Winter 1991
Africa Agonistes
In Essence
Robert A. Dahl, in Politi-cal Science Quarterly (Fall 1990), 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y. 101 15-0012.
When Ronald Reagan swept into the Oval Office in 1980, politicians and pundits fell over one another declaring his 50.9 per- cent victory a "mandate" to govern-just as they had upon the election of most pres- idents chosen during this century. Indeed, writes Dahl, a Yale political scientist, "it has become commonplace for presidents and commentators alike to argue t...
John Heilemann, in The Washington Monthly (Dec. 1990), 161 1 Conn. Ave. N.W., Wash- ington, D.C. 20009.
Ask a classroom fall of college honors stu- dents where they hope to work after graduation, and they'll likely tell you IBM, or CBS, or Arthur Anderson. Ninety per- cent of them, however, never even con- sider working for the nation's largest em- ployer: the federal government.
Exactly the opposite was true six de- cades ago when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. "Washington was deluged...
"the best and the brightest," but "the best of the desperate."
Casualties of "Ending the Cold War at Home" by Morton H. Halperin and Jeanne M. Woods, in Foreign Policy (Winter 1990-91), 2400 NThe Cold War st.N.w., Washington, D.c., 20037-1 196.
The Cold War abroad may be over, but the murky underworld of espionage, state se- crets, and highly classified government projects is still operating at full tilt-right here at home.
So say Halperin and Woods, both of the...
Beverly Ann Bendekgey, in The G.A.O.Journal (Summer 19901, Rm. 4129, US. General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C. 20548.
During the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, a platoon of American military police ex- changed gunfire with Panamanian soldiers outside of Panama City. What made this firefight different from others, however, was that the platoon was led a woman.
Officially, American women shouldn't have been fighting in Panama at all. Women in a11 branches of the armed forces have been barred...
Steven L. Spiegel, in The National Interest (Winter 1990-91), 1112 16th st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Even before Iraq invaded Kuwait on Au- gust 2, US.-Israeli relations were tense. Is- raelis worried that the United States would abandon them; Americans were dismayed daily reports of violence between Arabs and Jews in Israel's occupied territories. It appeared that the two allies might be nearing a major falling out.
But Spiegel, a political scientist at UCLA, argues that tension is the r...
Control Today (Nov. 1990), 11 Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C.
Last January President George Bush de-
clared that as long as the United States de-
pends on nuclear weapons, it "must be
free to conduct nuclear tests." The Penta-
gon claims that continued testing is
needed to ensure that the more than
20,000 nuclear warheads in the U.S. arse-
nal will work if they are ever needed.
Mark, former head of the Theoretical Divi-
sion of Los Alamos National Laboratory
(1947-73), finds...
~r-win M. Stelzer, in Commentary (July 1990), 165 E. 56th St., New York. N.Y. 10022.
For Irwin Stelzer, a Fellow at the Ameri- can Enterprise Institute, Japan's high wall of protectionism poses a special problem. As a strong believer in free trade, he should oppose retaliatory U.S. trade barri- ers. After all, he argues, "if the Japanese choose to rely on high-cost homemade products rather than on more efficient American-made alternatives, why should we retaliate denying ourselves their w...
Andrei Shleifer and Rob- ert W. Vishny, in Science (Aug. 17, 1990), 1333 H St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.
The words "hostile takeover" evoke im- ages of ruthless billionaires tearing apart helpless companies and firing workers for sport. 1989, 143 huge corporations that belonged to the mighty Fortune 500 of 1980 had been swallowed up by other
companies. All told, $1.3
trillion in corporate assets
changed hands during the
1980s. What should have
been done to stop the take-...
"Whatever Happened to New Math?" Jeffrey W. Miller, in American Heritage (Dec. 1990), 60 5th Ave., New York, N.Y.
In the mid-1950s a radical new way of teaching math to America's reluctant stu- dents was born, and was soon hailed as the greatest advance since Pythagoras's the- ory. A little more than three decades later, however, the term "new math" is virtually a profanity.
New math was born after World War I1 as a modest attempt to improve math edu- cation. Math classes...
the mid-1970s, new math was dead.
If the space race hadn't pushed new math along so quickly, Miller writes, it might have been a success. Instead, "its most lasting impact might be that of a cau- tionary tale." Today's curriculum reform- ers, he concludes, would do well to work "from the teachers up, not from the uni- versities down."
