Category: Vital Signs

Man may be dying out, but patriarchy—men’s oppression of women—lives on. If only we were more controlled by women, or at least by the feminine aspect of our natures, life would be much better: kinder, gentler, and more “caring.” It is patriarchy, after all, that makes America so aggressive; it is patriarchy that makes American...

Kristine Thatcher’s play Niedecker, produced earlier this year by the Women’s Project at the Apple Corps Theatre in New York, is about paradoxes. It is the story of the reclusive poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). She has been dead almost twenty years and is largely forgotten, but when she was alive Ezra Pound championed her. Basil...

Is it possible, in 50 words or less, to describe today’s woman, the postfeminist 80’s woman, the woman who will soon become the 90’s woman? I’m glad you asked. The typical American woman in 1989 is divorced, in need of financial guidance, worried about her career, either agonizing about her biological clock or searching out...

I was asked once on a radio show whether the arguments I was making against feminism wouldn’t also lead me to oppose women voting. I pointed out that though I personally favored giving women the vote, the case against female suffrage was a very respectable one, and was most visibly urged by women when female...

The women’s movement is in considerable disarray. While most self-described feminists are concerned mainly with job prospects, equal pay, and abortion rights, the radical wing of the movement is busy advocating everything from witchcraft to lesbianism. This was never more apparent than at NOW’s recent convention. While most delegates were content with denouncing the Supreme...

Some months ago, Katherine Dalton of Chronicles wrote an article in which, it seemed to me, she seriously exaggerated the leftist homogeneity of the literary establishment and further overestimated the hegemony of The New York Times. I begin with the question of the hegemony of the Times, but my acknowledgment must be larger than any...

If Ernest Hemingway had any notion of what would happen to his first drafts, miscellanea, letters received and sent, and unfinished manuscripts after his death, it’s likely he would have set fire to his study and all its contents before priming his shotgun and blowing his brains out on the second of July, 1961. For...

The oldest university in the West, the University of Bologna, has celebrated its nine hundredth anniversary; but much that is studied there sustains an intellectual tradition of scholarship that is thousands of years old. Universities are not the first institutions in which a systematic and sustained labor of learning has been pursued. Nor would anyone...

The below are little collections of information I picked up from, respectively, Esquire and GQ. The world’s finest ready-made suits are found in America. The world’s most intriguing men’s store is in Italy. The world’s best harmonicas come from Germany.   Fifteen percent of all furs in the United States are sold to males. Some...

Doctors are prohibited from hawking products in television commercials. It’s a question of ethics. So, since the real ones can’t do it, stand-ins are asked to fill the prescription. Marcus Welby was never jumpy—and probably wouldn’t have been even if he had accidentally reversed the electric paddles used to jump-start a heart—so Robert Young became...

One of the many hearses that ply Hollywood Boulevard is different from all the others. The long gray Cadillac sports a sunroof, air-conditioning, and a cargo of live bodies, not dead ones. The vehicle is the flagship of Grave Line Tours, and every day its driver leads his seven passengers, each with a window seat,...

People with more than a passing interest in words fall into two groups: prescriptivist and descriptivist. The prescriptivist believes that there is an ideal of correctness in the use of words, shifting and temporally-based as it ultimately may be. The descriptivist finds the concept of “correctness” elitist at best. More often, he finds it incomprehensible....

In recent years Actors Theatre of Louisville’s artistic director Jon Jory has come under fire for the relative weakness of his new play festival. He should be happy that this year’s season was stronger. Like any other genre, playwriting is a craft, and if nothing else was evident, it was clear from the eight plays...

Why, after half a century, Peter Freuchen’s Arctic Adventure has to be rescued from virtual oblivion is one of the true puzzles of literary anniversaries. Not quite a best-seller in its day, it nonetheless went into five printings and then fell, almost precipitously, into its curious obscurity. Retrospective itself as it looked back to Freuchen’s...

François Mitterrand’s socialist administration has become so scandal-ridden and financially precarious that the year-long celebration of the revolution’s bicentennial is now nothing but a hypocritical farce. Yet Mitterrand’s reference to 1789 is an ideological obligation, since the “leftist myth” is the number one legitimizing factor that makes the regime credible in the eyes of a...

Recently the Tobacco Institute, a lobbying outfit pleading the case for the tobacco industry, has been placing ads in numerous publications complaining about the harshness with which the government is fighting cigarette smoking. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has been a vigilant soldier in the government’s fight. But it is very probable that he has...

