Category: Cultural Revolutions

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...

The abortion question seems to have reached an unfortunate standoff. Just as the federal judiciary has seen fit to allow more scope for pro-life legislation, it would appear that public opinion, registered in the election returns (as interpreted), has turned against the pro-life position. If it is true that Americans are more pro-abortion now than...

A friend of mine sat recently on the planning committee for a large regional scholarly organization’s annual convention. It is not the kind of convention I attend, because I usually cannot afford it and I found out long ago that nothing of intellectual substance ever happens at such meetings. I prefer small specialized groups where...

Manuel Antonio Noriega, Panama’s crater-faced ex-dictator, may or may not wind up in a gringo calaboose for the rest of his life. After the first blush of the US victory over Gen. Noriega’s Panamanian Defense Force began to wear a bit gray, legal authorities in the United States suddenly realized they might not have much...

The Dept. of Education, in its seemingly endless quest to discover new ways for students and teachers to waste their time, has approved a high-school course on the holocaust. Centered around a 400-page textbook called “Facing History and Ourselves,” the course is a semester-long exercise in intellectual and psychological nosepicking, an extended submersion into irrationalism...

Peggy Buckey’s acquittal and the acquittal of her son Raymond Buckey on 52 counts of child molestation brought an end to a highly publicized and exhausting criminal trial. Less noticed, perhaps, were postmortems on the case by jury members, who described the excesses and strange ironies of a governmental crusade “to save our children.” The...

Senator Paul Simon (D-IL), former presidential candidate, wants to abolish Chief Illiniwek, mascot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Chief, a student who performs a war dance at halftime during UI football and basketball games, has recently been denounced by campus malcontents, on the usual grounds (“racism,” etc.). Simon, attending the “36th Annual...

The Washington Post‘s liberal black columnist William Raspberry once said something reasonable on race (he defended the Boy Scouts against charges that their name was racist when applied to blacks). But the DC thought police would have “wilded” any white who made a similar comment. Whites aren’t even allowed to make political criticisms. Just recently,...

That Congress has never been held in greater contempt at any time in its two centuries is something all available evidence, whether statistical or impressionistic, indicates. When our noble Conscript Fathers, a few months back, undertook to promote themselves a little pay raise, public outrage achieved its greatest negative unanimity since the Japanese hit Pearl...

The Institute for Advanced Study, the research center in Princeton, New Jersey, was founded 60 years ago around the figure of Albert Einstein. When I was named member (1989-1990) the inestimable William Safire said to me, “Oh, Jack! That’s where they send the geniuses!” So strong is the presence of Einstein that people hereabouts readily...

K-12 education in America is, nationally, a disaster—that is something everyone seems to agree on. But on the local level, the parents of schoolchildren are hearing a different story. In a 1988 study an educational watchdog group called Friends for Education discovered that all of the 50 states were reporting that their elementary and secondary...

Barry Sadler, the Vietnam veteran who wrote and recorded “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” died in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, last November 5. He was 49 years old. Sadler had been shot in the forehead in Guatemala City in September 1988, an incident that had left him brain damaged and partially paralyzed. The cause of death...

The NEA is back to business as-before—if anybody thought our elected representatives had any intention of listening to the will of voters, the recent NEA waffle and the newly revived congressional pay hike would squelch those fantasies. Under pleas from both parties not to make the pay hike a “partisan” issue, an increase for the folks...

The Peace Corp is going to the aid of glasnost and perestroika. President Bush has proposed the sending of the Peace Corps to Hungary and Poland, and Peace Corps director Paul Coverdell and staff are busy making the necessary arrangements. Peace Corps press officer Jim Flanigan says this marks “no great departure” from the Peace...

“Trade without frontiers”—when the European Economic Community talks about barrier-free trade, the wall begins at Spain and the US is left on the wrong side of it, as the Bush administration, which has supported the coming federation of Europe, is beginning to discover. In October the EEC voted 10 to 2 to adopt a set...

The politics of race—mayoral candidate Rudi Giuliani realized after the September 12 primary that to win as a Republican in a Democratic town like New York, he would have to get a large chunk of liberal and centrist Jews to desert David Dinkins’ ticket. As soon as the primary was over, therefore, the Giuliani campaign...

The Soviet Empire these days offers a formidable challenge even for the most experienced Kremlin watchers. While economic collapse, the communications revolution, the threat of another nuclear disaster like Chernobyl, the decline in life expectancy, and the environmental crisis are all tinder for fires of change, the power of nationalism still remains central. Shortly after...

