Category: Cultural Revolutions

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...

The Washington Post is best known outside the newspaper business for the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein—not to mention Janet Cooke. But in the long run, the Post‘s most enduring achievement is that it pioneered the modern newspaper feature section. Until the late 1960’s, most features sections were called “women’s pages,” but when Post...

John William Corrington’s early death ended the career of a distinguished and prolific literary figure. His first book appeared in 1961; it was followed by three other books of poetry, numerous novels, and four of the best short story collections of our times. He had stories selected for the Best American Short Stories in 1972,...

Some studies have failed to find that executions have any success in deterring homicides. But according to sociologist Steven Stack of Auburn University in the American Sociological Review (August 1987, vol. 52, pp. 532-540), those studies have been methodologically flawed by the highly questionable assumption “that the public is more or less aware of executions...

None dare call it treason when a former US President intrigues with the head of an unfriendly foreign government. But when Jimmy Carter met with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega on February 2, Vice President Quayle had the courage to say: “Obviously, when you have a former President meeting with heads of state we don’t meet...

“I’m tired of having to go to the office armed,” my wife said one day last March. She was not alone in going armed—especially not since the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had entered the case of the “Center City Stalker,” a young black man who had committed a series of robberies...

Continuing legal education is imposed on lawyers by the Missouri Bar Association and the Missouri Supreme Court, and right before the November election I took a day to fulfill the requirements. The only CLE show in town at the time was a seminar presented by the Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys on using a vocational...

School decentralization was one of the few practical items on the New Left’s agenda of the 1960’s. It was a genuinely radical idea, since the entire history of public education in the US has been the steady progress of consolidation and centralization. Small districts were merged, time after time, into larger consolidated units, and power...

“Globalization”—when did it become a central tenet of conservatism? According to Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead, it was in the New Deal era that the US “rejected isolationism and economic nationalism” in favor of the “globalization of our daily lives.” The text of Whitehead’s address to the September meeting of the Economic Policy...

When we argue about what should be taught in schools and colleges, at stake is our conception of the world. Our theory of the world tells us what we should teach, and whom we may ignore. Debates precipitated by Secretary Bennett’s important criticism of the Stanford curriculum centered upon the inclusion of formerly-ignored groups. But...

The Bennett interregnum has come to a close at the Department of Education. The former secretary of education had his shortcomings, but the vice with which he was most frequently charged—being “confrontational,” failing to “build coalitions with educators”—was actually his greatest virtue. Bennett knew better than to attempt significant reform by backroom dealings and conciliation...

Ethnic disturbances pose “the most immediate threat to Gorbachev, the one thing that could put him out of power,” said the Deputy Director of the CIA, Robert M. Gates. Zbigniew Brzezinski and other US analysts concurred. The recent ethnic strife in Estonia, Latvia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Romania, Bulgaria, even Yugoslavia is, in the words of The...

I recently returned from a visit to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, and there is no question about there being more freedom to express ideas. But reports of change are exaggerated. There are still no nongovernmental publishing houses. Two of the more popular journals, Ogonyok and Literaturnaya Gazeta, are sold out quickly and there is a...

Viktor Trostnikov, a scientist and philosopher from Moscow, recently paid a visit to Washington, DC. A decade ago he was fired from his job as professor of higher mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Railway Engineering, for participation in the almanac Metropol, and he currently earns a living as a mason. He is the author...

Day care and illegal drugs are hot political issues. Yet there has been little public discussion of the relationship between changing family patterns and the use of illegal drugs. Considerable data suggests a close connection between the two. Indeed, the decline of the traditional family seems to parallel the increase in the use of illegal...

The Atlanta air is clear and sultry, yet there’s a different air in the Democratic Convention’s Women’s Caucus in the Hyatt Regency—an air of conspiratorial illusions which stifle zealotry with their cold, hard calculations, but promise victory and the triumph of total human rights. In the hallway adjacent to the meeting room I’m the recipient...

Hangouts for the KGB are what libraries have become, according to the FBI. In a new report to the Senate, the Bureau says that libraries have been targets of espionage efforts since at least 1962. The Soviets have found that laying hands on secret documents is frequently unnecessary; they can simply collect what they need...

Fathers are striking back in the cultural war over abortion. As a slogan, “abortion rights” has translated into the woman’s absolute prerogative to abort her unborn child. It is not only the interests of the child that are brutally crushed by this “right”; the desires of fathers—even married fathers—have also been brushed aside as irrelevant...

