Category: Cultural Revolutions

Guns N Roses, the rock group, said they liked being white, the music business fell on them like a ton of discs. But racial music is not always insensitive. With what Washington Post music critic David Mills calls “unprecedented directness,” Black Muslim rappers are hitting the charts with records preaching their esoteric doctrines. These include...

The GATT Trade talks in Europe collapsed and surprised advocates of the new international order. American officials tagged blame on the nations of Western Europe and Japan for their intransigent unwillingness to dismantle national farm programs sheltering indigenous rural communities. Our negotiators blasted the irrational protection of obsolete jobs and an incomprehensible subsidy to undercapitalized,...

At the Univ. of Texas, in answer to criticism that he has turned a freshman English composition class into a one-sided debate on political correctness, English department chairman Joseph Kruppa has made several strongly worded replies. The concerns of his most outspoken critic, Professor Alan Gribben, are “nonsense.” Gribben et al. are “people of bad...

Washington’s gerrymandering of job seekers’ test scores to comport with egalitarian fantasy has given us a glimpse of the testing center of the future. On university campuses, the proctors will be apostles of Political Correctness. Armed with a high-tech apparatus that can detect signs of brain activity, they will prowl the test centers and activate...

The Respectable Right turned savagely against Michael Levin last spring for holding unacceptable views on the reasons for differing levels of measurable intelligence among the races. Thus Peter Collier, in organizing a Second Thoughts conference for those who had rallied to “democracy” from the 60’s New Left, disinvited, after having invited, the controversial Professor Levin....

The Bolshevik Revolution’s 73rd anniversary set the stage for an angry dissident’s attempt to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev at an outdoor rally. It would have been the first shot of the coming Russian revolution, which may be peaceful, but more likely not. Time is running out for peaceful change. Gorbachev’s new Treaty of the Union is...

American education is today so bureaucratized that every increase in tax monies poured into the system produces less real learning. We now spend approximately 33 percent more in real terms ($5,638) per capita on students in elementary and secondary schools than we did ten years ago, but all valid measures show a decrease in learning...

Filming an execution at San Quentin Prison is what San Francico’s KQED has asked the U.S. District Court in California for permission to do: it wants the unedited tape to run nationwide over the Public Broadcasting Service network. KQED is not doing this merely to get higher audience ratings. It thinks that once people see...

The NEA’s future has now been decided, the decision is by consensus, and the conservative position has prevailed. Chairman John Frohnmayer said so in a little-noticed appearance at the Newsmakers Breakfast at the National Press Club last September 17. Here is what he said: First, “I have argued all along that internal management reform and...

What is the art world’s state in America today? The answer depends on whom you talk to and what they do. Some of the answers I’ve heard are: rich, poor, over- and underfunded, neglected, status-laden, censored, silly, profound, personal, public, patriotic, obscene, sacrilegious, attacked, elitist, sexist, postmodern, pluralistic, and so on. And all are true....

Syria’s conquest of Lebanon is the first fruits of the Bush administration’s Middle Eastern policy. While 200,000 American soldiers were fighting off boredom in Saudi Arabia, our newest noble ally in the region, “President” Assad of Syria, was storming the Christian positions in Beirut. With a 40,000-man force that included hundreds of Soviet T-54 tanks,...

The art world, never a place for the linear-minded and logical among us, seems to be in an exceptionally strange way these days. Here a woman “performance artist” makes a career of doing vile things with yams while squeaking about phallocentrism; there a young man, presumably in the same spirit, castrates himself before a camera....

No major city in this country concedes that its major hospital is a pest-house, or that its museums display junk, or that its symphony orchestra squeaks. Nor are cities satisfied with inadequate schools. In medicine, the arts and music, politics and government, and primary and secondary education, there is good but no “best.” Yet we...

The Immigration and Naturalization Service announced last June that to “regain control of the border” the INS will now begin to deport and possibly jail aliens and smugglers entering our country illegally. If you’re wondering whether this hasn’t been INS policy all along, think again. In the Southwest, repeat offenders have traditionally been released just...

Barnard College’s “First Year Seminar Committee” has decided to use a grant from the Ford Foundation to encourage the faculty to use the works of “minority women” in their courses. So reports Herbert London in the Spring 1990 issue of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. It seems that faculty members...

A year after Hugo: the Good Morning America helicopter made several passes over the creek today in preparation for the “one year anniversary of Hurricane Hugo” programming that was aired in September. Two of my shrimping relatives went in the ocean instead of participating in the ground-based interviews filmed in advance. Surely a good sign....

