Summer 1983
Brazil
In Essence
Everett Carl1 Ladd,
in Public Opinion (Dec.-Jan. 1983), Ameri-
Choosing can Enterprise Institute, 1150 17th St.
N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Parsing the results of elections and public opinion surveys to divine whether the voters are moving Left or Right is a hallowed pastime among Washington pundits and elected officials. It is also futile, adds Ladd, a University of Connecticut political scientist.
Massive contradictions in poll results, he argues, show that Ameri- cans are abandoning...
the new "post-ideological" electorate, Ladd predicts. But innovative politicians will find the voters willing to give a fair hearing to thoughtful prescriptions for the nation's ills.
"Federal Fraud, Waste, and Abuse:
One Step Forward, Causes and Responses" Thomas F.
Eagleton and Ira S.Shapiro, in Journal of
One Step Back the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies
(Winter 1982/83), Airport Rd., White Plains, N.Y. 10604.
For years, nobody in Congress or the executive branch...
Arthur Schle- Eisenhower's singer, Jr., in Reviews in American History ew Look (Mar. 1983), Johns Hopkins, 34th and
Charles, Baltimore, Md. 21218.
Dwight D. Eisenhower's long-denigrated Presidency (1953-61) is sud- denly rising in scholars' esteem.
As Schlesinger, a City University of New York historian, notes, "the successive faults of Eisenhower's successors-activism, excess, crook- edness, mediocrity, blah-have given his virtues new value." And the diaries and official papers from...
PERIODICALS
POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
see no reason why [nuclear weapons] shouldn't be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else."
Moreover, Schlesinger adds, Eisenhower authorized a host of Central Intelligence Agency covert operations-backing coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) and organizing the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro's Cuba-that ultimately damaged U .S. interests.
As to the revisionists' claims that Eisenhower harbored a grand strategy that he...
Don-ald S. Zagoria, in Foreign Affairs (Spring 1983), PO. Box 2515, ~oulder,~01;. 8032 1.
The slowly ripening detente between Moscow and Beijing, a source of some anxiety in Washington, does not pose a serious threat to the West.
The two Communist powers have been at odds over ideological and security issues since the late 1950s, when China insisted on building its own nuclear weapons. Even as they move toward detente, writes Zago- ria, a Hunter College political scientist, mutual fears will keep...
Earl C. Ravcnal, in The New York Times Mugazi~ze (March 6, 1983), 229
America West 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
Budget-minded members of Congress who favor trimming Pentagon outlays are whittling while Rome burns. The only way to control de- fense spending and shore up the ailing U.S. economy is to abandon the 35-year-old U.S. strategy of "containing" Soviet global expansion.
So argues Ravenal, professor of international relations at George- town University. The Reagan administration's...
Stephen D. Wrage, in SAIS Rcvit~v Human Rights (Winter-Spring 1983), 1740 Massachu-
setts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
The Reagan administration's "quiet diplomacy" on human rights has accomplished little; President Jimmy Carter's approach was vigorous, noisy, but usually fruitless. Between the two, writes Wrage, a George- town University lecturer on international affairs, lies the route to an ef- fective U.S. human rights policy.
The Carter administration claimed, justifiably,...
recognizing the constraints under which we act," Wrage con- cludes, "and giving the larger goal of maintaining world order prior- ity over ending oppression, we are likely to do better by ourselves, by world order, and by the oppressed."
"The U.S. Ambassador" by James W.
Do Diplomats Spain, in The Washington Quarterly (Spring 1983), Dept. 8010, Transaction Periodicals Consortium, P.O. Box 1262, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
Despite high-level summit meetings,...
Alan Mur- The Lure ray, in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Re- (Feb. 19, 1983), 1414 22nd St. N.w.,Export Subsidies Washington, D.C. 20037.
Rising protectionism in world markets and sizable job losses at home are making it more and more difficult for Congress to abide the prin- ciples of free trade. Advocates of a "fight fire with fire" strategy are winning new support on Capitol Hill for at least one countermeasure, a big boost in federal export subsidies.
Exports are becoming increasingly...
Robert M. Kaus, in Har-per's (Feb. 1983), P.O. Box 2620, Boulder,
Industrial Czar? Colo. 8032 1.
To critics of President Reagan's brand of free-market economics, pro- posals for a European-style national "industrial policy" have a growing appeal.
Most industrial policy advocates, writes Kaus, a Harper's editor, are either "preservationists" or "accelerationists." The first group, led New York investment banker Felix Rohatyn, worries most about the urban decline and...
