CBS versus Law & People A little doubt likely invades anyone who listened to a recent CBS Evening News story about the U.S. government’s war on drugs. The network’s “legal” correspondent, one Fred Graham, informed his audience (people’s right to know) that the government was singling out so-called celebrities for investigation. At a certain point in his narrative, however, the...
Twisting & Turning Totalitarianism
As the year in which George Orwell’s masterpiece was set approached, a wave of critics, eulogists, and scavengers emerged. 1984 is a work hard to attack directly, though that has been done, and some who profess to be praising Orwell’s work would really prefer to bury it. E. L. Doctorow, in a recent Playboy article, provides a specimen of the latter. So...
Where’s the Baking Soda?
Nora Ephron is a genius at turning her personal life in to cash. In her essays, which she has collected in previous volumes, she has taken us to events and places including her college reunion, therapy group, and her amniocentesis. However, take away her individualized experiences and the essays become identical to those of every other liberal writer: she is...
Strange Gods
For most modem Westerners, the word idolatry conjures images of distant lands or times: saffron-clothed Oriental monks prostrate before golden Buddhas, ancient Aztec priests plunging their daggers into helpless virgins atop monumental temples, or iniquitous Israelites cavorting before Aaron’s golden calf in the Sinai. Certainly, the cultural dominance of Judea-Christianity has made these types of blatant and unsophisticated idolatry rare...
Erasing Mason-Dixon
The South has an enduring status as a region somewhat separate from the main thrust of American life. The tension between agrarian and commercial impulses in American society, epitomized by the yeomen idealized in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and the striving industrial class whose rise was promoted by Alexander Hamilton’s Reports as Secretary of the Treasury, had its...
The Diaphanous Bud
There are innumerable ways to approach The Name of the Rose. Its author, Umberto Eco, is an Italian, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. The book is a best-seller in Italy, France, Germany, and here; it has received awards including the Premio Strega, the Premio Viareggio, and the Prix Medicis. The book, translated into English by William Weaver, appeared...
Diplomacy and Fatuity
Lately our national leaders seem to have taken it into their heads that their first obligation upon taking office is to get ready to write their memoirs once they leave it. We’ve had Nixon’s and Johnson’s, Kissinger’s massive volumes, and now Vance’s and Brzezinski’s. Jimmy Carter reportedly has a high-tech memoir in preparation, the entire record of his eccentric administration...
Recycling Refuse
What do Groucho Marx, Lech Walesa, Oriana Fallaci, Johnny Carson, Ted Patrick, G. Gordon Liddy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Fonda, his daughter Jane and son-in-law Tom Hayden, Ed Koch, Roman Polanski, Robert Redford, Salvador Dali, William Shockley, Robert Garwood, Ayn Rand, Ian Fleming, Roane Arledge, Robert Shelton, Alex Haley, Henry Miller, Arnold Toynbee, and William F. Buckley, Jr. all have in...
Multiple-Choice Quandaries
The necessity of choosing is a fact of life. At even a tender age, one must choose between a doll or a tea set, a wagon or a tricycle, Captain Crunch or Frosted Flakes. As one becomes older, the choices become more difficult and more significant. When one is wise enough–lucky enough–to choose well, things remain fairly smooth. But a wrong...
Comment
George Orwell’s 1984. We’re almost there. Or are we? Walter Cronkite thinks the danger looms, and if anyone speaks for the “thinking”American it is surely Walter Cronkite. He said it again in a special preface to the Orwell novel in 1983, as the fatal year approached. After ticking off the menace of orbiting satellites that can read license plates in a parking...
Cracked Crystal Balls
The forecasters have had a bad year. That uncertainty of acuity that characterizes those who predict the weather has long been obvious; the predictions of their brethren in the field of economics are similarly infamous. President Reagan’s economic policies were supposed to make 1983 a disaster, but the economy is rapidly improving. The only worrisome aspect of the recovery is...
