Summer 1990
Latin America's Indian Question
In Essence
Mickey Kaus, in The New Republic (May 7, 1990), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036,
More and more Democrats these days seem to be resuming an old war cry: Soak the rich! Soak the rich!
Kaus, an editor of the New Republic, says that the chant sends shivers down his spine. Not because he is a Republican, not (presumably) because he is rich, but be- cause a revival of the politics of redistribu- tion, which he calls Money Liberalism, "would condemn the Democrats to a futile and often i...
Tom W. Smith, in Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring 1990), Univ. Of Polling of Chicago Press, 5801 S. Ellis, Chicago, 111. 60637.
The origins of American political opinion polls are generally traced to 1936, when Alf Landon faced Franklin Roosevelt in one of the most lopsided "contests" in American history. Three pollsters (George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley) rose to the not-very-difficult task of predicting the winner. In fact, says Smith, a University of Chicago polling...
early October of 1824, the Star and North Carolina Gazette had collected poll results from 155 different meetings. Surprisingly, Smith says, the straw polls rather accurately foretold local results.
The ultimate irony is that popular opin- ion finally counted for little in 1824. Jack- son, the hero of New Orleans, won a plu- rality of the popular vote but fell short of a majority in the Electoral College. The elec- tion was decided the House of Repre- sentatives, which chose John Quincy Ad- ams...
early October of 1824, the Star and North Carolina Gazette had collected poll results from 155 different meetings. Surprisingly, Smith says, the straw polls rather accurately foretold local results.
The ultimate irony is that popular opin- ion finally counted for little in 1824. Jack- son, the hero of New Orleans, won a plu- rality of the popular vote but fell short of a majority in the Electoral College. The elec- tion was decided the House of Repre- sentatives, which chose John Quincy Ad- ams...
contrast, provided a framework in which unilateral Soviet ac- tions-even unilateral concessions- might make sense." Such concessions came quickly, beginning with Gorbachev's December 1988 announcement of troop cutbacks in Europe.
That is only one sign of the astonishing "minimalism" that Sestanovich sees sweeping Soviet foreign-policy thinking. Thus, Andrei Kozyrev, a top Foreign Minis- try official, wrote recently: "Our country has no interests justifying the use of mili- tary...
de-
mocratization. A natural
substitute for democracy
was nationalism, "that won-
drous 'political good' which
is never scarce and which
bestows psychic equality on
rich and poor, on masters
and servants alike." Fur-A U.S. cartoonist found the reunification of Germany a laughing
thermore, historical cir- matter. Few Europeans take the prospective marriage so lightly.
cumstances encouraged ex- treme nationalism.~he Second Reich (187 1-1 919) was a latecomer to the Great Powers an...
? "The Competitive Advantage of Nations" Michael E. Porter, in Harvard BusinessReview (March-April 1990), Boston, Mass.
"In a world of increasingly global compe- tition, nations have become more, not less important."
That's right, insists Porter, a professor at the Harvard Business School, more impor-tant. Prevailing wisdom in corporate America tends toward the opposite con- clusion: Moving factories to countries with the lowest wages and interest rates, as well as strategic m...
Stephen R. G. Jones, in American Sociological Management Matter? Review (~pril1990), 1722 N st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Almost any undergraduate who has taken an introductory social science course dur- ing the last 50 years has heard of the fam- ous Hawthorne Effect: The very knowl- edge that researchers are studying them causes people to change the way they be- have.
That is just one of the more curious find- ings that came out of the landmark study of worker productivity in Western El...
IODICALS
To the Victors Goes the Sleep
Darkness reigns in the executive suites of major Japanese corporations after 6 P.M., while subordinates' lights burn late into the night. Just the opposite is true in U.S. cor-porations, three Japanese researchers were astonished to discover. Their findings are summarized Wallace H.Oftutt, Jr., in Across the Board (April 1990).
Do Japanese CEOs work harder than Ameri- can CEOs? You might expect them to, based on the enormous success of Japanese cor-porations an...
the year 2020 and to 17.8 million 2040. By then, there will be more than a million Americans aged 100 or older.
Simple demographic projections show with stark clarity what may be in store for the United States. In 1985, for example, the budget for Medicare (federal health in- surance for the aged) was $72 billion. But Medicare outlays increase "substantially" with age, from $2,017 annually for those aged 65 to 74 to $3,215 for those aged 85 and above. By 2040, therefore, Medicare could...
"Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790-1880" Loren Schweninger, in The American Historical Review (Feb. 1990), 400 A St. S.E.,Washington, D.C.20003.
Hard as it may be to believe, the South be- fore the Civil War was home to more than a few well-to-do free blacks. In fact, writes Schweninger, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, the ante- bellum South gave rise to two fairly dis- tinct black elites.
To compound the irony, the wealthiest blacks lived in the Deep S...
Patrick S. And the Press Washbum, in Journalism Monographs (~pril 1990), 1621 COL . lege St., Univ. of S.C., Columbia, S.C. 29208-0251.
A month after the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Gen. H. H. Arnold of the Army Air Force wrote a glowing letter to the head of the U.S. Office of Censorship thanking him for suppress- ing "any mention" of the new weapon in the press until it was used. Arnold wrote that it "shall go down in history as the best- kept secret...
the time Smith's blunder was discovered, the story had al- ready gone out over the news wires.
Despite leaks like this, Washburn con-cludes, the story of the atom bomb re-mained "reasonably quiet." He believes that much of the credit belongs to Byron Price, the ex-newsman who directed the Office of Censorshin. Price resisted the army's call to impose a total news black- out on atomic (and other) news, opting in- stead for a voluntary approach. Total cen- sorship, he insisted, would have...
Kiku Adatto, who compared television's Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. coverage of the presidential elections of 1968 and 1988. intelligence experts sur- prise, as Tismaneanu does. By 1988 television's tolerance for the languid pace of politi- But he warns that they still cal discourse, never great, had all but vanished. An analysis do not understand that it is of all weekday evening network newscasts (over 280) from the strength of the groups Labor Day to Election Day in 1968 and 1988 reveals that the...
courtroom etiquette.
As for Mrs. Foot, as the authors are care- ful to call her, her fundamental error was in assuming that morality and etiquette are two different things. Both are part of a sin- gle, highly complex system of rules for the governance of social conduct, the authors insist. Without both of them, civilization would disappear.
"Holy Headgear" Harry Steinhauer, in The Antioch ReviewInventing (Winter 1990), P.O. Box 148, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387.
The Yadke
Harry Steinhauer w...
PERIODICALS
emeritus of German at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was the as-sumption (which even the Supreme Court made) that the yarmulke is an old and sa- cred part of the Jewish faith.
In the Torah, he notes, nothing is even said about covering the head, much less with a yarmulke. "Neither in the 248 posi- tive, nor in the 365 negative, precepts listed in the Torah (the dos and don'ts), is there any mention of this rite." Through- out the Old Testament, "covering...
many of the Holger Pedersen noted vague similarities same things that bother us, for they took between Indo-European and other proto- the trouble to invent words for fleas. lice. languages, including Semitic (precursor of and in-laws. Arabic and Hebrew) and Al- taic (ancestor of Japanese and Korean). But it was not The Importance of Genes until 1964 that two Soviet scholars, Vladislav Illich- "We cannot continue to think about disease as an outside Svitych and Aaron Dolgo- enemy," geneticist...
a cloud of orbiting elec- trons; when struck sunlight, the mole- cule resonates and one of the electrons is flipped out of orbit "along an electrical cir- cuit to drive the production of storable chemical power." Occasionally, however, there is a malfunction, and the electron es- capes and attaches itself to an oxygen mol- ecule. The result is an "oxygen radical," one of which, the hydroxyl radical (HO), is a kind of terrorist of the natural world. It "almost instantly abstracts...
"Reinventing the Wheels" Marcia D. Lowe, in Technology Review (May-June 1990), Building W59, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02 139.
America's first bicycle craze began in 1876. In 1884, a California steps: Bicycle parking
man even set off to cycle around the world; it took nearly three towers dot the cities of Ja-
years. Here, cyclists take a break near Tallahassee, Florida. pan; Swiss buses are
WQ SUMMER 1990
130
PERIODICALS
equipped with bike racks to encourage "bike and ride" tra...
Bette Hileman, in Chemical & En-gineering News (Mar. 5, 1990), 1155 16th St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036.