The Future of Gene Bylinsky, in Fortune (Feb. 21, 1983),
3435 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif.
The Factory 90010.
The last major revolution in American manufacturing occurred when Henry Ford opened the first assembly line in 1913.Today, reports By- linsky, a Fortune editor, another big breakthrough is on the horizon.
Coming up are so-called flexible manufacturing systems. Conven- tional assembly lines are relatively rigid: Each machine performs a sin- gle, narrowly defined function. Any cha...
Christopher Jencks, in The New York Re-Discrimination view ofBooks (March 3 and 17, 1983), P.O. Box 940, Farminedale, N.Y. 11737.
Are "affirmative action" quotas and other compensatory federal anti- discrimination efforts unnecessary?
Thomas Sowell, an influential black UCLA economist, believes they are, and his arguments in such books as Ethnic America (1981) have supported the Reagan administration's retreat from social activism. But Jencks, a Northwestern University sociologist, takes...
excluding blacks from the pool of job candidates will be undercut competitors and forced to relent. Jencks concedes that this may be true in professional fields (such as law) where discrimina- tion is not universal. But he argues that lower-class black men may face increasing job discrimination as crime rates and other "statistical" stigmata of ghetto culture worsen.
Since 1965, affirmative action has raised minority employment by between six and 13 percent over what it would have been...
104 percent to $19,800. Mortgage
payments consumed 19 percent of family income in 1980, up modestly
from 17 percent in 1970. Renters fared less well. Average rents jumped
125 percent, consuming 27 percent of tenant income in 1980 as opposed
to 20 percent in 1970. And renters' family incomes in 1980 were only 67
percent of the US. average, while those of homeowners grew to 125
percent, widening a gap that first appeared during the 1940s.
More than half of all American blacks and Hispanics...
Kieran Egan, in Teachers College Rec-
ord (Winter 1982), Columbia Univ., 525
Children Learn West 120th St., New York, N.Y. 10027.
American educators have been strongly influenced the child devel- opment theories of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). Yet Egan, professor of education at Canada's Simon Fraser University, con- tends that Piaget's evidence is seriously flawed.
Piaget held that children pass through four fixed stages of "logico- mathematical" development. Using...
Edward Jay Ep- stein, in The New Republic (Feb. 7, 1983), 1220 19th St. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Does Soviet Communist Party leader Yuri Andropov play tennis? Lis- ten to Glenn Miller records? Write comic verse?
Yes, U.S. newspapers told the American public in describing the former KGB chief last November when he succeeded Leonid Brezhnev. Yet virtually none of these piquant details can be verified, says Epstein, author of Between Fact and Fiction.
When he was head of the Soviet secret police,...
the Post to have been entertained Andropov denies the story.
The early mistakes of the press, Epstein concludes, stemmed not from sinister Soviet "disinformation" but from its own uncritical thirst for "color," obligingly provided by self-appointed "Andropov experts." The newspapermen should simply have admitted their ignorance. "He [Andropov] stands at the head of Russia," says Epstein, "but we don't even know how tall."
"Television News...
FredThe View from Barnes, in Washington Journalism Review The Fringe (Jan.-Feb. 1983), 2233 Wisconsin Ave.
N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007.
Spokesmen for the New Right and their left-wing opponents seldom agree on anything, but on one matter they see eye to eye: The nation's major news organizations treat them unfairly, albeit in different ways.
One complaint is more common on the Right, writes Barnes, a Balti- more Sun reporter: Reporters tend to label its spokesmen as extremists. Right-wing activists...
fits and convulsions-interpreted the faithful as a sign of the Holy Spir- it's presence-which further detracted from Wesley's image as a theolo- gian. But Wesley himself was skeptical of the value of such episodes: "I neither forward nor hinder them," he said.
In fact, says Dreyer, Wesley gave considerable thought to the nature of faith and human reason. His arguments closely paralleled those of
John Wesley's 1738 religious experience started him on the road to Methodism after 13 years...
Leon R. Kass, in The American Scholar (Spring For Death 1973), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.
Arresting the aging process and prolonging human life are top priori- ties of medical researchers. At first glance, such efforts seem an unqual- ified good, but Kass, a University of Chicago biologist, is troubled some of their implications.
The aging process, he says, prepares us for death. "Inasmuch as I no longer cling so hard to the good things of life when I begin to lose the use and...
diverting so much attention to living longer, we may sacrifice 'our chance for living as well as we can and for satisfying to some ex- tent. . . our deepest longings for what is best."