“Imperial Congress”—many in the conservative movement are denouncing it these days. From all over the right, we hear worries about slipping presidential prerogatives, or denunciations of Congress’s “meddling” in foreign policy. But I would argue that it is the Imperial Presidency that threatens our freedom. Too often. Congress simply lays down in front of the...

Selective pernicious amnesia is the endemic disease of Establishment politics. Its symptoms are evident whenever the Soviet Union does something awful—like delivering six sophisticated Su-24D bombers to Libya, as it did in March 1988, or excusing the sinking of an advanced Soviet attack submarine in the Norwegian Sea last April, a submarine that, the Soviet...

South Africa has been unable to deflect interference with its exercise of sovereign rights within its own borders. Other states have declared that racial discrimination as practiced in South Africa is such an egregious offense against “fundamental human rights” that interference is required, and since the Carter administration, the United States has relentlessly asserted that...

The Disabilities Act is likely to entertain C-SPAN viewers for months to come. The bill, which in its current form is a compromise worked out between the Bush administration and congressional Democrats, extends sweeping civil rights protection to the nation’s blind, deaf, lame, and degenerate (AIDS is, of course, a handicap). Times being what they...

Freedom Association has come to mean no freedom of dissociation, at least not in Madison, Wisconsin. There a city statute barring discrimination in housing has been interpreted by the Madison Equal Opportunities Commission (MEOC) to apply to roommates. In other words, when Ann Hacklander and Maureen Rowe were told by their prospective roommate Cari Sprague...

The Anti-Drug Crusade contains the common hype along with always-commendable pledges to crack down on drug criminals and introduce “zero tolerance” for users. Nonetheless, President Bush’s war on drugs can only fail, for it insists on attacking the symptoms of the problem rather than the real disease itself. Social research on the use of illegal...

The phenomenon of popular movements of protest succeeding and then being swallowed up by the Establishment is not a new story in American history, but the fate of “conservatism” in the last decade or so gives a remarkable case study. Not long ago, after ages of liberal dominance, conservatism seemed to be in the ascendancy...

Illegal aliens rank high on any social reformer’s list of priorities. At the very time millions of tax dollars are being spent to patrol our borders and to prosecute the illegals, CUNY—the City University of New York—announced in August that not only will it continue to welcome illegal aliens into its fold, but it will...

Publicly Funded Art is causing a stir now in Los Angeles, where a mural citing (in part) the Pledge of Allegiance has drawn fire from a neighborhood group. The Little Tokyo Community Development Advisory Committee complained that placing a mural featuring the pledge above LA’s Little Tokyo was, at the very least, insensitive to the...

Witches and Satanists tax-exempt? When we raised the issue in the September 1988 Chronicles, several members of the nation’s clerical lobby scoffed. But in Rhode Island, the home of Roger Williams and other champions of religious freedom without responsibility, a witches’ coven known as Our Lady of the Roses Wiccan Church has apparently met the...

The New York State public restroom equality law, popularly being referred to as “the potty parity act,” is no laughing matter. Rather, it takes away gains achieved by men in their long struggle, starting with the establishment of the first public restroom, to receive some degree of compensation for past inequities. The purpose of the...

Flags are a feudal phenomenon. Not until the French tricolor was the flag a focus of nationalism. Even during the 19th century, flags were used mostly in military, naval, and diplomatic contexts, and were seldom seen by civilians. Often there was not one national flag but a variety for different uses and occasions. Americans did...

“Hasidic Village in New York wants own public school district” blared The New York Times (July 21). The Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel, NY, already runs its own private schools, but the town (100 percent Hasidic) has been pushing for special religious accommodations in the nearby public school’s handicapped programs. Parents are unhappy with the...

A Flag Amendment—what would be the effect? In one school of thought that goes back through Acton to Jefferson to Plato, the health of a society is inversely proportional to the amount of written law (and the number of lawyers) it has. A suspicion of lawmaking is even more justified in the case of constitutional...

Batman was the summer’s box office sensation. Responses to the film followed the usual pattern: audiences and lowbrow critics loved it; highbrow critics turned up their noses. Pans from serious film critics are the best recommendation a movie can get. Yes, it is a dark and violent movie, and yes, Michael Keaton is a perfectly...

Girl’s SAT scores are lower than boys because of bias in the questions, charges a Center for Women Policy Studies report. Nationally, boys score higher on 4 of the verbal questions and 17 of the math, and the fact that they do better is alone prima facie evidence, according to Phyllis Rosser, that the Educational...