Music – First-Timers & Second Stingers
“Movie music!” is the exclamation of recognition that newcomers often make upon first hearing classical music. They seem as delighted with this discovery as was Moliere’s Middle-Class Gentleman when he realized he had been speaking prose all his life. One tries not to wince noticeably when explaining to a neophyte that William Tell rode long before the Lone Ranger galloped...
Avoiding Questions
The American Novel and the Way We Live Now is a gem, one of those concise little books that coruscate with gleaming wisdom and flashes of insight. As the title suggests, it is a study of certain features of the contemporary American novel, a commentary on prominent aspects of contemporary life, and an exposition of the connection between the two. This connection, as his earlier books...
Screen – Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
I want to get out while I still can / I want to be like Harry Houdini / Now I’m the Invisible Man. –Elvis Costello In Reds, writer-director-producer-actor and all-around polymathic performing pygmy Warren Beatty felt that he could achieve veracity in his untellable, tedious tale of John Reed and his Amazon queen by interrupting the stretched-out people’s polyester saga with...
Catastrophic Chic
The wave of articles and books concerning nuclear-weapons policy has reached flood stage since 1981 in the wake of the protests launched by the born-again peace movement. The timing of this effort provokes suspicion. It is hard to take seriously as pacifists those figures who mix their opposition to American military policy with support for revolutionary warfare and terrorism in Central...
Bouillabaisse by Ear
Years before many Americans noticed him, France’s socialist president made a career while provoking contrary sentiments. He evidently prefers not to be understood. Conservatives governing America must nonetheless decide what to think about a ruler who supports us and opposes the Soviets in Europe while opposing us and supporting Soviet allies in Latin America. This biography can contribute to that effort,...
The American Proscenium – What Happened?
In the days after the Beirut massacre of October 1983 both the print and electronic media went into their instant business of interviewing. People’s most frequent reaction to the reporters’ questions was in the form of a question: “Why are we, that is the Marines, there in the first place?” Of course, a phalanx of officials, politicians, and pundits tried...
American Proscenium – Gott Strafe England!
Voices are heard from the British Islands that are highly critical of Mr. Reagan’s decision to do something about that other little island–Grenada. Let us take a brief peek at what for the last two centuries has been called in history books the perfidyof Albion. Once it was a world calamity, but today it seems more like the annoying fuming of...
American Proscenium – Ship of Fools
The debate on how to render America impotent has reached orgasmic intensity. Suddenly, everybody sees atomic war just around the corner; the conventional liberal media are organizing giant scare campaigns (in the name of the people’s right to know), while the radicals, the professional freezeniks, the regular pro-Moscow troops, and all the incorporated communist- front enterprises accuse the liberal media...
American Proscenium – Methodology
Once again (though it is only the second time), there is a black contender for the Presidency–and it is a glorious moment, for it shows that we are true to ourselves in that we are living up to the most intrinsic promises of our free society, pluralistic democracy, and the Constitution–the sources of all our strengths. The momentousness of this...
Journalism – Compassion Anyone
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 decade, the magazine–nearly a sexagenarian–has...
Journalism – Syndicated King Lear
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. The reason: they were not...
In Focus – Politicians of Piety
Upon his return from conversing with God upon the top of Sinai, Moses began the work of reclaiming straying Israel by demanding, “Who is on the Lord’s side?” Upon their return from ecclesiastical conferences held at somewhat lower altitudes and with rather less distinguished guest speakers, thousands of American and European clergy men are now similarly trying to reclaim their...
In Focus – Mixed Drinks & False Faiths
To a world of parched souls, Jesus Christ offered the Water of Life. Unlike club soda, however this Water is not a good mixer: in order to refresh, it must be taken straight, and on the Rock For centuries, men have attempted to concoct heady new “Christianity-and-” brews, but the disappointing result is always temporary intoxication, not lasting rejuvenation. Lately,...
