A Plague on Both Your Houses Women have always been our censors. Mrs. Grundy was a household word for inflexible propriety a good 30 years before Dr. Bowdler produced his expurgated version of Shakespeare. Times and manners change, and the American Mrs. Grundys took up, in succession, Abolition, Women’s Suffrage, and Temper ance,butitremainedtruethat: Many are...
For years the editors of Christianity and Crisis have done their best to make friends with the international left, even to the point of adjusting or ignoring inconvenient doctrines. Despite these efforts, The Nation recently took aim at all (not just conservative) religionists and fired a broadside entitled “Political Opium.” C&C’s soul-searching response: What’s the...
In a curiously schizophrenic article in Ms. entitled “The Uses of Chastity and Other Paths to Sexual Pleasures,” GermaineGreer, long time radical feminist, agonized over how young women are “jeopardizing their health and fertility with potent medications and mischievous gadgetry” in the sterile sexual frenzy she helped initiate a decade ago. Unable to admit that...
Let us praise famous men for their unique ability to talk foolishness and be admired for what they say. Here is Prof. Arthur Schlesinger, lui même, in the Wall Street Journal: Where Washington seems to regard the East European satellites as faithful creatures of the Kremlin, West Europeans see them as restless, discontented and, from the Soviet...
The New York Times Sunday Magazine has produced in print a sentence that unmistakably attests to one of two possibilities: either its editors do not know the meaning of conjunctions, a serious grammatical disability, or their liberalism automatically turns their minds into Tibetan prayer wheels. Here is the sample from a piece on General Vessey,...
Ideology as Prognosis Village Voice, the chief organ of the radical-industrial complex (a multi-billion-dollar enterprise in left-wing snobbery whose chief products include: mattresses, vociferous anti-Americanism, mink coats, elitist social engineering, rock music, phony populism, instantly disposable footwear, recreational fornication, drugs, trendy political ardors for terrorist “underdogs” such as El Salvador guerillas, PLO, etc.), assessing Mr....
Lest it seem that we pay undue attention to the Chicago Tribune’s man in the aisle seat and not enough to his Sun-Times competitor and At the Movies cohort, Roger Ebert, we would like to make amends by providing an example of Mr. Ebert’s deep erudition. Here is Under the Volcano as described by the movie maven: the...
Neo-Camelot For years supermarket tabloids have shamelessly made merchandise out of John F. Kennedy by promulgating almost every imaginable shred of gossip or speculation about his life and its untimely end. During the recent revival of Kennedy nostalgia occasioned by the 20th anniversary of his assassination, however, antiestablishment journals claiming intellectual respectability have introduced a...
Physician, Heal Thyself— That American society is vile, unequal, unjust, and unfair is by now a sort of commonplace, a once-and-for-ever fixed obviousness, as self-evident as the presence of McDonald’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola. The trite naturalness of this characterization has been driven into the popular consciousness by the omnipotent and omnipresent liberal media. And no...
In the Weekend At The Movies section, the Post, that invincible bastion of D.C. journalism, reports on a movie which is: a decadent, daring film, filthy and full of hard core porn and hard core punks…. The WP’s movie “critic’s” final evaluation: this film is a shocker. Besides sodomy, there’s oral sex and necrophilia. It’s...
The Grenada episode has shown, with crystal-clear unambiguity, that the press in America is not only held in contempt and deeply distrusted, but hated-pure and simply. Why is it so? Perhaps the ubiquitous blab—broadcast and printed—that is churned out with a monotonous regularity evokes a loathing of the producers, the liberal media. A case in...
In a recent editorial attacking the Reagan Administration’s Central American policies, The Nation demonstrated once again how pro-Soviet attitudes so warp the mind that even such simple mental tasks as counting and adding and subtracting are no longer possible. Opined The Nation’s casuists: If the State Department was seriously interested in reducing the daily body...
Last full, a holier-than-thou exercise in breast-beating was sponsored by The Nation and The New Republic; it was designated “Were the Rosenbergs Framed?” As expected, the one-up manship lasted long after the programs were littering the floor of Town Hall. Andrew Kopkind, associate editor of The Nation, wrote up the event for his employer, which...
It was not a letter to the editor, for which a tolerant journal needs not be responsible, but an article, something featured as information, so that its laudable attitude is more than a mere expression of opinion. There we read: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called communists….Is it not to the everlasting...
Within a social stratum that may be described as very wealthy and very liberal, The New Yorker is venerated as the “Sovereign One”–which is the “in” synonym for the Lord in the new lectionary issued by those charming theologians from the National Council of Churches who have decided to rewrite the Book. Actually, for more than a...
The jeremiads were not devoid of a certain poignancy. Anchormen and columnists filled their “spaces,” both the psychological ones and those allocated to them during the prime time or on editorial pages, without bursts of the most righteous anger witnessed since Lancelot went on rampage and King Lear filled theaters with the outrage of sorrow....
Time’s shining light in the domain of publicistics, Mr. Hugh Sidey, instructs Ronald Reagan on why and how we should be cautious and measured in flexing America’s military muscle: Twice in the past four decades we miscalculated, and we had war in Korea and Viet Nam. What did we “miscalculate” in Korea? On June 25,...
One Lawrence Barrett– Time magazine’s senior editor who blew the whistle on Carter’s purloined briefing papers in his book on Reagan and whom Parade, the lowbrow Sunday gossip magazine, calls “distinguished,” “knowledgeable,” and “insightful”–bares his mental acumen for the aforementioned sheet in an interview about the President: [He is] often too rigid for his own...
In The Nation, whose basic reigning philosophy is–to the best of our knowledge–rigid dialectical materialism, we find a fine example of how smoothly this allegedly scientific and empirical ideology turns into mystical fideism. One Sidney Lens, an intrepid apologist for any Sovietized thing on earth, writes: Cubans have the highest standard of living in Latin...