"Alternative agriculture" has been much in the news since the U.S. National Re- search Council CNRC't nublished a contro-
,A
versial report last fall hailing its promise. and large, says Hileman, a Chemical & Engineering News editor, it is not what its critics or its supporters claim.
Even the term "alternative" is a little misleading, since it conjures up images...
Ewa M. Thompson, in Slavic and East European Journal (Winter 1989), Dept. of Russian and East Eurooean Studies. Univ. of Minn.. Minneano- lis, Minn. 55455.
Who Speaks for Whom?
Do exiled Eastern European writers truly speak for (or to) their countrymen? In an interview with Philip Roth in the New York Review of Books (April 12, 1990), Czech novelist and playwright Ivan Klima suggests that one of the most prominent exiles, Milan Kundera, may not.
The reproach that he is writing for foreigners rat...
Arthur Steinberg and Jonathan Wy-Decline of Nations lie, in Comparative Studies in Society and History (Jan. 1990), 102 Rackham Bldg., Univ. of Mich., Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109-
How many times has the story been re-peated? A society slowly rises to greatness and then, just as it passes its peak, experi- ences a spectacular flowering of the arts.
Venice during the early 16th century was such a place. Exhausted decades of war with the Ottoman Empire, it then con- fronted the League of Cambrai-including F...
painting them in motion. The effect, paradoxically, was to set them apart.
Natural painting was a critical and com- mercial success, say the authors, because it "opened a fresh avenue of mediation be- tween God and men" in a city whose citi- zens feared that God had turned His back on them. One writer of the day said that Titian's pictures "have a touch of divinity in them . . . his colors are infused as though God has put the paradise of our bodies in them, not painted, but made...
"Democracy and Economic Crisis: The Latin American Experi- ence" Karen L. Remmer, in World Politics (April 1990), 17 Ivy Lane, Princeton. N.J. 08544.
Nobody ever seems to say anything about Latin America's new democracies without attaching warning words like "fragile," "fledgling," or "struggling." The assump- tion among academics and journalists ap- pears to be that the newly elected leaders of Brazil, Chile, and other nations will find it much harder t...
Debt and Democracy "Democracy and Economic Crisis: The Latin American Experi- ence" Karen L. Remmer, in World Politics (April 1990), 17 Ivy Lane, Princeton. N.J. 08544.
Nobody ever seems to say anything about Latin America's new democracies without attaching warning words like "fragile," "fledgling," or "struggling." The assump- tion among academics and journalists ap- pears to be that the newly elected leaders of Brazil, Chile, and other nations will f...
PERIODICALS
temporary visitors. Then, writes Begag, a researcher at the University of Lyon and himself an example of the phenomenon he describes, a second generation, largely born in France, appeared on the scene. These young "BeursJ'-the word rebeu (Arab) rendered in a slang called verlan- obviously are not going to return to North Africa. (Youngsters born of Algerian par- ents after 1963 even hold French citizen- ship.) Nor are they well prepared to make a place for themselves in France's h...
Book Reviews
BOUND TO LEAD: The Changing Nature of
American Power. By Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Basic.
307 pp. $19.95
AMERICAN POWER: The Rise and Decline
of US. Globalism. By John Taft. Harper & Row.
321 pp. $22.50
THE SUICIDE OF AN ELITE: American Internationalists
and Vietnam. By Patrick Lloyd
Hatcher. Stanford. 429 pp. $35
BARBARIANS AT THE GATE: The Fall of
RJR Nabisco. By Bryan Burrough and John
Helyar. Harper & Row. 528 pp. $22.95
THE PLEASURES OF THE PAST. By David -
Cannadine. Norton. 338 pp. $19.95
By
Francine du Plessix Gray. Doubleday. 213 pp.
$1 9.95
By
Robert Schaeffer. Hill and Wang. 306 pp.
522.95
By
Volkmar Braunbehrens. Weidenfeld. 481 pp.
$25.95
By Hermione
Lee. Pantheon. 410 pp. $29.95
By Sanford D.
Horwitt. Knopf. 595 pp. $29.95
By Stephen Toulmin. Free Press.
228 pp. $22.95
By John Hope Franklin. LSU. 450
pp. $29.95
By Hans Moravec.
Haward. 214 pp. $18.95
By Lawrence M.