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
"Chasing Particles of Unity" MichaelAfter E =me2 Gold, in Science 83 (Mar. 1983), P.O. Box
10790, Des Moines, Iowa 50340.
Physicists have identified the particles responsible for three of nature's four basic forces-electromagnetism, gravity, and the so-called "strong for...
IODICALS
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
ent particles and forces are only "different faces of a single, more funda- mental property of naturen-the effects have been awesome. Television and radar sprang from Heinrich Hertz's (1857-94) work on the relation- ship between electricity and magnetism; Albert Einstein's famous E=mc2 formula linking energy to matter in 1905 led to nuclear power -and the atomic bomb.
"Interferon and the Cure of Cancer" byInterferon's Sandra Panem and Jan Viltek, i...
Bruce Piasecki, in The Washington Monthly (Jan.Toxic Wastes 1983), 2712 Ontario Rd. N.W., Washing- ton, D.C. 20009.
After the 1978 Love Canal scandal in Niagara Falls, New York, federal and state agencies hastened to tighten regulation of toxic-waste dumps. Yet some Western European countries have discovered that detoxifying chemical by-products makes more sense than dumping them.
American industry generates some 77 billion pounds of toxic waste -sulfuric acid, mercury, cyanide-every year. Eighty...
IODICALS
RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT
"The Future of American Agriculture" by
American Farms Sandra S. Batie and Robert G. Healy, in Scientific American (Feb. 1983), 414 Madi-
Face the Future son Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017.
After a century of growing productivity, the nation's farmers face seri-
ous problems. Yet, Batie and Healy, economists at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and the Conservation Foundation, respectively, claim that no
U.S. agricultural crisis looms on the horizon.
Fears t...
50 to 90 percent, and is already used on about 25 percent of U.S. farmland. Higher costs, farmers' habits, and subsidies for certain crops are among the factors slowing wider implementation of such techniques.
A greater imponderable is the possibility of a sudden climate change. Nevertheless, the authors argue, Washington policy-makers should do more to limit such long-term risks. Among their options: encouraging wider dispersal of farms and diversification of crops in one-crop re- gions, ending...
50 percent, and Canada, which is
searching for successors to its Alberta oil fields.
The possibility of an OPEC price collapse or a sudden breakthrough in synthetic fuel production makes investing in Arctic oil a financial gamble. But to oilmen searching for energy supplies outside of OPEC's grasp, it seems a risk worth taking.
"American Naturalism and the Problem uccess spoil of Sincerity" Christopher I.Wilson, in American Literature (Dec. 1982), Duke The Naturalists? Univ. Press,...
50 percent, and Canada, which is
searching for successors to its Alberta oil fields.
The possibility of an OPEC price collapse or a sudden breakthrough in synthetic fuel production makes investing in Arctic oil a financial gamble. But to oilmen searching for energy supplies outside of OPEC's grasp, it seems a risk worth taking.
"American Naturalism and the Problem uccess spoil of Sincerity" Christopher I.Wilson, in American Literature (Dec. 1982), Duke The Naturalists? Univ. Press,...
Roger Copeland, in
Partisan Review (NO. 1, 1983), BostonFor Dance Univ., 121 Bav State Rd., Boston, Mass.
02215.
Performers and choreographers of modern dance-Martha Graham, for example-have long stressed the "primitive" elements of their art. But a new generation is abandoning primitivism, and possibly dance itself.
So says Copeland, an Oberlin College theater teacher. Primitivism, he notes, arose around the turn of the century in reaction to the "neu- rotic character" of...
Hilton Kramer, in The New Crite-
rion (Nov. 1982), Foundation for Cultural
Review, 460 Park Ave., New York, N.Y.
10022.
Neo-Expressionism is only one of many new styles that has swept the art world since the 1960s. Nevertheless, asserts Kramer, editor of the New Criterion, it signals a real change in the direction of art.
The previous major innovation in painting occurred during the early 1960s, when Andy Warhol's Pop art displaced the postwar Abstract Ex- pressionism of such artists as Jackson...
E. L. Kircizizer's Der Theosoph (far left). An example of 1960s Pop art is Roy Lichteizstein's Girl With Ball. Mimmo Paladino's Porta is a Neo-Expressionist work.
Kramer writes. "The mystical, the erotic, and the hallucinatory were once again made welcon~e in painting." Not only did the new painters reinject emotion into art, they reversed a 100-year trend towards "de- pletion" and sparer images in painting.
