More Equal Than Thou Judith A. Baer: Equality Under the Constitution: Reclaiming the Fourteenth Amendment; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. Among the amendments to the Constitution, none were ever more morally justified nor more desperately needed than the three which abolished slavery and gave blacks the rights of citizenship and of equal protection under...
At the Crossroads Not long ago, Mr. Theodore White, connoisseur of presidential elections, crafted a well reasoned, though intellectually prefabricated, article for the New York Times Magazine. His was a solid analysis of this country’s shifting political geology: some major social forces are in the process of crystallizing into defined political powers, moved by ideas...
The Grenada episode has shown, with crystal-clear unambiguity, that the press in America is not only held in contempt and deeply distrusted, but hated-pure and simply. Why is it so? Perhaps the ubiquitous blab—broadcast and printed—that is churned out with a monotonous regularity evokes a loathing of the producers, the liberal media. A case in...
In a recent editorial attacking the Reagan Administration’s Central American policies, The Nation demonstrated once again how pro-Soviet attitudes so warp the mind that even such simple mental tasks as counting and adding and subtracting are no longer possible. Opined The Nation’s casuists: If the State Department was seriously interested in reducing the daily body...
Last full, a holier-than-thou exercise in breast-beating was sponsored by The Nation and The New Republic; it was designated “Were the Rosenbergs Framed?” As expected, the one-up manship lasted long after the programs were littering the floor of Town Hall. Andrew Kopkind, associate editor of The Nation, wrote up the event for his employer, which...
Once again, President Reagan has spoken out about the collapse of the American educational system (and correctly so) and stated facts that will hit anyone who has an average IQ, and one that is uncontaminated by liberal orthodoxy, with a force of a brick: Classrooms across the country are not temples of learning, teaching the...
A General’s Life by Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair; Simon and Schuster; New York. General of the Army Omar N. Bradley’s military career spanned a half-century of dramatic change for the United States. When he entered West Point in 1911, the United States had few military interests beyond its borders; when he retired in 1953,...
A Little Tour in France by Henry James; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York Mark Twain was so disgusted by the superficial and sentimental nonsense in most American travel books that he said he wanted to eat “a tourist for breakfast.” But instead of devouring American tourists he delightfully caricatured their bungling stupidity, their romantic...
Television created a subgenre of music a few years ago that can be designated as “artificial, nonexistent, techno-pop,” which must be differentiated from the succeeding, garden variety of techno-pop aired today by the human/machine combinations known as the Eurythmics, Flock of Seagulls, etc. The original includes the music of The Monkees, that group of well-scrubbed...
The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays by Max Black; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. One of the moderately interesting—and ultimately most annoying—things that one can do with a home computer is to put it into a GOTO loop. That is, a program is a series of steps. To make a loop, the final instruction...
Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans, LA; Volume II. Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans, LA; Volume III Linda Ronstadt and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra; What’s New; Electra/Asylum Records. On the back cover of Volume Ill, the entire Preservation Hall crew is grouped around a table on which is mounted a feast of...
Worstword Ho by Samuel Beckett; Grove Press; New York. The Twofold Vibration by Raymond Federman; Indiana University Press; Boomington. Beckett continues. While there has been a sense of ending from the beginning, the pauses, as he nears 80, seem . . . felt, not studied. Genuine. The words emerge, repeat, proliferate, press onward, enjamb, stall,...
The Work of Atget: The Ancient Re gime; The Museum of Modern Art; New York. Bill Harris: New York at Night; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Robert Freson: The Taste of France; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Ansel Adams: Examples; New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown; Boston. William Manchester: One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering...
House of Slammers by Nathan Heard; Macmillan; New York. “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” So wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in “The Soul and Barbed Wire” about his experience in the Soviet Gulag. Like most inmates in the communist penal system,...
Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze by Norman Bryson; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. Western painting—at least that which was produced before the advent, or onslaught, of photography in the 19th century—shares a characteristic with a trinket that could once be found in cereal boxes and gum ball machines: the flicker ring....
Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton; University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis. To put Mr. Eagleton in the proper light, one might borrow a quotation from his own Walter Benjamin; or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981): Let us review some of the names of the major Marxist aestheticians of the century to date: Lukacs, Goldmann,...
Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film by Erik Barnouw; Oxford University Press; New York. Cinema in our society serves, for the most part, to entertain. This is not to deny the existence of training films—educational tools, which are served by a sizable industry—but to take note of the fact that the cinema is almost...
