Category: Correspondence

Since 1940, the Batavia Clippers have played baseball in the lowest of the low minors, the Class A (formerly D) New York-Pennsylvania (nee PONY) League. The ballpark, Dwyer Stadium, named for the shoe store owner who served as club president for decades, is just one block from my parents’ house, so I’ve spent many hundreds...

I’m back in Manhattan Criminal Court for another round of The People of the State of New York v. Robert Spencer, looking at a misdemeanor conviction. At previous court appearances, the People have offered me plea-bargains of fines and community service, but I’m toughing it out to clear my name. I’ve been caught in a...

The mural is old and faded, a reminder of headier days when the world looked ripe for violent revolution. Three years of neglect, the effects of a tropical climate, and petty vandalism have combined to give the mural its present appearance of a long-forgotten billboard along some abandoned stretch of rural highway. Yet the huge...

The creative writing students in the small seminar room at Ateneo University in Metro Manila were answering my question about the relation of language to politics in the Philippines. With that youthful energy that is each generation’s greatest natural resource they talked about the “feudal system” Filipinos have lived under, about the centrality of village...

It should be a property owner’s dream. Thirteen acres in the heart of America’s largest city, bordered by two of its most prominent streets, Broadway and 42nd Street. Famous shopping and tourist attractions are all within walking distance. Broadway theaters, Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Madison Square Garden. Major transportation hubs like...

Earlier this year my 12-year-old son and I had a knock-down-drag-out fight over patriotism and the evils of media influence. What incident set off these family fireworks? Was it the current U.N. wars or the influx of foreign goods? Was it Dan Rather or MTV? No, it was something much more important. My son, who...

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is keeping pace with the rest of the Church in America as it embraces the usual causes and crusades under the banners of “community” and “equality” while all but shedding Catholic inconveniences like Mortal Sin and Sanctifying Grace. Apparently salvation now depends more on the sincerity of your handshake of peace...

Eastern Europe’s adversary today, now that communism is dead, is the melange of brutal liberalism pouring in as an ideological menace from America. Those who will shape the new Eastern Europe want very much a renewal of cultural links with the West, but they already sense that a severe selection will have to be effected...

Many alumni of a junior year abroad summarize their experience as “enjoyable,” “enlightening,” or even “empowering.” Others rely on their senses in recalling the niceties of life in another country: they remember the smell of warm bread wafting from a pâtisserie, the sight of a bustling and colorful Saturday-morning market, the sound of high-pitched horns...

Jan Myrdal, the brooding bad boy of Swedish letters, agreed to meet with me on a Sunday afternoon, at his home near the village of Mariefred. I went to ask this iconoclastic celebrant of China’s Cultural Revolution (Report From a Chinese Village), merciless public critic of his famous parents Gunnar and Alva (Childhood), and author...

Wap! Someone just punched me, going down the subway stairs from the elevated. Behind me, I hear girlish, teenaged laughter. No accident here. I turn to my assailant, a 12- or 13-year-old black girl and tell her she’d better keep her hands to herself. “You better keep on walkin’, I don’t talk to no white...

It is reported that “faithful adherence to legal principle sometimes [takes] a back seat to the more compelling demands of politics.” This appears to be a pointed assessment of a little-publicized controversy surrounding the pardon of four convicts by last year’s Acting Governor of Arkansas, dentist Jerry Jewell. As president pro tempore of the state...

It’s been a while since my last roundup of regional news, so some of these items have a little age on them, but you probably missed them anyway, so they’ll be news to you, right? An implicit theme (not implicit now that I’ve mentioned it, I guess) is that Southern culture is still kicking, even...

Sheldon Hackney, president of the University of Pennsylvania, was recently chosen to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Hackney has been described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as something of a moderate with a passion for free expression. I won’t rehash his credentials as a defender of free speech, except to say...

Last October I journeyed to Moscow by invitation for a conference on conversion from military to civilian production. Upon arrival, my colleague, Professor Constantine Danopoulos of the political science department at San Jose State University, and I were informed that the meeting had been shifted to December to coincide with the Congress of the Supreme...

My, how time flies, sir. It seems like only yesterday (it was in late November 1991, actually) that you were apologizing after being caught telling a so-called gay-bashing anti-lesbian joke to Jerry Brown. You remember, the one that was inadvertently picked up by a C-Span microphone. I thought that what was wrong with the joke...

January in Jackson—well, it wasn’t April in Paris, but it had its pleasures, among them the chance to compare the Magnolia State to the more northerly South I know better. I was lecturing at Millsaps College, staying in a nearby motel with a view from my window of the quaint little observatory that figures in...

