Category: Cultural Revolutions

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...

Death and taxes are only a little more predictable than the art of Andy Warhol. Just one month after Warhol’s death in Manhattan at age 58 from a heart attack the morning of February 22, the day after otherwise successful gall bladder surgery, the artist was back in the news. Unlike the obits, the news...

Who will censor the censors? That is a question asked increasingly by librarians and other defenders of pornography in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin, at least, we know the answer: it is the Board of Regents, who recently ordered the Union Council (a predominantly student or ganization) at the Madison campus to return...

Affirmative Action Art is all the rage in California. Recently, the California Arts Council decided that, because of ”social conditions which have historically denied some groups access to the mainstream and . . . complicated patterns of cultural bias,” race-blind awarding procedures were no longer adequate. A new “cultural outreach” was called for with hundreds...

“Perversion of the law” took on new meaning recently when homosexual groups forced Georgetown University—a Catholic school—to grant them official recognition. In a 2-to-1 decision handed down with the unusual stipulation that the case must be reargued before a full appeals court, a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed a...

The cultural alienation of the press was recently seen in its least flattering light, when the Associated Press distributed a picture of a grief-stricken father beside the body of his drowned five-year-old son. Originally published in the Bakersfield Californian, the picture provoked a storm of local outrage: within two days 500 people had called to...

So, at least, we might conclude from a poll conducted recently by Starch Advertisement Readership Service, which has been doing door-to-door opinion surveys since the l 930’s. The results of a poll taken in 1953 indicated that the top five areas of interest for American women at that time were: (1) religion, (2) food, (3)...

We asked conservatives that question in June. And hand in hand On the back steps,   my pregnant sister and I Wistfully remember summers here – warm and long ­ A life this awful August will deny Her baby, whose presence now is slightly wrong. Cool wind moves the little field of loosestrife. Their lavender...

Loyal Americans are still winning the battles but losing the war. Fifteen years ago, American troops were victorious in every major engagement in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but all their efforts came to nothing, because the Presidents who committed us to war (Kennedy and Johnson) never formulated a strategy for victory and be­ cause...

Heroes are back in style. According to a recent poll, the  approval  ratings given to the objects of our admiration are up significantly from a few years back. The official story goes something like this: back in the bad old days of Vietnam and Watergate,  the  Ameri can people lost their youthful idealism and learned to...

Capitalism is now avant-garde. A recent issue of the New Art Examiner chronicled the pioneering work of two men from Battle Mountain, Nevada, who together constitute United Art Contractors. UAC explains their breakthrough in conceptual art as a shortcut to success:   Every artist wants success and fame and if they could get it easily...