Gods of Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. In 1971 Philip Jose Farmer published To Your Scattered Bodies Go. With it, Farmer launched, figuratively speaking, what has become known to science fiction devotees as the “Riverworld series.” There were four novels to landfall. Back in that general period of time,...
In the Weekend At The Movies section, the Post, that invincible bastion of D.C. journalism, reports on a movie which is: a decadent, daring film, filthy and full of hard core porn and hard core punks…. The WP’s movie “critic’s” final evaluation: this film is a shocker. Besides sodomy, there’s oral sex and necrophilia. It’s...
An Empty Shell Game A.P. Foulkes: Literature and Propaganda; Methuen; New York. The cover of Literature and Propaganda, the proverbial warning notwithstanding is very telling about the book’s contents and about how perverse the image of America is in the offices of Methuen. Indeed, the cover makes an impression with such a magnitude of force...
A gentleman with impeccable leftist credentials, Mr. Todd Gitlin: Journalism is; memory hole. In the perpetual present of the press, nothing is older than old news. We agree. What’s even worse is that both American liberals and conservatives have a pernicious tendency to confuse history (life’s teacher) with old news (most often valueless trivia).
CBS versus Law & People A little doubt likely invades anyone who listened to a recent CBS Evening News story about the U.S. government’s war on drugs. The network’s “legal” correspondent, one Fred Graham, informed his audience (people’s right to know) that the government was singling out so-called celebrities for investigation. At a certain point...
The Ingersoll Prizes On December 8, 1983, in Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, The Ingersoll Prizes were awarded for the first time. Mr. Jorge Luis Borges was the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, and Mr. James Burnham received the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters. The Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, theologian and...
It was not a letter to the editor, for which a tolerant journal needs not be responsible, but an article, something featured as information, so that its laudable attitude is more than a mere expression of opinion. There we read: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called communists….Is it not to the everlasting...
Léger Peter de Francia: Fernand Léger; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. During the fabulous, legendary, supreme outburst of artistic creativity that occurred during the first three decades of this century, concentrated in Europe between Vitebsk and Pyrenees and called “avant-garde” (or the School of Paris, modern abstraction, fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, constructionism, suprematism, surrealism,...
Recycling Jim Morrison is dead and buried and thriving in Paris. That is a fact, not the name of a new bit for the dinner theater circuit. Morrison — the rock singer who had his loins between his ears and pretentions of being a filmmaker (Pauline Kael admired him) and a poet (a sort of...
Original Thought & Triplicate Forms George Roche: America by the Throat: the Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy; Devin-Adair; Old Grennwich, CT. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr: Conservatives Stalk the House: the Republican Study Committee 1970-1982; Green Hill; Ottawa, IL. Conservatives come in at least two types: those who wish to conserve principles and those who wish to...
Simpering for the Soviets Derek Lambert: The Red Dove; Stein and Day; New York. Anthony Olcott: May Day in Magadan; Bantam Books; New York. At a recent professional conference I had an informal discussion about world affairs with an editor of a metalworking trade journal. A constant concern in that industry, as in automotive, is...
Hugh Bayless: The Best Towns in America; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. A semanticist would have a field day with the title affixed to Mr. Bayless’s efforts. The word “best” is one of the most subjective in the English language. And “town”: What, exactly, are the definitive differences between town, village, municipality, city? (Hint: It isn’t size;...
Jorge Luis Borges once observed that ideally–given an omniscient observer–”an indefinite, and almost infinite” number of biographies could be written about a man, including “the genealogical biography, the economic biography, the psychiatric biography, the surgical biography, the topographical biography.” These and other types ( e.g., the sexual biography) depicting insignificant personalities roll from the presses at...
The debate on how to render America impotent has reached orgasmic intensity. Suddenly, everybody sees atomic war just around the corner; the conventional liberal media are organizing giant scare campaigns (in the name of the people’s right to know), while the radicals, the professional freezeniks, the regular pro-Moscow troops, and all the incorporated communist- front...
In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner created a landmark in American historiography by articulating his thesis that the frontier experience had produced “the forces dominating American character.” Especially during the last 20 years, many historians have challenged the validity of Turner’s views, arguing that European culture remained the primary influence upon American...
Once again (though it is only the second time), there is a black contender for the Presidency–and it is a glorious moment, for it shows that we are true to ourselves in that we are living up to the most intrinsic promises of our free society, pluralistic democracy, and the Constitution–the sources of all our...
At a recent gathering in San Francisco, the National Council of Churches considered an application for membership from the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, which teaches that homosexuality is “a gift from God.” Most of the 27,000 members of this church are so gifted. In championing the cause of this denomination, liberal Methodist theologian...