"The Economics of Legalizing Drugs" Richard J. Dennis, in
Drug Bust The Atlantic (Nov. 1990), 745 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 021...
Randall K. Hornelessness Filer, in NY (Autumn 1990), 42 E. 71 St.,New York, N.Y. 10021.
To many New Yorkers, daily encounters ways, roaming Central Park, or panhan- with homeless people sleeping in door- dling suggest a problem of crisis propor-
WQ WINTER 1991
120
PERIODICALS
tions. And it is, says Filer, an economist at residents in New York-one third the rate Hunter College, but not of the kind or for of 20 other large American cities. Curi- the reasons most people think. ously, though, New...
25 percent and the supply of cheap apart- ments was as great as in other cities, yet the number of homeless families rose steadily. New York families are more vul- nerable. Filer concedes. But while there are 30 to 50 percent more poor, female- headed families in New York than in other large cities, the city's family homeless rate is 250 percent higher.
Filer suggests a third, perverse possibil- ity: New York's generous homeless and housing policies encourage families to be- come homeless.
Since...
the same company. In- side the magazine were full-page ads for two Guerlain products. The woman on the cover, it turned out, was Guerlain's public relations director.
Food and cosmetic companies regularly advertise in magazines such as People and the New Yorker without demanding reci- pes or beauty columns, Steinem
en, [ellectsthosechanges
Today's Ms covers the mild as il attwlsadds. So where does the habit of men In all its diversity,wthout l~m~tat~ons
controlling the content of wom- From politics,...
a lack of non-crime-related news reporting on blacks. "Reports invariably will give mi- nority legislators ample coverage when the subject is a so-called minority issue," notes one black state legislator, "but when minority legislators become involved in the mainstream of economic, political, government, and social matters," they are "either ignored or very lightly reported."
The small number of black reporters is one reason for the media's poor coverage of blacks,...
the messiness of life," and Quine sought to construct a fluid philoso- phy of belief, Wittgenstein said that each person's truth is revealed in the way he perceives his life's experiences. Ultimately, the philosopher cannot hope to discern universal truths.
Not all Anglo-American philosophy of the past half century has been concerned with language, Ross continues. In his ele- gant Theory of Justice (1971), Harvard phi- losopher John Rawls set out explicitly to construct a set of "just...
George A. Keyworth I1 and Bruce R. Abell, in Technology Review (Oct. 1990), Build-Shuttle ing W59, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02139.
The U.S. space shuttle was supposed to open the door to routine, affordable space flight. Needless to say, it hasn't. Keyworth and Abell, both researchers at the Hudson Institute, argue that it was "doomed from the start. The shuttle is too costly, too com- plex, and too inflexible to support today's space access needs." Scrap it, they urge, and instead pump...
the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which is wary of any program that threatens the shuttle's future. Partly because of such bu- reaucratic indifference, Congress cut the NASP's 1990 budget from $427 million to $254 million, pushing back the first sched- uled flight test from 1994 to 1997. Keyworth and Abell worry that the NASP will be killed. "Only when travel into orbit ceases to be a newsworthy event," they conclude, "can we claim to have truly en- tered...
Peter W. Huber, in Daeda-lus (Fall 1990), 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
Scientists have no patience for colleagues who cook numbers and gloss over errors. So it is ironic, says Huber, a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, that half-baked scien- tific theories and unproven hypotheses have found a home in, of all places, the American courtroom. During the last dec- ade, he writes, "courts have become steadily more willing to decide factual is- sues that mainstream scientists still c...
Michael Fumento, in The Ameri- can Spectator (Nov. 1990), 2020 N. 14th St., Ste. 750, Arlington, Va. 22216-0549.
For years environmentalists have called for the development of cheap, clean alter- natives to gasoline. In November, they were rewarded when Congress passed its landmark Clean Air Act. It requires, among other things, that localities that fail to reach clean air targets 1992 begin mixing "clean" fuels with gasoline to lower nollution. But while the Clean Air Act might make...
Michael Fumento, in The Ameri- can Spectator (Nov. 1990), 2020 N. 14th St., Ste. 750, Arlington, Va. 22216-0549.
For years environmentalists have called for the development of cheap, clean alter- natives to gasoline. In November, they were rewarded when Congress passed its landmark Clean Air Act. It requires, among other things, that localities that fail to reach clean air targets 1992 begin mixing "clean" fuels with gasoline to lower nollution. But while the Clean Air Act might make...