Laurie Dann, a bizarre psychotic who sent poisoned food to acquaintances and former employers and once stabbed her husband with an ice pick, shot up a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, murdering one child and wounding several others before killing herself. To people in the community, it should have been (and was) a source of...

Four black students, representing the Union of African Student Organizations, staged a “takeover” at a recent Rutgers University conference on race relations. They grabbed the microphone and proceeded to criticize the audience for its thoughtlessness in not having invited them. In another age, when propriety existed and usurpation was decried, these students would have been...

“Understanding AIDS,” the U.S. Surgeon General’s brochure on “public enemy number one,” has been called the first mass mailing of a federal policy message to every American household. In fact, an earlier administration attempted to meet a very different public danger—nuclear attack—with a similar mail campaign. Comparison of the social assumptions found in each document...

A new word, “hazing,” has washed onto the pages of the Soviet press with the wave of glasnost. It denotes the harassment, oppression, and humiliation suffered by new conscripts, “greenhorns,” at the hands of “grandfathers”—the Soviet term for soldiers who are nearing the end of their conscription term. The subject was broached by Yuri Polyakov...

Sex and the clergy have never made a good combination, and when the nation’s Catholic bishops wrote a draft letter on the status of women, we could just about predict the outcome. The time has passed when clergymen shepherded flocks or attended to questions of the eternal. Men of the cloth now keep busy scrambling...

Cry Freedom, the Richard Attenborough film, is yet another attempt to rewrite recent history using a prism of liberal shibboleths and the civil rights experience in the United States from which to make judgments. The film is based on the so-called friendship between Bantu leader Steve Biko, the black consciousness proponent, and Donald Woods, a...

Lyndon LaRouche has been back in the news. Not only is the leader himself on trial for the political equivalent of credit card fraud, but in Illinois the two LaRouche candidates who managed to torpedo Adlai Stevenson’s gubernatorial campaign are both running again. LaRouche is, so far as we can tell, an unlikable crank without...

A Noah’s Ark or a nation state? seems to be the question posed by the U.S. immigration policy. “Eviction[s] because of building charcoal fires indoors or slaughtering animals in the bathtub” are only some of the problems facing immigrant Hmong and Mein tribesmen in California. Others are “their medicinal use of opium, their capturing of...

Billie Boggs used to be a bag lady—although she preferred the term “professional” street person. She slept in front of a vent outside a New York restaurant, ran out into traffic, screamed obscenities at passersby, and defecated in her clothes or on the sidewalk outside the Chemical Bank. She begged for money, then burned it...

Brats—now we call them hyperactive children—used to be disciplined; these days they are given drugs. Many psychologists and school officials insist that Ritalin is the best treatment for children suffering from hyperactivity, or the “attention deficit disorder.” As a matter of routine, 15-year-old Rod Matthews of Canton, Massachusetts, was put on Ritalin as a means...

The Closing of the American Mind was last year’s liberal cliche of the year. This year, the left’s answer may well be I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. Billed as an exercise in investigative reporting. Stone’s book does to Athens what I.F. Stone’s Weekly used to do to the United States. Stone’s “original” thesis is...

Whose man is in Haiti? He was 40ish, of medium height, powerfully built on the way to being stout, and with an obvious gift of speech—he overrode his listeners, particularly since they were in their early and late 20’s. He was Leslie Manigat, the place was Caracas, and I was a guest lecturer and full-time...

Western civilization is under attack at American colleges and universities. The most publicized series of incidents is the willingness of the Stanford University faculty to introduce a replacement for Western civilization that includes equal time for minority contributions and women authors. Presumably what the Stanford faculty has responded to is the charge that the reading...

The genderless society is just around the corner. Eager to oblige, the Pentagon has ordered a series of “reforms” that will admit women to some 4,000 military positions previously reserved to men. The only restriction remaining is the congressionally mandated ban on women in direct combat, and even that barrier is increasingly porous (“we will...

In the recent firing of “Jimmy the Greek,” CBS explained its action in a “terse statement,” decrying racism. (What they meant by this is anyone’s guess. I ban the word racism in my introductory sociology class, not because there are no barriers to black advancement but because the word itself is a barrier to the...