Within a social stratum that may be described as very wealthy and very liberal, The New Yorker is venerated as the “Sovereign One”–which is the “in” synonym for the Lord in the new lectionary issued by those charming theologians from the National Council of Churches who have decided to rewrite the Book. Actually, for more than a...
Ned Rorem is a composer. And a Pultizer Prize (1976) winner at that. He is also his own favorite subject: listed among his titles are The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, with which he started his career as a writer in 1966, and The New York Diary (not A), both of which will soon see fresh...
The jeremiads were not devoid of a certain poignancy. Anchormen and columnists filled their “spaces,” both the psychological ones and those allocated to them during the prime time or on editorial pages, without bursts of the most righteous anger witnessed since Lancelot went on rampage and King Lear filled theaters with the outrage of sorrow....
Upon his return from conversing with God upon the top of Sinai, Moses began the work of reclaiming straying Israel by demanding, “Who is on the Lord’s side?” Upon their return from ecclesiastical conferences held at somewhat lower altitudes and with rather less distinguished guest speakers, thousands of American and European clergy men are now...
To a world of parched souls, Jesus Christ offered the Water of Life. Unlike club soda, however this Water is not a good mixer: in order to refresh, it must be taken straight, and on the Rock For centuries, men have attempted to concoct heady new “Christianity-and-” brews, but the disappointing result is always temporary...
Among all those courageous spirits who forsook religious and traditional norms in favor of the beatific self-fulfillment promised by the sexual revolution, the names of William Masters and Virginia Johnson have long been invoked with deep reverence. As one sexologist in New York City explained: “Masters was the prototypical godlike figure that people hesitated to...
As a distinctively modern genre, the short story does not require any earth-straddling heroes, merely ordinary people. It does require, however, an author with extraordinary perception of how small events may reveal a spark of the transcendent–or a shadow of the fiendish–even in dry goods clerks or grade-school teachers. Maxine Steinman was such a rare writer....
In his last novel, The Orchids, Mr. Cook wrote about nazis. His latest production, Tabernacle, concerns itself with a group of people he evidently finds just as awful: the Mormons. A resident of Cape Cod, Mr. Cook obviously hasn’t spent much more time with Mormons than he had with nazis, so his portrayal of them is even more superficial...
In the days after the Beirut massacre of October 1983 both the print and electronic media went into their instant business of interviewing. People’s most frequent reaction to the reporters’ questions was in the form of a question: “Why are we, that is the Marines, there in the first place?” Of course, a phalanx of...
A cultural paradigm should be a positive one, an object that, through its very being, encourages emulation. If that model is a man or woman, a hero or a heroine, then that person should, at all visible times and in all apparent ways (i.e., let’s acknowledge privacy as a personal need, People and National Enquirer to...
Voices are heard from the British Islands that are highly critical of Mr. Reagan’s decision to do something about that other little island–Grenada. Let us take a brief peek at what for the last two centuries has been called in history books the perfidyof Albion. Once it was a world calamity, but today it seems more...
Eerdmans justly enjoys a reputation as one of America’s leading Christian publishers; however, as modern Christianity itself becomes increasingly fragmented and secularized, publishing books that try to represent the whole of it, as these two volumes do, becomes increasingly problematic. Though the United States has never been united by a single communion or creed, until...
Although a world safe from nuclear destruction is an ideal that all civilized people should pray for, as a practical matter, it is an impossibility. Nuclear weapons exist and will continue to do so until the time that (a) they have been used and so only rubble remains or (b) they have been replaced by...
Benjamin Disraeli and John Henry Cardinal Newman are credited with bringing intriguing imponderables into the syndrome of conservative philosophies. Theirs was, in Russell Kirk’s phrase, “conservatism of imagination,” a rather vague category of cognition and judgment. In fact, Disraeli’s historical image is deceptively coherent, definable, even simple: he’s perceived as an astute statesman, dedicated to...
With a sense of sweet justice muted only by the most basic human considerations, we read of one event in New York’s end-of-summer season: the mugging of two prominent socialites, big stars on the Manhattan lib jet-set firmament, both shining lights of Vogue and WWD. The deliciously exciting romp took place in the East End-Carl...
Jorge Luis Borges is anything but easy to accept, absorb, comprehend, and emotionally embrace. It’s not that his poems, short stories, and essays are all hard to read, for some of them have the lucidity and pure tone of a crystal form seen and struck. Others are admittedly trying, especially for those not cognizant of...