Liberal Culture – The New Higher Criticism
Among all those courageous spirits who forsook religious and traditional norms in favor of the beatific self-fulfillment promised by the sexual revolution, the names of William Masters and Virginia Johnson have long been invoked with deep reverence. As one sexologist in New York City explained: “Masters was the prototypical godlike figure that people hesitated to challenge.” But now iconoclasts are...
Exceptional Insight
As a distinctively modern genre, the short story does not require any earth-straddling heroes, merely ordinary people. It does require, however, an author with extraordinary perception of how small events may reveal a spark of the transcendent–or a shadow of the fiendish–even in dry goods clerks or grade-school teachers. Maxine Steinman was such a rare writer. In the stories posthumously collected...
Waste of Money – Cape Cod Babble
In his last novel, The Orchids, Mr. Cook wrote about nazis. His latest production, Tabernacle, concerns itself with a group of people he evidently finds just as awful: the Mormons. A resident of Cape Cod, Mr. Cook obviously hasn’t spent much more time with Mormons than he had with nazis, so his portrayal of them is even more superficial and inaccurate. He does know...
Screen – Once Upon a Time in the West Coast
A cultural paradigm should be a positive one, an object that, through its very being, encourages emulation. If that model is a man or woman, a hero or a heroine, then that person should, at all visible times and in all apparent ways (i.e., let’s acknowledge privacy as a personal need, People and National Enquirer to the contrary), be the type...
Commendables – A Man Apart
Jorge Luis Borges once observed that ideally–given an omniscient observer–”an indefinite, and almost infinite” number of biographies could be written about a man, including “the genealogical biography, the economic biography, the psychiatric biography, the surgical biography, the topographical biography.” These and other types ( e.g., the sexual biography) depicting insignificant personalities roll from the presses at an in exorable rate, multiplying...
Commendables – Subtlety vs. Six-Guns
In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner created a landmark in American historiography by articulating his thesis that the frontier experience had produced “the forces dominating American character.” Especially during the last 20 years, many historians have challenged the validity of Turner’s views, arguing that European culture remained the primary influence upon American government and society. Nonetheless, movies,...
Liberal Culture – Neo-Salvation
At a recent gathering in San Francisco, the National Council of Churches considered an application for membership from the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, which teaches that homosexuality is “a gift from God.” Most of the 27,000 members of this church are so gifted. In championing the cause of this denomination, liberal Methodist theologian Roy Sano called down fire...
Music – Do, Re, Me, Me, Me
Ned Rorem is a composer. And a Pultizer Prize (1976) winner at that. He is also his own favorite subject: listed among his titles are The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, with which he started his career as a writer in 1966, and The New York Diary (not A), both of which will soon see fresh ink. The diary portion accounts...
Twinkle, Twinkle
These three works deal with aspects of what will be a crucial problem of the next generation: the exploitation of space travel and its effect on the arms race. Daniel Graham’s High Frontier advocates convincingly an all-out space effort for both military and economic purposes. James Canan’s book is a straight reportorial account of the American side of the arms...
Making Hay with the Southern Sun
Posthumously, William Faulkner has achieved a celebrity that, if we take him at his word, he despised and eschewed, but which seems inseparable from modem commercial culture. Every second man in the street, who can’t remember who is currently Vice-President, recognizes Faulkner’s name as that of a famous writer. Every lumpen intellectual who once read The Sound and the Fury...
Getting & Spending
One of the oddest intellectual trends of recent years has been the abandonment of economic determinism by writers on the left and its adoption by some writers on the right. The notion that all important human affairs are controlled by economic relations is a key element of Marx’s theories, yet the most influential leftist writers of today commonly operate in...
A Flounder and the Shark
Vladimir Bukovsky remarked that without a guide through the “labyrinths of the Soviet soul,” studies of socialism “are simply useless—or worse, they make the subject even more obscure. “ Were it not for the fact that Adam Ulam has been interpreting the Soviet Union since long before Bukovsky made his comment, one could suspect that Ulam wrote Dangerous Relations to...