Back in September, USA Today (circ. 1,400,000), in its equivalent of the man-on-the-street interview, asked citizens at random, “Do we need a federal death penalty for drug-related murders?” That same week, the Adair County ‘News-Statesman (circ. 3,800; advertising slogan: “The only newspaper in the world that covers Adair County”) asked its man-on-the-street question: “What do...

Stevie Wonder wants to become mayor of Detroit. He’s had some trouble determining precisely when the election will be held, but no matter. He believes that he can be the mayor of Motown in the 90’s. Now, this is no Sonny Bono and Palm Springs. Bono is decidedly a working-class stiff compared with the Retin...

Restructuring: that’s one way the recent wave of take-overs, breakups, and buyouts of major US corporations has been described. Others see it in more pejorative terms. “Violating the rules of prudence” said a Wall Street Journal editorial. “The buyout bomb,” The New York Times called it. “When everything’s for sale, you lose something,” is the...

In the years following World War II, the merchant marine of the United States went from being the greatest in the world to its present virtual nonexistence. From 1935 through World War II, the United States built some 6,500 merchant ships. When the guns ceased firing, the United States owned the largest merchant fleet in...

“He who controls the past controls the future.” Nowhere is Big Brother’s dictum truer than in the case of Vietnam and the antiwar movement. Lately, one can detect a new and persistent attempt to remold the history and goals of the antiwar movement in a way designed to make it more acceptable to. the mass...

“I always wanted to be a writer I can remember the first book I ever wrote when I was very little. I wrote the title and the index, but I didn’t actually get ’round to the contents.” Nikolai Tolstoy laughs and leans back, trying to fit his extremely long legs under my dining room table....

It was an interesting time. The Second World War had gone on two years longer than the First, with resultant fatigue in England’s industrial north, which gave the Labour government its 1945 landslide. Such is admirably explained in Corelli Barnett’s The Audit of War, which shows how the appeal of the shadow Attlee government, particularly...

“Missouri doesn’t have a death penalty,” a former prosecutor remarked to me last Christmas. He was wrong, as he well knew. The Revised Statutes of Missouri specifically allow for capital punishment. But as a practical matter, the man was right. At the time he spoke, Missouri had not put a person to death since 1965,...

The morality of abortion is entirely a matter of definition: is the fetus a person or not? The definition—whether derived from millennia of religious tradition or from individual analysis and subjective choice—both generates and justifies the intense emotions that are given free rein when fact is irrelevant. There is no logical or empirical way to...

Fans of George Bush pulled an unusual weapon from their political arsenals in the 1988 campaign—comic books. Delegates and hangers-on at the Democratic Party National Convention in Atlanta reportedly were upset when handed copies of a cartoon magazine ridiculing the public record of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. The appearance of the “attack” comic book, entitled...

People want to save their souls by writing poetry, or so they say. Should we take that seriously? Did Smart save his soul in the madhouse writing all those lucid lines? Perhaps it’s enough to say that from primitive times there has been a need for expression. Poetry is older than prose. Poetry was the...

In 1889, when the Baron Pierre de Coubertin was in the middle of formulating his plan to revive the Olympic Games of ancient Greece, one of his primary worries was the use of cash as an incentive for performance. He feared that “a mercantile spirit threatened to invade sporting circles,” and that amateur sports had...

In 1963, when Tyrone Guthrie produced his first season at the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the States did not have much in the way of regional theater. In a country whose two most famous actors are, respectively, a President and a presidential assassin, Ronald Reagan and John Wilkes Booth—two actors who, in other words,...

On the Literature of the American West For the last several weeks, working at a leisurely pace, I have been reading through the new and extremely ambitious Columbia Literary History of the United States. This is a huge work, one which has many merits and aspires to be inclusive. Indeed, it is a conscious attempt...

When Pete Schaub, a business major in his senior year at the University of Washington at Seattle, couldn’t get into an overenrolled business course for the first quarter of 1988, he signed up for “Women 200: Introduction to Women Studies” instead. He was expecting to learn about “the history of women and the contributions that...

The lights come up on an old woman holding a candle. It is Auntie Rula. RULA Do you hear a child crying in the cellar? Yes, yes, it is you. Patsy! Back again to haunt your old Auntie Rula. But why are you crying, child? Or are you laughing? Crying, laughing—with you, they always sounded...

If your local bookstore does not stock Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, Guilty by Georges Bataille, Altazor by Vincente Huidobro, Compact by Maurice Roche, Space in Motion by Juan Goytisolo, I-57 by Paul Metcalf, Concierto Barroco by Alejo Carpentier, or Cold Tales by Virgilio Pinera, you’re living in a culturally deprived area. All these books...