Basically, the Yugoslav problem is simple: it is a war of vanities, of various ethnic and religious groups vying for supremacy. If this sounds familiar to American and other Western readers, the parallel is intentional: after all, it was Tito, the arch-communist, who first implemented the New World Order of former President George Bush, of...

The tumultuous events at the New York Post over the last few months serve as a perfect metaphor for New York. This oldest daily in the United States, established by Alexander Hamilton, is (as I write) fighting for its life amid courtroom recriminations over its ownership and purported losses of $1.5 million a week. When...

In the aftermath of a conference not long ago, a dozen of us spent a night in downtown Little Rock. (No, this wasn’t the Economic Summit. It was a gathering of poets, novelists, and essayists to discuss Southern autobiography, and the talk was a whole lot better.) All in all, I’m a little more cheerful...

In the twilight, the machine gunner holds aloft the dissembled barrel of his weapon, his hands oily and stained, and grins at me. White-toothed, red-haired, he wears his beret like a bonnet. Cocky, not too large, he laughs, then swears a heavy, loaded Serbian curse, unsparing of the Croats. The machine gunner is a Kraina...

Last year I had the agreeable and unusual experience of spending two hours in a packed sports stadium where there was no hooliganism, no violence, and no bad feeling. The good-humored crowd of thousands of men, women, and children, mainly local but with a fair sprinkling of foreigners assembled, enjoyed themselves and dispersed in a...

Back in February, a USA Today story on black historical sites mentioned a “Black Confederate Memorial” in Canton, Mississippi, a “20-foot obelisk . . . built in 1894 to honor Harvey’s Scouts, one of the black units that operated behind Union lines to harass supply shipments.” As it happened, I read that story while spending...

We have it on good authority that the peacemakers are blessed, and that’s only fair, because we sure catch hell in this world. Not long ago I suggested that most Southerners who display the Confederate flag are not bigots and got some hate mail to the effect that only a bigot could believe that. Last...

Though my wife and I make our part-time home in Florida, in the port town of Fort Pierce, for the past six years we have made it a custom to attend Memorial Day services at Vero Beach a few miles up Route AIA. How this custom began we cannot recall; but each year, rain or...

If there is one constant at yard sales, estate auctions, and second-hand bookstores in this state, it is the presence of old books, Bibles, classics, and diverse texts that once made splashes before sinking into obscurity. Perhaps the most frequently seen volume, after the Bible, is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a book that, again, was...

Half a century ago Puerto Rico was the poorest country in the West, including Haiti. At that time I was living penuriously in what was to become New York’s Spanish Harlem, then the preserve of Italian immigrants. This Little Italy of the Upper East Side was virtually ruled by the colorful communist Congressman Vito Marcantonio,...

In an earlier letter I cheered my buddy Chris’s suggestion that announcements at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics be given in both Southern and Yankee English but pointed out that on preliminary form Atlanta’s civic leaders are unlikely to cotton to the idea. I didn’t mention another of Chris’s proposals, one they’re guaranteed to like even...

On August 24, 1992, shortly after 3 A.M.. Hurricane Andrew hit the coast at Miami, in South Dade County, Florida. A “Category Four” hurricane on the Saper-Simpson Hurricane Scale, Andrew struck with 145 m.p.h. winds, making it the worst hurricane to hit Miami since 1926. In fact, this was the worst hurricane to hit a...

Through the mysterious alchemy of “social justice,” criminals become martyr-saints. Habitual criminal Rodney King is now spoken of in the same pious tone once reserved for icons like plagiarist/philanderer Martin Luther King, Jr. William Andrews, who was executed last year by the state of Utah for his role in the 1974 torture-slayings of three people,...

Ambling through the Museum of the History of the City of Helsinki I find myself in a small projection room where a film about the history of Helsinki during the last 70 years is shown. It is poignant and telling. There are shots from the late 1930’s of young, smiling, large-boned Finnish women in their...

It was late October, and my old friend was very depressed: “I’m not interested in any of these guys,” he said of all the presidential candidates. “I’m only interested in one thing in this election.” His voice grew warmer: “The reelection of ‘Senator Pothole.'” Senator Alfonse D’Amato, the only Republican victorious in a statewide election...

Welcome to Darlington. The cradle of Southern stock car racing. The sport was born near here the first time a U.S. Revenue agent figured that he could catch a moonshiner running along a twisty hack road with a car load of booze. No way. . . . Darlington is tradition. First of the big tracks...