The yelping began almost as soon as Jesse Helms proposed his plan for bringing the National Endowment for the Arts under control. Helms’ amendment would forbid the use of federal funds to “Promote, disseminate or produce indecent materials.” There was hardly a respectable newspaper that did not yell “censorship” and decry this attempt to “politicize...

Americans complain endlessly about income taxes. And yet we hardly ever reflect on the heart of the matter: that even if every tax dollar were wisely spent, the very principle of the income tax is unfair. The purpose of taxes is to pay for government. In exchange for taxes we get highways, soldiers, and diplomats....

Everyone now knows what the Methodists have done to their hymnal. Inclusive language once again triumphs over not only tradition and elegance, but even reason. Economists arc not exempt from such folly. In an otherwise excellent and informative book, Breaking the Academic Mould: Economists and American Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century, there is an...

Massachusetts State Senator William Owens, who represents an inner-city Boston district, has filed legislation to require the Commonwealth to pay reparations for slavery. Senate Bill 1621 mandates payment to “people of African descent born in the United States . . . for malfeasance and culpable nonfeasance of the Commonwealth, its agents, employees and citizens with...

I remember sitting in an airport bar with a few bemused travelers listening to the ads on TV. “America’s ignored crisis,” Tom Brokaw blared at us. “Children in poverty. Most people below the poverty line are children.” First one of us and then the rest broke into gufFaws. “What this country needs is a national...

The “Affirmative Action curriculum” returns east: T. Edward Hollander, New Jersey’s higher education chancellor, has argued that college teachers should “rethink what they teach and . . . seek ways of bridging the gaps between their areas of expertise and the diverse student populations in New Jersey colleges and universities.” What this obscure language means...

Glasnost in Chile? Pinochet is getting no credit for it. Yet at the same time General Secretary (and now also President) Gorbachev’s policies are being hailed as major breakthroughs, departures from the previous (Brezhnev) era. They are deemed to hold out great promise for the people of the Soviet Union, if only they can succeed....

A trade surplus nation for the century before the 1980’s, the US had been the world’s leading industrial power since 1900 and a net creditor since World War I. The apparent reversal of all of these positions in less than a decade has elicited both consternation and controversy. By early 1989, a Washington Post/ABC News...

Affirmative Action Art was supposed to solve the headaches of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—still reeling from last year’s response to its display of a painting depicting the late Mayor Harold Washington in frilly underwear—when it hurriedly arranged an all-minority show at the school. But instead of peace and quiet, they got...

Edward Levine, professor emeritus of social psychology at Loyola University of Chicago, was an academic and a truthteller, a combination increasingly hard to find in the modern university. His wide range of interests was reflected in his work, from his book The Irish and Irish Politicians: A Study of Social and Cultural Alienation (University of...

The March Chronicles stirred up a great deal of hostility in strange quarters, where freedom of expression used to defend everything but unfashionable opinions. The Perspective essay on immigration even attracted the attention of a newspaper editor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, named Paul Greenberg. In an op-ed piece published in the Washington Times, Greenberg applies...

Free speech has been one of the great American luxuries, but according to the University of Wisconsin it may prove to be too expensive. In April its Board of Regents passed a rule that would make racial, ethnic, or sexist epithets grounds for expulsion. This does not come out of nowhere: last fall the Zeta...

Judicial tyranny is a familiar phenomenon as judges routinely take charge of school systems and strike down state laws on abortion, pornography, and murder. Recently, one federal judge has even changed the property taxes in Kansas City, MO, while a federal district judge in Des Moines upheld the right of convicts in Iowa to read...

Immigration is increasingly becoming a major subject for concern among Americans. In a recent report released by FAIR, 51 percent of 800 Californians surveyed thought the US was accepting “too many” legal immigrants, while only 35 percent replied “too few” or “about right.” Sixty-nine percent thought there ought to be a limit, as opposed to...

Child abuse has become a national issue. But close scrutiny of the problem raises doubts about the current crusade to combat it. Before expanding the power of the state to intervene in the home, concerned citizens ought to take a hard look at the evidence. While it is hardly possible to overstate the horror of...

Laurie A. Recht, a legal secretary in New York, received encomiums from the press and various and sundry others for endorsing the court-ordered plan for integrated housing in Yonkers last year. In fact, when Ms. Recht was the only speaker in favor of the integration proposal at an open hearing, arguing that the City Council...