PERIODICALS
can be perverse.
When trees are cut for timber, for in- stance, the profits from their sale are added to GNP. But nothing is subtracted from GNP for the loss of the forest. Econo- mists do, however, count money spent to combat environmental destruction and pollution. Thus, the $40 billion that Postel says Americans dole out to doctors each year to treat pollution-related ailments is, strangely enough, counted as wealth. De- spite its devastating effect on Alaska's wild- life, the 1...
speculators, "with ostensi- blv no attention to versonal taste and de- sire, thrown up to cover the most land and make the most money, using the materials and technology of the 1870s, [have been] considered superior bv manv of those liv- ing in them to the new flats designed the best planning authorities using good architects?" Because most people, espe- cially those raising families, share a "taste for the low-rise, the small-scale, the unit that gives some privacy, some control,...
Phillip Booth: "On the far side/of the storm/window." The break is used as a trick to interrupt the flow of the poem and call attention to the cleverness of its author.
Are there any antidotes to the workshop syndrome? Dooley knows that little can be done about the larger cultural trends and
u
smaller academic imperatives that foster mediocrity. But he does have a few hints for buddins McPoets. Avoid obvious cli-
"
ches, such as the "adjective noun of noun" formula....
Philip Norton, in West European Politics (July 1990), 11 Gainsborough Rd., London El 1 1%.
After seven centuries, the British Parlia- ment is experiencing, in typically subdued British fashion, a revolution in its ways. Over the last 20 years, says Norton, a po- litical scientist at the University of Hull, Parliament has become more aggressive and influential. For better or for worse, it has come in some ways to resemble the
U.S. Congress.
Britain's political tradition favors a strong executive, a...
Tom Bethell, in Reason (Oct. 1990),
Trouble On the Kibbutz
2716 Ocean Park Blvd., Ste. 1062, Santa Monica, Calif. 90405.
To Israelis, the kibbutz is as vital a national symbol as the family farm is to Americans. Like the American family farm, the kibbutz is an ideal that has been sustained a few; at no time has more than three per- cent of Israel's population lived on a kib- butz. Now, according to Bethell, a Reason contributing editor, kibbutzim share one other similarity with family farms...
Tom Bethell, in Reason (Oct. 1990),
Trouble On the Kibbutz
2716 Ocean Park Blvd., Ste. 1062, Santa Monica, Calif. 90405.
To Israelis, the kibbutz is as vital a national symbol as the family farm is to Americans. Like the American family farm, the kibbutz is an ideal that has been sustained a few; at no time has more than three per- cent of Israel's population lived on a kib- butz. Now, according to Bethell, a Reason contributing editor, kibbutzim share one other similarity with family farms...
Book Reviews
RACE AND SLAVERY IN THE MIDDLE EAST: An Historical Enquiry
By Bernard Lewis.
Oxford. 184 pp. $24.95
THE ARROGANCE OF FAITH: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century.
By Fewest G. Wood.Knopf. 517 pp. $29.95
THE NATION, 1865-1990:
Selections from the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture.
Edited by Katrina vanden Heuvel.
Thunder's Mouth. 534 pp. $21.95
THE DEATH OF LITERATURE
By Alvin Kernan.
Yale. 230 pp. $22.50
BEFORE NOVELS: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. By J. Paul Hunter.
Norton. 421 pp.$25
By Homer. Trans. by Robert Fagles, with introduction and notes by Bernard Knox.
Viking. 683 pp. $35
By Brian Boyd.
Princeton. 607 pp. $25
By David Sweebnan. Crown. 391 pp. $30
By Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda.
Free Press. 432pp. $29.95
By Donald L.Miller. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 628 pp. $24.95
America. By Judith Stacey. Basic Books.328pp. $22.95
By Ann Braden Johnson. Basic.306 pp. $22.95
By John Noble Wilford.
Knopf. 244 pp. $24.95
By Claude Quetel. Trans. by Judith Braddock and Brian Pike. Johns Hopkins. 342 pp. $35.95
Essays
1990, Africans in most of the 46 black-ruled nations below the Sahara were poorer
than they had been 30 years before Yet all is not misery. As philoso- pher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes here, Africans in their
disillusionment have cast ' i
aside the shallow national-ism of the early postcolonial years. They are holding their societies together with old bonds of family and i tribe, and, increasingly,
with new bonds, spun i!
churches, sports clubs, and other groups. These humble grassroots in...
