LECTIONS
iscovering Mexico
Novelist Carlos Fuentes has spent much of his life on the move. He has served as Mexico's ambassador to France and has been a visiting professor at numerous European and American universities. The son of a diplomat, he grew up in Panama, the United States, Chile, and Argentina. As a result, Fuentes explains, he learned "to imagine Mexico" before he really knew it. The experience proved invaluable. It taught him that the only worlds that remain new are those d...
? We were the gen-
taking, which turned out to be a bad eration of hope; the generation that was
idea. Maybe drugs make you a better going to change the world; the biggest,
person, but only if you believe in heaven richest, best-educated generation in the
and think John Belushi could get past the history of America-the biggest, rich-
WQ AUTUMN 1988
162
FROM THE '60s TO THE '80s
It seems like only yesterday
est, best-educated spot in this or any other galaxy. Nothing was too good for us....
"Manners and Morals2'-the expression is peculiarly, unrnistak- ably Victorian. Not "manners" alone: Lord Chesterfield in the 18th century was fond of discoursing to his son on the supreme irnpor- tance of manners-manners as distinct from (if necessary, in opposi- tion to) morals. And not "morals" alone: Philosophers had always taken this as their special province, had, indeed, made it so elevated a subject that it had little to do with anything so mundane as manners.
It...
Airlift. "Just as a trickle of water can, if sufficiently prolonged, wear down the stoutest rock, "wrote The New Yorker 's E. J. Kahn in May 1949, "so the airlift, with its unostentatious but ceaseless trickle of flights, carved a hole in the Soviet blockade of [ West] Berlin. "A week later, Stalin ended his effort to starve the city into submission.
WQ SUMMER 1988
100
During the summer of 1948, the future of West Berlin seemed to hang in the balance. On June 24, Josef Stalin...
Airlift. "Just as a trickle of water can, if sufficiently prolonged, wear down the stoutest rock, "wrote The New Yorker 's E. J. Kahn in May 1949, "so the airlift, with its unostentatious but ceaseless trickle of flights, carved a hole in the Soviet blockade of [ West] Berlin. "A week later, Stalin ended his effort to starve the city into submission.
WQ SUMMER 1988
100
During the summer of 1948, the future of West Berlin seemed to hang in the balance. On June 24, Josef Stalin...
.
On Breitscheidplatz, the main square in the heart of the city, two dozen German women dressed in sports suits, all in late middle age, are stepping out, moving gingerly to the beat of a Bavarian march. With their ample midriffs pressing against their leotards, these members of an exercise club from Munich lift and twirl their batons toward the sky. Some 300 shoppers and passersby-senior citizens, middle-aged cou- ples, many with their children-applaud approvingly as the group com- pletes its...
jetliner, the window- counterparts at the Berlin Air Safety Center seat passenger can see the Berlin Wall three (BASC). The BASC monitors the plane traffic in times. Heading east, he first glimpses the bar- the 20-mile-wide air corridors that link West rier where it runs between East Germany and Berlin and West Germany. West Berlin. From an altitude of several thou- "Since we're in the same room around the sand feet, the broad "death strip" looks as be- clock, our shift work becomes...
politics in the 20th century than Berlin. Yet unlike other major West European capitals-Rome, Paris, London-old Berh bloomed late as a cosmopolitan center. "Prior to 1871," as Gerhard Masur points out in Imperial Berlin (Basic, 1971), "the great powers of the world would not have considered the city worth the price of a bitter international struggle."
The city, writes Gordon A. Craig in The Germans (Penguin, 1983), was founded late in the 12th century as a tiny traclmg settlement...
For centuries, as merchant ships plied the high seas, pirates lurked somewhere nearby to prey upon them. Usually murderous and cruel, such maritime brigands have seldom been completely lawless. In-deed, throughout history, and regardless of national origin, most free- hooters have avoided anarchy; in some cases, they fashioned their own ethical codes as well as special notions of authority. Between 1716 and 1726, the brief heyday of Anglo-American piracy, thou- sands of men sailed under the Jolly...