The lessons of history are never quite definitive. History repeats itself, but not exactly, and the trick is to know where the differences come in. Nevertheless, in the case of drug abuse and its control we have as good a lesson and as close an analogy as history ever provides—Prohibition. Unfortunately, our politicians have no...

When my fellow Iowan Norman Borlaug started what came to be called the Green Revolution, he had only the best of intentions for farmers. Using chemicals, farmers could be converted into superhuman producers able to supply society with cheap and abundant food. In 1970 Borlaug won the Nobel Prize—a kind of trumpet sounding for the...

Evolutionists used to be hard-boiled theorists who maintained that nature, including man, was based only on the impersonal plus time plus chance. They coolly asserted that the fittest survive, that some species die off and others thrive because of natural selection. All enduring creatures, great and small, have mutated and adapted to their environments. The...

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to; You would cry, too, if it happened to you. —Lesley Gore, 1963 Mike Love’s churlish behavior at the third Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies should not have come as a surprise to anyone. His outlash against everyone from Paul McCartney to Diana...

Just before the Minnesota caucuses, one of the nation’s ten or so largest Reform Jewish synagogues, Minneapolis’s Temple Israel, cosponsored a political speech by Kitty Dukakis at the synagogue’s regular Friday evening sabbath service. Temple Israel is typical of many synagogues around the country where liberal Democrats are regularly endorsed from the pulpit. The fondness...

On any Wednesday night, there’s plenty to do in San Diego, or “America’s Finest City,” as it is billed. But tonight the locals pack the University of California lecture hall to hear Vladimir Posner, the Soviet Union’s most famous journalist. (Since it has often been pointed out that “Soviet journalist” is oxymoronic, we won’t get...

Civil rights activists called Rev. Jerry Falwell “hysterical” for claiming that the recently passed Civil Rights Restoration Act could require churches to hire a “practicing, active homosexual drug addict with AIDS to be a teacher or youth pastor.” His claim was dismissed as a ploy by a televangelist to squeeze more money out of a...

Sir Ernst Gombrich, for one, is glad to hear the news. The eminent art historian stands in the modestly furnished drawing room of his Hampstead house, leafing through his copy of Leonid Pasternak’s memoirs, recently published in England. The book’s publication had attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, and the first retrospective of the...

Prince of Darkness directed by John Carpenter screenplay by Martin Quatermass Universal Pictures. When they hear about Prince of Darkness, unsuspecting moviegoers may envision a thrilling story of the occult. Some person will probably release Satan from his underworld domain, either deliberately or unwittingly; the demon will run rampant over the globe for a short...

After Harold Washington died,black leaders in Chicago almost immediately began the process of deification. Buttons started to appear, reading: “Hi God, How’s Harold?” The way I saw it, to make a god out of Harold Washington was sacrilegious. Then this ridiculous poster came out. It shows the Chicago skyline with Jesus on one side and...

Every student radical at Granada Hills High School showed up before firstperiod class on the morning of October 12, 1969—but we didn’t stay long. Charged with excitement and righteousness, two dozen or so junior longhairs, freaks, yippies, and hippies formed a ragged line and marched past the classroom buildings, past the school gates, and onward...

Santayana’s commonplace observation that “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it” is not popular with professional historians, who suffer from chronic disagreement about what the past means, or whether it means anything at all. Such embarrassment is understandable: Since the First World War, the most salient lessons of the past have...

“So the plague defied all medicines; no cure, no help could be possible nothing could follow but death. . . . The strange temper of the people . . . contributed extremely to their own destruction.” —Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1721) Until recently, the United States has enjoyed unquestioned success in public...

It is encouraging to see that Michael Jackson is still capable of something more than Pepsi commercials. That he didn’t pick up an award is, as many have suggested, a backlash against the success of Thriller. But the correlation is not as direct as it seems. The real problem is that Jackson is not the...

The present agitation around Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, reminds me of the many similar debates I have witnessed in this country during the last four decades. At almost regular intervals the mediocrity of our system of education, from grade school to university, is demonstrated, denounced, deplored, and pilloried. Committees are...

Nearly 60 years have elapsed since James Agate, the London theater critic, quipped, “The English ceased to be playgoers as soon as there was anything else to go to.” On Broadway, the American solution has been to guarantee ticket sales by casting celebrities. The cause of Agate’s complaint, as well as our Band-Aid solution, are...

A recent action by a Minneapolis judge has such a potential for inhibiting economic development of our central cities that, if a decision by a putatively less high-minded apostle of judicial restraint had anywhere near a similar impact, the miscreant would be pilloried from Cambridge to Berkeley for condemning the nation’s ghettos to further impoverishment....