The Neo-Expressionists are not the only painters who are breaking...
PERIODICALS
ARTS & LETTERS
introduced many new works Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel.
Most conductors included no works from the past in their musical programs. Felix Mendelssohn's controversial 1829 revival of Bach's St. Matthew Passion was a turning point. Gradually, older works came to dominate conductors' repertoires, and became "classics."
In Europe and America, composers themselves contributed to the change, Henahan concedes, by turning increasingly after World War I t...
his rival's supporters. Dissidents have been imprisoned; the press has begun to suffer government harassment. [In February 1983, Mugabe widened the campaign; thousands of ZAPU sympathizers and former guerrillas were killed government troops.]
Mugabe placates other potential rivals with patronage. Of the 80 black members of Parliament, he has appointed 54 as cabinet ministers or deputy ministers with salaries of up to $35,000. Such dubious ap- pointments, along with the departure of white civil...
Bil-
Creating Hunger lie R. DeWalt, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Jan. 1983), 5801 South
In Honduras Kenwood, Chicago, 111.60637.
In 1976, Honduras joined a growing list of Third World nations that must import corn, rice, and other basic foods. Many of its people go hungry. Yet, at the same time, the Hondurans have stepped up their production and export of beef.
Between 1961 and 1980, such exports rose more than 500 percent, while domestic beef consun~ption dropped. In the rich...
Liza Crihfield
apan's Geisha Dalby, in Natural Histon' (Feb. 1983), Box
4300, Bergenfield, N.J. 07621.
To Westerners, Japan's "geisha girls," with their powdered faces and traditional garb, seem exotic and slightly sinful. Most Japanese, reports anthropologist Dalby, have the same reaction.
Yet the geisha are not prostitutes. The first geisha were male enter- tainers in 17th-century Japanese brothels. No women entered the pro- fession until 1751, but 1800 they had claimed the profession...
Book Reviews
by Wole Soyinka
Random, 1982
230 pp. $14.95
edited by Alfonso Ortiz
Smithsonian, 1983
868 pp. $25
by Robert Shogan
New American Library,
1982
312 pp. $15.95
by Stanley I. Kutler
Hill & Wang, 1982
285 pp. $16.50
by Jean Lacouture
trans. by George Holoch
Holmes & Meier, 1982
571 pp. $39.50 cloth,
$24.50 paper
by William E. Nelson
Harvard, 1982
208 pp. $22.50
by Petro G. Grigorenko
trans. by Thomas P.
Whitney Norton, 1982
462 pp. $19.95
by Paul Starr
Basic, 1982
514 pp. $24.95
by William W. Warner
Little, Brown, 1983
338 pp. $17.95
edited by Kurt Weitzmann,
Gaiane Alibegasvili, Aneli
Volskaja, et al.
Knopf, 1982
419 pp. $60
by Bobbie Ann Mason
Harper, 1982
247 pp. $12.95
by Hyam Maccoby
Thames & Hudson, 1983
208 pp. $19.95
by Philip J. Hilts
Simon & Schuster, 1982
302 pp. $15.95
by Derek Freeman
Harvard, 1983
379 pp. $20
Edited by C. Vann Woodward.
Yale, 1982.886 pp. $14.95
By Hanna Batatu.
Princeton, 1982 1,284 pp. $27.50
Edited by Lewis M.
Dabney. Penguin,
1983.647 pp. $6.95
Essays
the passion for the development of natural resources, is a feeling of regret that a West European race, powerful its numbers and its skill . . . has not, to use the familiar phrase, got the thing in hand.'" That was how Lord Bryce appraised the Brazilians in 1912, and it is probably what he would say if he visited their country today. On the one hand, Brazil boasts the world's 10th largest economy and manufactures everything from computers and jet aircraft to tanks and rockets. On the other,...
During the 1950s, a few years before the suspension of dem- ocratic government by Brazil's military, the citizens of S5o Paulo on one occasion went to the polls and, after considering the choices, elected a hippopotamus, a write-in candidate, to the city council.
The hippo, a popular attraction at the city zoo, was never sworn in. But the episode illustrates the streak of good-humored cynicism that has helped Brazilians endure a century of politi- cal ups and downs. Over the past 95 years, the...
. Word of a major find in the eastern Amazon spread throughout the country. There were rumors of men unearthing gold rocks as big as their fists, of men who could not read or write turning into millionaires overnight and signing their checks with a thumbprint.
Soon the rumors were confirmed.