The euphoria that accompanied the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, should still be fresh in our minds. We remember the scenes of people dancing on the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, total strangers embracing each other, sharing bottles of champagne. We remember the party atmosphere that culminated in reunification...

Not long ago, during the glory days of the Gulf War, Stephen J. Solarz, ferret-faced little Democratic congressman from southern Brooklyn, was riding almost as high in the saddle as our Commander-in-Chief. For it was Solarz who played the major role in dragging his often- reluctant liberal colleagues away from their traditional dovish stance into...

Yes, I know I promised to write about the Georgia state flag controversy, but that prospect was too depressing. Let me address instead a couple of more entertaining topics, namely the 43rd annual Mountain Dew Southern 500 NASCAR Winston Cup Series Race and the recent presidential election. By the time you read this you’ll know...

There’s something about a book sale. The blood quickens, the nostrils flare, the eyes narrow. Anyway, it’s for a good cause. The “Friends of the Library” are putting it on, and somewhere among those one hundred thousand used books is at least one of value. The doors open and in we rush. Almost at once,...

Early in my first Russian-language course, our professor noted that the word for “Sunday” is the same as the word for “resurrection.” Somebody asked her how that word had managed to survive under 70 years of totalitarian atheism. She replied that Russian is so permeated with Christian images that it would be impossible to remove...

My Downtown is dying. That is perhaps saying too little; Downtown is nearly dead. The neat, grid-patterned, wellpayed streets of the old Baton Rouge, the white hot cement Huey Long pounded Florsheim heel and toe against, the small optimistic stores set up in the 30’s and 40’s and equipped with illuminated signs in the 50’s...

From the barrio of South Tucson, the Tucson Mountains appeared clean and sharp like hammered copper on a clear morning following the equipata or winter rains, nearly the season’s last; the glassy towers downtown held the sky reflected in squares of wavery unnatural blue. The university students were on spring break and already the snowbirds...

I chose the three words in my title because they summarize the situation in Eastern Europe, a situation simple yet complicated, tragic yet full of hope. I apologize for the cliches, but they become more profound as this article proceeds. Notwithstanding those who advertise the “clear and present danger” of a communist comeback (and who...

Elbridge Gerry’s infamous salamander district pales in comparison to the monster- like menagerie birthed in redistricted states that fall under the preclearance requirement of Section Five of the federal Voting Rights Act. Although Virginia’s state constitution requires that “every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory,” the feds overruled it and mandated...

Yeah, I know we’ve got two Southerners running on the Democratic ticket. Don’t rub it in, OK? As Miss Scarlett used to say, I’ll think about it tomorrow. Let’s talk about sports. As you probably know, in four years jocks and TV cameramen from around the world will converge on Dixie for the next Olympic...

In Europe today there is a youthful yearning for a new genesis and a desire to overcome the legacy of World War II. While a facile model of one generation rejecting the last is a tempting one to offer as explanation, in fact, the emerging “New Right” seeks both a connection and a rejection to...

Last spring I picked up our student newspaper to read this sentence in a front-page story: “Statistics show that one out of every four UNC females will be sexually assaulted while in college.” Wow. The University of North Carolina has roughly 15,000 undergraduates (leave the graduate students out of it), something over half of them...

The American Indians are on the warpath and with good reason, it would seem. For at least two hundred years their grave sites have been desecrated simply to satisfy the curiosity of the White Man. On the defensive, archaeologists are arguing that in all cultures studied graves are one of the best sources of information....

Harvard University publishes a glossy magazine called, of course, Harvard Magazine. It is sent free once in a while to all graduates, and bimonthly to those who send in some annual amount. It is an extraordinary public-relations vehicle; only the surliest of alumni would choose to take a dim view of such an outpouring of...

There is a fairly long gestation period for alumni wrath, which does not fully come into being until the end of the year. That’s when every organization in the world calls or sends letters asking for a tax-deductible donation. With the chirpy dunning notices and billets-doux come the hard choices: do I send money to...

What an Austrian news magazine terms the “March on Vienna,” Jörg Haider’s “Freedom Party” took 23 percent of the November 1991 vole. Remarkably, this had followed a dismal showing four years earlier when his party garnered only 8 percent of the total vole and appeared on the verge of deterioration. Handsome and energetic, the 42-year-old...

Did you notice last spring how the national media-the New York Times, Newsweek, NPR, all of them-almost simultaneously began talking about “the Bubba vote”? I seriously doubt that many of these folks have actually met Bubba, much less discussed politics with him, but at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Contest they sure could...