Africa has endured an economic catastrophe that dwarfs the Great Depression. Starting from stark poverty, it descended during the past decade into unbelievable deprivation. Famine, war, and civil strife became commonplace, and even AIDs was visited upon the Africans. By 1990, Africans in most of the 46 black-ruled nations below the Sahara were poorer than they had been 30 years before Yet all is not misery. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes here, Africans in their disillusionment...
I got the news during a brief visit to the United States in September 1988. Don Bonifacio, the finance minister of Equatorial Guinea and my closest colleague, had been fired. I figured that it must have had something to do with the recent coup attempt. The plotters were partly motivated by fears of the free-market reforms Don Bonifacio and President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo had been pushing to shore up the country's crumbling economy, reforms that threatened the backdoor enterprises of many...
Seek ye first the political kingdom, "and allthe rest shall be added unto you," exhorted Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first head of state and Africa's premier nationalist.
Now more than 30 years and some 70 coups later, all the rest has not been added-and some things even have been subtracted from Africa. Today, its per-capita income is lower than it was 30 years ago, and 70 percent of the world's poorest nations are in Africa. In his recent Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent...
n the liberal democracies of the
West, and in a growing number of
other nations, the "public" and its
"opinion" are fixtures of modem
life. Indeed, it is hard to imagine
how culture and politics ever man- aged without them. The highbrow poet, the pulp novelist, the classical musician, the rock star, the avante-garde filmmaker, the director of TV sit-coms: All of these produc- ers of "culture" need an image of the "pub- lic" and its expected reaction, wh...
the almost daily eruption of new disputes over the very things that most agitated our forebears: rights. Does Madonna have a First Amendment right to have her steamy rock video aired on television? Is there a right to life? A right to abortion? Do the homeless have a right to shelter? Here, historian James H. Hutson recalls the equally difficult time Americans had sorting through rights before fram- ing the Bill of Rights; legal scholar Gary McDowell casts a critical eye on the proliferation of...
dpdf-doc>
For more than a decade, Americans have been reliving the birth of the United States through bicentennials: those of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, the Constitution, and now, finally, the Bill of Rights. But this past is also kept alive by the almost daily eruption of new disputes over the very things that most agitated our forebears: rights. Does Madonna have a First Amendment right to have her steamy rock video aired on television? Is there a right to life? A right to abortion? Do...
' e are living in the midst of America's second great age of rights-or perhaps its first age of rights rhetoric. Scarcely a question now comes before the American public without some fundamental issue of rights being invoked. There is said to be a right to life and a right to die, and a right governing virtually everything that might occur between the exercise of these two prerogatives. There are said to be women's rights, gay rights, and handicapped rights, a right to work and a right to smoke, t...
THE BILL OF RIGHTS
since the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission opened for business in 1966. Americans have been benumbed by celebra- tions of big historical events. The indifference that one detects toward the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights is also evident in the scholarship on the origins of that document. Until the 1950s, scholars largely ignored the subject, with the result that, according to one expert, there is no good book on it.
What writing there has been on the birth of...
e was the dominant politi-
presidential performance from Franklin D.
cal figure of the 1960s. He
Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan showed that
challenged us to wipe out
Americans consistently ranked Johnson
poverty, to end racial seg-
near or at the bottom of every category.
regation, and to win a
Asked which of these presidents made
morally confusing war in
them feel proudest of being an American,...
amnath is a 51-year-old
man who owns a grocery
shop in the oldest part of
the city of Delhi. When he
took the unusual step of
coming to see me. a West- ern-trained psychoa~lyst, he w& suffer- ing from an unspecified anxiety which be- came especially acute in the company of his father. He did not call it anxiety, of course, but a "sinking of the heart." This condition was less than three years old, a relatively new development.
Ramnath had, on the other hand, long suffered from...
in Washing- ton on behalf of the elderly. 'Old-age interest groups ap- pear to be one of the great po- litical success stories of the last two decades," writes Day, a University of New Orleans po- litical scientist. Federal spend- ing on programs for the elderly rose from less than 15 percent of the federal budget in 1960 to about 27 percent in 1986, cut- ting the poverty rate among the elderly from 33 percent in 1959 to 12.5 percent in 1987.
Politicians, fearful of a back- lash from the "gray...