One Way Out
So too it may be useful to write a novel about the end of the world. Perhaps it is only through the conjuring up of catastrophe, the destruction of all Exxon signs, and the sprouting of vines in the church pews, that the novelist can make vicarious use of catastrophe in order that he and his readers may come...
Self-Indulgence Made Simple
This starry-eyed reappraisal of two unhappy decades in our nation’s history serves as a sobering reminder that “the revolt of the masses” is far from over. Its author, deaf to any appeal to duty or civility, is an unabashed apologist for “postdeprivational,” appetitive, man. Indeed, insofar as I am able to tell, there is almost no conceivable indulgence, no selfish...
Writing Poetry & Striking Poses
”When he wriggles,” Ambrose Bierce once wrote of the politician, “he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice.” Bierce might well have said the same about modem writers who cannot distinguish between propaganda and art or between political sermons and poetry. Within the last year college bulletin boards and newspapers have been flyspecked with announcements...
Dark Contract
Matthew Bruccoli is, perhaps, the leading biographer of modern American novelists. With this book he scores something of a triple, as it appeared soon after his acclaimed lives of Fitzgerald and O’Hara. Like his other works, it is exceptionally well-produced. It is a handsome book, with a full apparatus of notes and documents. There is a difference between biography plain...
A Man Among Mice
Lady Lytton probably summed up the aura of Winston Churchill most effectively when she said, “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.” Those who have chronicled Churchill’s life have been liberal about providing a compendium of his faults. Churchill was, after all, an albatross...
Open—Or Empty?
In the work of Professor Germino’s prime mentor, Eric Voegelin, and that of Hannah Arendt, the subject of Professor Young-Bruehl’s biography, we have the head and the heart of a theory of man that understands politics as phenomenality, as self-disclosure in a space of appearances, originating in the “experiential locus of humanity.” This locus is a problematic “Between” in which,...
Faltering Christian Soldiers
Eerdmans justly enjoys a reputation as one of America’s leading Christian publishers; however, as modern Christianity itself becomes increasingly fragmented and secularized, publishing books that try to represent the whole of it, as these two volumes do, becomes increasingly problematic. Though the United States has never been united by a single communion or creed, until quite recently it did enjoy...
At the Abyss
Although a world safe from nuclear destruction is an ideal that all civilized people should pray for, as a practical matter, it is an impossibility. Nuclear weapons exist and will continue to do so until the time that (a) they have been used and so only rubble remains or (b) they have been replaced by more potent forces. This is...
Conservative Imagination
Benjamin Disraeli and John Henry Cardinal Newman are credited with bringing intriguing imponderables into the syndrome of conservative philosophies. Theirs was, in Russell Kirk’s phrase, “conservatism of imagination,” a rather vague category of cognition and judgment. In fact, Disraeli’s historical image is deceptively coherent, definable, even simple: he’s perceived as an astute statesman, dedicated to achieving goals of a political...
“Social Register”
With a sense of sweet justice muted only by the most basic human considerations, we read of one event in New York’s end-of-summer season: the mugging of two prominent socialites, big stars on the Manhattan lib jet-set firmament, both shining lights of Vogue and WWD. The deliciously exciting romp took place in the East End-Carl Schurz Park area, one of...
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges is anything but easy to accept, absorb, comprehend, and emotionally embrace. It’s not that his poems, short stories, and essays are all hard to read, for some of them have the lucidity and pure tone of a crystal form seen and struck. Others are admittedly trying, especially for those not cognizant of Argentinian history, versed in Anglo-Saxon,...
James Burnham
Few 20th-century writers have moved so dramatically from the left to the right as James Burnham, and fewer still have articulated so clearly the moral and cultural validity of such a shift. Born in Chicago in 1905 and educated at Princeton and Balliol, Burnham began a 26-year career as a teacher and professor of philosophy at New York University in...
Time’s Precision
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, 1950, with no prior indications...
Epistemological Chutzpah
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 good and the country’s good...