Three centuries after the gold strikes that had first lured thousands of men into the interior, Brazilians descended on Serra Pelada (Naked Mountain), the place where the discovery had been made, a small hill...
actually existed. Another three decades elapsed before they be- gan to exploit the colony systemati- cally. In 1532, the first town was established at Siio Vicente. Cattle and sugar cane were introduced, and a sugar mill was built.
the 1570s, when Pero de Magal- hiies de Gandavo toured Brazil's sugar-producing provinces, he counted some 60 mills and estimated the colo- ny's sugar exports at one million pounds a year. His detailed chronicle is translated as The Histories of Brazil (1922; Longwood,...
THE SUBURBS OF
CAMELOT
Has poetry ceased to matter to most Americans? And if it has, should the blame be placed on the poets, the reading public, or the times? Here critic Frank McConnell considers the state of contemporary American poetry and describes the efforts of some of our better poets to make their art matter once again.
by Frank D.McConnell
"The suburbs of Camelot"-one may as well admit, at the outset, that the poet in America has really never gotten closer to the center o...
America's leaders.
MISADVENTURE REVISITED
Richard K. Betts
Each November 22nd, representatives of the U.S. Army Special Forces-the Green Berets-join members of the Ken- nedy family at a memorial ceremony at President John F. Ken-nedy's grave. This joint tribute symbolizes the ambiguous legacy of the U.S. venture in Vietnam. Kennedy had personally championed the Green Berets as an elite vanguard combating Communist revolution and subversion in the Third World. But just four years after th...
Each November 22nd, representatives of the U.S. Army Special Forces-the Green Berets-join members of the Ken- nedy family at a memorial ceremony at President John F. Ken-nedy's grave. This joint tribute symbolizes the ambiguous legacy of the U.S. venture in Vietnam. Kennedy had personally championed the Green Berets as an elite vanguard combating Communist revolution and subversion in the Third World. But just four years after the President's assassination, his brothers Robert and Edward had moved...
As the year 1965 began, Ho Chi Minh, his Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, and the other members of the ruling Politburo in Hanoi saw triumph ahead. The long-sought goal of unifica- tion of North and South under the Con~munist banner would be achieved during the next twelve months. Broadcasting the lead- ership's annual State message, Radio Hanoi did not say that 1965 would be a "year of victories,' or of "moving toward vic- tory." It said flatly "the year of victory."
This...
A story made the rounds of the Army during the closing days of the Vietnam War. When the Nixon administration took over in 1969, so the story goes, Pentagon officials fed all the data on North Vietnam and the United States into a computer: popu- lation, gross national product, manufacturing capacity, size of the armed forces, and the like. The computer was then asked: "When will we win?" It took only a moment to answer: "You won in 1964!"
From the American professional soldier's...
Washington Post veteran Don Ober- dorfer, who concluded, as most historians do now, that the Commu- nists' spectacular 1968 Tet Offensive was a defeat for Hanoi in South Viet- nam, even as it demoralized political Washington. In The Unmaking of a President (19771, Herbert Schandler, a retired Army colonel and one of the authors of the Pentagon Papers, fol-lowed up with a scholarly, eye- opening dissection of Washington decision-making during the hectic February-March $968 period. An- other Postman,...
public agencies and private institutions
"Prospects for Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund."
Staff Memorandum, Congressional Budget Office, U.S. Congress, Washington,
-
D.C. 20402.22 pp.
Even as Congress celebrates the ap- parent resolution of the Social Secu- rity crisis, it may have to start worrying about another impending
U.S. trust fund bankruptcy.
According to the staff of the Con- gressional Budget Office (CBO), Medi- care (health insurance for the elderly and dis...
LECTIONS
Galileo's Science
And the Trial of 1633
"Nature .. . is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her." Thus did Galileo argue in 1615 for the authority of science over that of Scripture in the physical world. The Catholic Church's 1633 condemnation of Galileo is popularly seen as the response of theological dogmatism. But the issue debated by scholars today is whether Galileo actually proved that the Earth revolves around the sun. Here, as he a...
I guess I should have known I would one day write biography when, at the age of 10 or so, I discovered that the heroes I most craved to meet were not taxpaying residents of Nairobi, Kenya.
Alexander the Great, Tom Sawyer, Winston Churchill, and test pilot Chuck Yeager lived in "a world else- where," and seemed unlikely to visit mine, except perhaps on safari. Lacking their company, I was forced to improvise novels in which tow- headed aviators fought confusedly with Prime Ministers we...