Cui bono? That is the question to ask now that the fur and feathers have settled from the celebrated January match between gamecock Vice President Bush and wildcat Dan Rather. Clearly the answer is George Bush. Before the encounter Bush had two serious liabilities: a general impression of wimpishness and a lingering taint (at least...

American professors of literature (or a large number of them) have been in thrall for some time to a body of “literary theory” exported from Europe in the late 60’s. The basic masters are Marx and Freud, followed by de Saussure and Levi-Strauss, and the developers of this property now most in vogue seem to...

Yale Scholar’s articles found in Nazi paper, read the headline in the New York Times for December 1, 1987. Paul de Man was a prolific member of the Yale Hermeneutical Mafia, which made the term “deconstructionism” an academic byword. By the time he passed away in December 1984, he was Sterling Professor of Humanities at...

Nuclear disarmament has its good side. Europeans and Americans have been sheltered by the nuclear umbrella so long that they have begun to dream of a world without war. That sort of Utopian rubbish is not only demoralizing for the soft, welfare state inhabitants of the Western democracies, but—even worse—it also compels our leaders to...

Lavender liberals recently held the National Conference of Openly Lesbian and Gay Elected and Appointed Officials in Minneapolis. Graced by the presence of two delegates from Canada’s New Democratic Party and one from the British House of Commons, the conference adopted a resolution (supported by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Senator Paul Simon) calling for further...

Frederick the Great of Prussia once said that heads of state should avoid meeting one another. With all the hyperbole surrounding the Reagan/Gorbachev summit, the three-day meeting aroused almost hysterical expectations, setting up Americans, inevitably, for a fall. Previous summit conferences should have taught us at least that much. In 1972 President Nixon went to...

Glasnost American style is all the rage among the nation’s literati. At over a dozen universities, American academics are now waking up to the Soviet equivalents of Good Morning America and Richard Simmons. After years of watching our own People’s Broadcasting System, students and faculty alike may now get a glimpse of the real thing....

Convicted traitor Clayton Lonetree wept as he described his upbringing on an Indian reservation orphanage and with his father, a brutal alcoholic. The Marine Corps was, he said, a way out of his misery, although his principal reasons for joining were patriotic. The military jury, unmoved by his arguments and those of his celebrity lawyer...

Gary Hart has withdrawn to the seclusion of his Rocky Mountain home, claiming that the nation’s press, led by the Miami Herald, invaded his privacy. Donna Rice, an aspiring actress suddenly in the limelight, is spending most of her time denying to any reporter who will listen that there was anything immoral in her relationship...

He was a controversialist. As a literary critic he argued with T.S. Eliot, and as a Trotskyist he quarreled with Trotsky himself. Almost alone among the ex-Communists, he made the full journey to a conservative world view, and before his death he returned to the Catholic faith. He wrote many books, some of which will...

It’s hip to be square—Huey Lewis’ new gospel—may have been announced prematurely. George Michael has a different message: “I can’t think of a better question for a 13- or 14-year-old child to be asking than ‘What does monogamy mean?'” Michael is a part-time child psychologist better known as a pop singer who was once the...

America’s fertility rates plunged in the early 1970’s, falling well below the minimal Zero Population Growth (ZPG) of 2.1 children per American woman. Never before has this happened to the nation while enjoying peace and relative prosperity. But a decisive rebound in the birthrate does not seem likely in the near future, given the widespread...

The “Contragate” hearings have been a poor substitute for daytime soap operas and do not begin to match the thrills of Watergate. Perhaps it is because we have heard them before: arrogantly inarticulate congressmen scoring points off frightened bureaucrats, an administration that turns to private contractors to carry on apparently illegal activities, and an imperialist...

Gunnai Myrdal came as the featured speaker at the annual meeting of the Lutheran Council in the USA—yet another public atheist called to give moral guidance to yet another demoralized band of American religious leaders. I saw his presence as a godsend. In a sense, he was to be my dissertation project. The chance to...

Catastrophic health insurance—already endorsed by the President and now on the fast track to approval in Congress—will soon shift the economic burden of huge unexpected medical bills from the elderly to the federal government. But already some members of Congress are complaining that a much more inclusive public health-care plan is needed. Unfortunately, most policymakers...

The Reagan Court has been a source of great expectation for conservatives. If only a few more superannuated justices would retire (or die), then we could have the court’s unchecked authority in our own hands. A favorite target of pious hopes and voodoo dolls is the apparently senile Thurgood Marshall. An example of tokenism at...