Krauss. Basic. 342 pp. $21.95
Essays
Peter F. Klarkn
he Real Life of Alejandro
Mayta (1986), Mario Vargas
Llosa's fictional portrait of
a Peruvian revolutionary,
captures in its opening
pages the desperate poverty that has become commonplace throughout the South American nation. The narrator of the novel, a writer himself, is out for an early morning jog through his neighbor- hood when he comes across "stray kids, stray men, and stray women along with the stray dogs, all painstakingly digging through the trash looking for...
he Real Life of Alejandro
Mayta (1986), Mario Vargas
Llosa's fictional portrait of
a Peruvian revolutionary,
captures in its opening
pages the desperate poverty that has become commonplace throughout the South American nation. The narrator of the novel, a writer himself, is out for an early morning jog through his neighbor- hood when he comes across "stray kids, stray men, and stray women along with the stray dogs, all painstakingly digging through the trash looking for something to...
The Indians of Brazil have been much in the news
lately. In the summer of
1988, Kayapo from the
northern state of Para sat
for several weeks in the an- techambers of parliament while delegates drafted the new constitution of Brazil. They were there, in tribal paint and feathers, to urge the delegates to guarantee Indian rights. In March 1989, the same Kayapo In- dians played host to a week-long Indian summit meeting at Altarnira in the heart of the Amazon to protest the building of dams t...
RAD ON 0
by Richard N.Adams
etween 1979 and 1984, the government of Guatemala added a particularly tragic chapter to this century's chronicle of "civilized" bru- tality. In the name of quell-
ing a leftist insurgency movement in the northern departments of the nation, the successive military regimes of General Lu- cas Garcia and General Rios Montt directed a campaign of mass terror against the na- tion's Indian population-a campaign so bloody that it recalled the worst atrocities of...
Guatemala is the only country in Central
America with a large In-
dian population. The In-
dians, mostly of Mayan
ancestry, are probably a majority, although it is hard to know for sure since there is much debate over who is, and who is not, an indigena. Once a fam- ily of Indians moves to the city, they can turn themselves into ladinos (as mestizos are called in much of Central America) af-ter a couple of generations if they learn to think and behave like ladinos-that is, if they speak o...
am a fortyish, middle-class, black American male, with a teaching po- sition at a large state university in California. I have owned my own home for more than ten years, as well as the two cars that are the minimal requirement for life in California. And I will confess to a moderate strain of yuppie hedonism. Year after year my two children are the sole representatives of their race in their classrooms, a fact they sometimes have difficulty remembering. We are the only black family in our subur-...
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The Wild West looms nowhere nearly sb large in the American imagination today as it did only a generation ago. Children whose parents were reared on Bat Masterson during the 1950s now dream of Masters of the Universe. On those rare occasions when Hollywood still deigns to put on spurs and six-shooters, it is more likely to deliver comic send-ups like Blazing Saddles and Silverado than heroic sagas like High Noon and The Magnificent Seven. The western myth was popular- ized by moviemakers,...
he tragic god of the indus-
trial West was once Prome-
theus, who still holds the
place of honor at the Rocke-
feller Center skating rink. If a-
statue for the year 2000 is needed, it perhaps should be of King Tan- talus, son of Zeus, who according to one account brought secrets-information rather than fire-from the gods to human- ity. For this theft he was cruelly punished in the netherworld: The water in which he was condemned eternally to stand would recede whenever he leaned over to...
Ithink of Warrenpoint as a town, not as a village. In my private diction-
ary a village is a community sur-
rounded by fields: The people are
farmers, or they serve farmers and
their families as shopkeepers, nurses, doctors, teachers, priests. At Sun- day Mass the men wear caps, not hats, and after Mass they stand around the church to chat, gossip, or stare at the hills. A town, small or large, is not dependent on the, land that surrounds it; it opens on a differ- ent world. Tullow, in Co...
n just five years, much to the aston-
ishment of professional Sovietolo-
gists, the Soviet Union has gone
from being the world's most men-
acing superpower to a weak ag-
glomeration of states uncertain of its very future. Why were most Moscow-- watchers so ill-prepared for this dramatic transformation? The fault lies partly in what may be called their "Copernican" view of the Soviet Union, a view which has dominated the field since the 1960s. Ac- cording to Copernican Sovietology, al...