When the NEA’S Council and chairman last July refused to fund four of the eighteen “solo performers and mime” grants the NEA staff had recommended, there was a tremendous reaction from the artists involved and the Joseph Papp crowd. Rejected! went the headline in the Washington Post‘s Show section. Most of the coverage concentrated on...

Freedom of Religion is important to Americans. So is freedom of expression. Both freedoms are traditionally guaranteed by the First Amendment, which prohibits government interference in religious freedom either by establishing a religion or by forbidding religious exercises. What was not envisaged was that the “free expression” provisions of the same amendment—from which the freedoms...

The IAS’s directorship today resembles the Presidency from Kennedy to Carter—a series of one-termers. Three directors have come and gone in not 13 years, with directors having left the job, dropped the job, or been driven from the job. Now with Marvin Goldberger’s departure without finishing even his first five-year appointment (whether he was fired...

Machiavelli, in answer to the question of whether a prince should prefer gold or arms, replied that arms were the logical choice since gold could not always buy a strong military but a strong military could usually acquire wealth. This answer had not changed three and a half centuries later when Kipling wrote, “Gold for...

Noncompliance with the 1990 census was massive: the Wall Street Journal reported on May 21 that only 75 percent of the forms had been filled out and sent in, “down from 90 percent a decade ago.” That’s good. Passive resistance against such intrusions is the least we should expect of ourselves as citizens. Thirty years...

Harvard University, in 1959, refused more than $350,000 in money offered for student loans by the National Defense Education Act in the wake of the Soviets’ Sputnik shock because of the requirement that students submit to an oath and an affidavit of loyalty and noncommunist affiliation. Harvard President Nathan B. Pusey stated that the demand...

Nelson Mandela idolized? Am I the only one who didn’t do a spastic street dance over his arrival in America? Tell him to take “power” in the wrong African language? California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown said being with Mandela was like “being in the presence of God.” A worshiper along the parade route in New...

“Don’t Vote, it Only Encourages Them” goes the bumpersticker, and it is only one among many signs of voter unrest. Another proposal, newly revived and cropping up in states like Oklahoma and South Dakota, is to reform Congress by limiting congressional terms. Back in 1978 two then-freshman senators, John Danforth and Dennis DeConcini, sponsored legislation...

A tale of two prisoners. Nelson Mandela spent many years under arrest. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent many years in a slave labor camp, as a fugitive and exile, and as a nonperson. Mandela resisted a mildly repressive regime by terrorism. Solzhenitsyn resisted a brutal totalitarian state by heroism and eloquence. Mandela sought the bestowal of benefits...

The Univ. of Michigan has not given up. Federal District Court Judge Avern Cohn’s August 1989 ruling that Michigan’s anti-discrimination and discriminatory harassment policy (inaugurated in April 1988) was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad merely sent administrators back to their drawing boards. After implementing an interim policy last September, University President James Duderstadt assembled three committees...

William J. Brennan, Jr., has retired from the Supreme Court. In three decades on the nation’s highest court Brennan did more, perhaps, than any other American politician except for Lyndon Johnson to promote the agenda of the liberal left: the antiwhite racism of the “Jim Snow” system, radical feminism, the reduction of the authority of...

Walker Percy never tired of asking a simple question: why are people happy in circumstances that ought to make them miserable? It was a question he set for himself in his first collection of philosophical essays, The Message in the Bottle, and in one way or another his best novels—The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love...

Mills College recently repulsed the male invasion invited by the college’s board of trustees, and it will remain all female, for the immediate future at any rate. At the same time, in the once proudly independent Commonwealth of Virginia, the state’s attorney general, a woman, is attempting to defend the prestigious Virginia Military Institute against...

Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man’s former colleague, a Jew and, while not a scholar in Judaic studies, nonetheless a considerable presence in Jewish scholarship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, has had to face the fact that the man whose theory of literature he advanced was an...

The NEA is broken, so lets fix it. What has gone wrong in the debate over the National Endowment for the Arts is that the extremes have crowded out the middle, and the NEA, like the NEH, should be a consensus-building agency. The one side invokes an apocalyptic vision of censorship, and the other side...

The Simpsons is both the hottest and the most controversial program on television. At first sight, a cartoon show for children and adults is not promising material for “equality” TV (remember The Flintstones? The Jetsons?). Worse, the graphic style of the show is as disturbing as any drawing we have ever printed in Chronicles: The...

Free-Market Environmentalists, that small band of economists, didn’t talk much about the National Park Service in the early 1980’s. In their effort to convince the public that the government is often a poor steward, they concentrated on commodity-producing agencies that are supposed to be efficient, agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of...

