment, not its generals nor its statesmen nor its entrepreneurs.” So declared Dr. John A. Howard, president of The Ingersoll Foundation and of The Rockford Institute, as he welcomed leading scholars, critics, business executives, and patrons of the arts...
Lucrative Lying John Barth: The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction; G.P. Putnam’s Sons; New York “For the writer intent on truth,” Solzhenitsyn observes, “life never was, never is (and never will be!) easy: his like have suffered every imaginable harassment—defamation, duels, a shattered family life, financial ruin or lifelong unrelieved poverty, the madhouse, jail.”...
For years the editors of Christianity and Crisis have done their best to make friends with the international left, even to the point of adjusting or ignoring inconvenient doctrines. Despite these efforts, The Nation recently took aim at all (not just conservative) religionists and fired a broadside entitled “Political Opium.” C&C’s soul-searching response: What’s the...
The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths by W. Fuller Torrey, McGraw-Hill; New York. Without doubt, Ezra Pound was a remarkable poet. His best verse is beautifully cadenced, delicately chiseled. Herbert Read described him as “an alchemist who transmuted the debased counters of our language into pure poetic metal.” Deferentially, T. S. Eliot called him...
Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert; G.P. Putman’s Sons, New York. While waiting for the cinematic spectacle of Dune, we decided that a bit of exploratory work was in order, so we attended to Frank Herbert’s world –– nay, universes –– of Dune. That was no small feat, as it is a trek into Dune,...
The anonymous reviewers at Chronicles of Culture don’t seem to like any thing except right-wing polemics. The problem is the usual plague of the selfrighteous: they have no sense of humor. For them, Roy Blount Jr. is “a humorist of sorts.” What’s the worst thing that can be brought up against him? He wears makeup...
In Art, as in most areas of life, California is ahead of the rest of us. A new set of California laws, collectively known as “An Artist’s Bill of Rights,” prohibit the buyer of a work of art from making any alterations in that work without consent of the artist. According to a recent issue...
George Balanchine died a year ago April. Last July the Ballet Master of the New York City Ballet, John Taras, was finally persuaded by Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the American Ballet Theater. In a recent interview with Dancemagazine, Taras observed that with Balanchine gone “things will not be the same.” How right he was. The...
Gertrude Stein may be the only official member of “The Lost Generation” who has not been disemboweled by literary analysts. Stein’s circle-biographer James R. Mellow called it a “Charmed Circle” in the title of his 1974 book was not restricted to Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and other literati. Gertie, as she was known to some of...
The History and Impact of Marxist-Leninist Organizational Theory: “Useful Idiots,” “Innocents’ Clubs,” and “Transmission Belts” by John P. Roche; Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, MA. The joke is as old as Marxism in power: Lenin (or Stalin or Khrushchev or Chernenko) shows his beautiful Crimean villa, his fleet of limousines, his army of servants,...
Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World by Jonathan Kwitny; Congdon & Weed, New York. During the formative years of the American republic, Alexander Hamilton proposed that a national debt would be beneficial since it would tie the wealthy, the lenders, to the fledgling government, the debtor. Hamilton doubtless would regard a trillion-dollar national...
The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in the U.S. by Michael Schwartz; Our Sunday Visitor Press, Huntington, IN. Catholicism is so pervasive in America that it is taken for granted as somehow normal. Schwartz traces hostility to Catholicism from its Reformation roots in England, where it was identified with “foreigners” and political conspiracy. Transplanted to the New...
Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin; Farrar Strauss Giroux, New York. Philip Larkin is a rare thing among literary journalists—his own man. When he edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, he filled it with his own eccentric choices, many of them rhymed and often by uncelebrated poets. His own verse, as...
Barbara W. Tuchman: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam; Alfred A.K Knopf, New York. William L. Shirer: 20th Century Journey: A Memoir of a Life and the Times. Volume II: The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940; Little, Brown & Company, Boston. The world of nations, like the world of nature, is characterized by...
Politics and Prayer One of the high points of this fall’s campaign season was the vigorous debate over the place of religion in America’s public life. In retrospect, it may some day be regarded as the most meaningful public discussion of the question in this century. The exchange began early in the campaign when...
Jerome Bruner: In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography; Harper & Row; New York The so-called cognitive revolution occurred during the career of Jerome Bruner, and his history is essentially its history. At the time Bruner entered the field of psychology it was almost totally dominated by various offshoots of Behaviorism. Behaviorism rests on...
The recipients of the 1984 Ingersoll Prizes are Anthony Powell and Russell Kirk The T. S. Eliot prize goes to Mr. Powell and the Richard Weaver prize goes to Dr. Kirk. Anthony Powell The serious novel has undergone a radical transformation in the 20th century. The old narrative forms that had given...
From Dewey to Huey To a superficial observer, philosophers seem like people who inconsequentially spin their idle theories in their ivory towers while the real world blithely goes its own way. The truth is otherwise. Aristotelian thought refurbished and re shaped by medieval Thomists, for centuries governed life in Western Europe far more pervasively...
Howard Thurman: For the Inward Journey; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. During his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Jesse Jackson was widely praised for using the language of black evangelism. Wiser observers recognized that Jackson had actually degraded his inherited religious vocabulary by cutting it loose from its spiritual roots and putting it...
