And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
round the world, rough beasts are busily slouching. They are the nations recently emerged from decades of com- munist misrule, or those on the verge
of similar emergence, while some additional few are escapees from other forms of authoritarian gov- ernance, both of the right and left persuasions. What all have in common, from Russia and Poland to Zambia and Nicaragua,...
as much as 50 percent between 1983 and '88, are on the rebound. The economy has begun to grow again.
So successful have the reforms been that the Economist (Feb. 13, 1993) declares that President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who took office in 1988, "has a claim to be hailed as one of the great men of the 20th century." It is a tribute to how far Salinas has taken Mexico that the 24-member Organiza- tion for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is taking seriously the application...
"Whose Body Politic?" b Alan Wolfe, in The American Prospect (Winter 1993) p.6. Box 383080, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
Without Ronald Reagan and the Cold War to unite them, conservatives today are badly divided over sor. But today, Andrew Reding, a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute, writes in World Policy Journal (Spring 1991), "the culture of presidencialismo appears more naked than at any time since the ill-fated reign of Porfirio Diaz," the dictator overthrown i...
Robert E. Gilbert, in The Sci-ences (Jan.-Feb. 1993), New York Acad. of Sciences, Two E.63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) is remembered as an indifferent president who favored short workdays and long naps. When he died, only four years after leaving the White House, writer Dorothy Parker asked: "How can they tell?" But Northeastern Uni- versity political scientist Gilbert says that Silent Cal had not always been so given to lassitude.
Elected governor of Massachusetts...
Robert E. Gilbert, in The Sci-ences (Jan.-Feb. 1993), New York Acad. of Sciences, Two E.63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) is remembered as an indifferent president who favored short workdays and long naps. When he died, only four years after leaving the White House, writer Dorothy Parker asked: "How can they tell?" But Northeastern Uni- versity political scientist Gilbert says that Silent Cal had not always been so given to lassitude.
Elected governor of Massachusetts...
Charles 1. Dunlap, Jr., in Parameters (Winter 1992- 93), U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pa. 17013-5050.
The year is 2012 and the White House is abruptly taken over General Thomas E. T. Brutus, heretofore merely the uniformed chief of the unified armed forces. Upon the president's death and the vice president's
not entirely voluntary retirement, Brutus declares martial law, postpones elections, and names himself permanent Military Plenipotentiary. The coup is rati- fied in...
Charles 1. Dunlap, Jr., in Parameters (Winter 1992- 93), U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pa. 17013-5050.
The year is 2012 and the White House is abruptly taken over General Thomas E. T. Brutus, heretofore merely the uniformed chief of the unified armed forces. Upon the president's death and the vice president's
not entirely voluntary retirement, Brutus declares martial law, postpones elections, and names himself permanent Military Plenipotentiary. The coup is rati- fied in...
American weapons until after the war. Shrewd adversaries will locate their military bases in civilian areas or near cultural and religious landmarks. All of Amer- ica's weapons, the authors warn "will do little to dissuade an antagonist who knows that we like neither to suffer nor inflict casualties, military or civilian." At some point, they predict, the United States will be unable even to contemplate war, and "isolation will eventually be our answer."
The New Wisdom on M...
Richard R. Nelson and Gavin Wright, in Journal of Eco- nomic Literature (Dec. 1992), American Economic Assoc., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203.
For more than a decade, more and more voices have been heard bemoaning the loss of U.S. lead- ership in high technology and calling for a govem- ment-led industrial policy to set things right. What such analysts fail to understand, contend econo- mists Nelson of Columbia and Wright of Stanford, is why the United States had its big technological...
David J. Armor, in The Public Interest (Summer 1992), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 530, Washington, D.C. 20036.
The bad news about the lives of many blacks living in America's cities is all too familiar: drugs, crime, joblessness, family breakdown, and, many ac- counts, failing public schools. Yet, in the face of these oft-reported woes, black students in America over the course of the 1970s and '80s posted sub- stantial gains in math and reading achievement, according to the National Assessment of...