Children are dying in an increasing number of ingenious ways, and the only thing more disturbing than this trend is the even more ingenious way in which society is rationalizing and legally justifying their deaths. Two-year-old Robyn Twitchell died at his parents’ home in Massachusetts on April 8, 1986, after suffering for five days with...

50,000 Haitian immigrants gathered in the streets of New York the other month, angry at an FDA hint that they consider not giving blood. With the appalling AIDS rate among Haitians, and the ease with which some infected blood can pass the screening tests, it seemed an unobjectionable idea. But not in Manhattan, 1990. You...

The 1980’s were supposed to be the conservative decade. Not in Fairfax County, Virginia. This past winter at Annandale High, the school’s students fought a battle over placing a $40 advertisement from a homosexual “youth group” in the school paper. Offered by the “Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League” (SMYAL), which is based in Washington, D.C.’s...

The Yale Lit. has returned, but not in the form that some Chronicles readers may remember from the early 80’s, when Andrei Navrozov was editor. The undergraduate magazine (est. 1836) he turned into a national quarterly of arts, letters, and politics finished its run through the courts in 1986 and has now returned to the...

San Francisco, the AIDS capital of the nation, is presumably a city that should be open to a variety of views on how to combat the virus. As the experience of Dr. Lorraine Day of San Francisco General Hospital suggests, the greater the concentration of homosexuals and AIDS carriers in an area, the narrower the...

Ryan White’s death in Indianapolis on Palm Sunday attracted nationwide attention. In retrospect, it is apparent that the initial public reaction to Ryan’s illness, demanding his exclusion from school, was as unwarranted as it was cruel. However, it is important to recognize that when his disease was first diagnosed, in 1984, AIDS was still considered...

When IAS (the institute for Advanced Study), the research center that takes pride in having housed Einstein, told the National Endowment for the Humanities last December to take its money and shove it, the New York Times responded with a front-page, four column headline: “Endowment Embattled Over Academic Freedom.” But it appears there was much...

The fiscal 1991 budget proposed by President Bush totaled some $1.2 trillion. This prodigious amount, larger than the entire Gross National Product of twenty years ago, is considered a “tight budget” in Washington. Politicians complain that they cannot find enough money to finance programs, while the hunt has been on to find programs to cut...

Arthur Asher Shenfield died on February 13 at the age of 80. A British lawyer and economist, he spent much of the last three decades as a visiting professor at American colleges and universities, setting forth with rare vigor and clarity the principles of the free market and its role as the only economic system...

The 1990 census arrived last week, along with the usual past due notices and Gold Card applications. I am one of the lucky Americans who received the long form, which asks for such inconsequential data as how much I earn, which of the myriad minorities I swear allegiance to, and how much money I spent...

Americans have always had a healthy suspicion of government snooping. When George Washington’s administration undertook the first census in 1790, under the supervision of Thomas Jefferson, it only counted heads. Yet the public resisted on a massive scale. At that time, Americans were widely familiar with the biblical anti-census story of First Samuel. King David...

Apartheid is the sole issue ever discussed in this country with regard to South Africa. Readers and viewers must occasionally ask themselves whether that huge and varied country, with almost four times the area of France, presents really nothing but a two-dimensional picture, without any depth, any culture, any search for identity in a truly...

Mikhail Gorbachev has it, so do Jesse Jackson, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Violetta Chamorro. John Kennedy personified it, Ronald Reagan scripted it, and Michael Dukakis experienced what life can be like for a politician without it. It’s how success and failure in national politics is so often now spelled: it’s c-h-a-r-i-s-m-a. Like so many...

Europeans accuse Americans of being childocentric, and I guess I’d have to plead guilty. My nine-year-old daughter is the apple of my eye. I want her to live in a society that is moral and free, that looks as much as possible like the old American Republic, unsubverted by the welfare-warfare state and its allied...

With the Cold War “over,” social engineers are scrambling for the “peace dividend”—the bonanza of cash expected to derive from a winding down of military expenditures that have been allocated to defend against the Soviet military threat. Regardless of the status of the Cold War and of the Soviet threat, and that is by no...

William Bennett, in a speech at Harvard, chided America’s intellectuals for criticizing the war on drugs without having done their homework. As is his custom, Dr. Bennett laid down some bad news that was as well-founded as it was unwelcome. Notable among the poorly informed agitators to whom he referred are the advocates of drug...

A defense of drug addicts another one, in the pages of our family magazine? But defend them we must; this time from prohibitionists who would carry on the fight in utero. Recent cases in Wyoming and Michigan have seen pregnant women being brought up on charges of delivering drugs and alcohol to a minor—not through...