Media MIA’s Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War;Edited by Harrison E. Salisbury; Harper & Row; New York. James Dunkerley: The Long War, Dictatorship and Revou1tion in El Salvador;Junction; London. It has been a decade since America withdrew its troops from Vietnam. Unfortunately, scores of servicemen remain officially unaccounted for, their fate shrouded...
Pure Drivel The feminist movement has fallen on hard times. Many of the intellectual leaders of the movement are abandoning the battlefield and withdrawing to the snug fastnesses of fantasy and self-gratification. Some dream of once and future Amazonian kingdoms ruled by women. Others plan to engineer their androgynous land of heart’s desire with...
A Dangerous Classic Richard M. Weaver: Ideas Have Consequences; University of Chicago; Chicago and London. Richard Weaver was among the rarest of rare birds: an American political philosopher. His intellectual roots reach back through the Nashville Agrarians (Donald Davidson, especially) to Calhoun and ultimately to Thomas and Aristotle. A professed enemy of the...
Journey to Nowhere Lesley Blanch: Pierre Loti: The Legendary Romantic; Helen and Kurt Wolff Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. In the end, nothing is more boring than adventure. Once the newness has worn off, foreign landscapes, forbidden loves, and bizarre rituals prove less stimulating than familiar settings, ordinary people, and well-worn traditions. This...
… And Now Something Completely Different Husbands, who of late have been invaded by an indomitable feeling of limitless partnership with their wives, have become a routine fixture in the delivery rooms across the country. Some Lamaze instructors regularly speak of “the pregnant couple. “This unnatural exaggeration of equal participation must have resulted from...
From Russia with Love During the 1920’s and 30’s, restless American progressives — “political pilgrims” in Paul Hollander’s phrase — returned from their obligatory hajj to Moscow lauding the Soviet regime and indicting the hopelessly inferior American order. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Berlin Wall, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Solzhenitsyn, Afghanistan, and KAL 007, almost no...
In an era when frozen embryos, conceived on processed sperm, are considered legal inheritors to financial assets, and former convicted felons seek redemption by supervising police in Chicago Mayor Washington’s administration, nothing is particularly surprising anymore. In the Chicago Tribune, someone identified as cochairman of the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force bitterly complains that homosexual highschool...
The magnitude of mental confusion in which this society exists–actually, considered normal and permanent by historians endowed with a sense of humor–overwhelms us on occasion. In August, three months before the election, a Gallup poll found that Walter Mondale and his ultra-liberal Democratic Party are believed by the majority of Americans to be better suited...
We received a piece of direct mail sent to us from an outfit in San Francisco entitled U.S. Out of Central America. There we could read: We are not from the left or the right, we are not from the same political organization, and we probably have different opinions on many things. As the very...
Zbigniew Lewicki: The Bang and the Whimper: Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Every instant, each of us moves closer to the End. It may be a result of “the big one,”or it could simply be that our biological software program has run its functions. Every instant there is more disorder....
In a full page ad in The New York Tinzes Book Review for Sex & Destiny: Tbe Politics of Human Fertility by Germaine Greer (Harper & Row; New York) a certain Fay Weldon’s words from a piece in the London Times are quoted in type that’s 1/2-inch high: “One of the most important books to be...
Malcolm Bradbury: The Modern American Novel; Oxford University Press; New York. Serviceable handbooks to literature are always handy to have around the house or office; those that are pithy rather than prolix are even superior. Malcolm Bradbury, himself no mean novelist, examines, in a mere 186 pages (excluding back-of-the-book materials), American fiction from the 1890’s...
Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader; Edited by Alix Kates Shulman; Schocken Books; New York. In science fields, creating a false paradigm is a sure way to gain disrepute among posterity. The modern reputations, for instance, of Ptolemy as an astronomer, or of Tycho Brahe as a cosmologist are not high. In politics, however,...
John S. Saloma III: Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth; Hill and Wang; New York. Because Goliath laughed when David came against him with a sling shot and five smooth stones, we may safely assume that the giant was neither a leftist nor a liberal. For as Ominous Politics by John S. Saloma III makes...
In a curiously schizophrenic article in Ms. entitled “The Uses of Chastity and Other Paths to Sexual Pleasures,” GermaineGreer, long time radical feminist, agonized over how young women are “jeopardizing their health and fertility with potent medications and mischievous gadgetry” in the sterile sexual frenzy she helped initiate a decade ago. Unable to admit that...
Let us praise famous men for their unique ability to talk foolishness and be admired for what they say. Here is Prof. Arthur Schlesinger, lui même, in the Wall Street Journal: Where Washington seems to regard the East European satellites as faithful creatures of the Kremlin, West Europeans see them as restless, discontented and, from the Soviet...
The New York Times Sunday Magazine has produced in print a sentence that unmistakably attests to one of two possibilities: either its editors do not know the meaning of conjunctions, a serious grammatical disability, or their liberalism automatically turns their minds into Tibetan prayer wheels. Here is the sample from a piece on General Vessey,...
Surely the most significant text a man ever starts out to interpret is the compromise that is his own life. The events, ragged and serene, that tempt explanation were shared by others, and so it is with delicacy and humility that the autobiographer should seek to set the record straight—yet all too frequently the public...
Perhaps it was in retaliation for those fried potatoes that are served up in little bags and cartons at McDonald’s that they did it, that they performed an act which is so horribly outlandish. The French, those in question, have always been a very proud people; nowadays, the word French in English seems to be...