Spring 1986
New Zealand
In Essence
R.
Kent Weaver, in The Brookings Review (FallFor U~ZC/~Sam 1985), Brookings Institution, 1775
Massachussetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C.
20036.
Washington is not a model of efficiency.
With power divided among three governmental branches (including a bicameral legislature) and two heterogeneous political parties, Arneri- ca's regime is often criticized for being slow-moving and indecisive. Those who fault the US. system often cite England and Canada as examples of lean, smooth-running democracies....
comparison, says Weaver, Uncle Sam's regime-for all its faults- does not look so terrible.
"0WI BLILL/~S "How the Constitution Disappeared" Lino A Graglia, in Commentary (Feb 1986), 165 East 56th St, New York, N Y 10017
Addressing the American Bar Association last July, U.S. Attorney Gen- eral Edwin Meese said, among other things, that federal judges (espe- cially those on the Supreme Court) should interpret the U.S. Constitu- tion according to the intentions of its original framers.
Three...
David
C/lC/1-/.s"l?1a? P Glass, in Public OpznzonQuarterly (Winter 1985), Journalism Bldg , Columbia Univ , 116th St and Broadway, New York, N Y 10027
Everyone knows that personality plays a big role in determining who ends up in the Oval Office. But which voters are most swayed style over substance?
Contrary to popular assumptions, Glass, a demographics researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, asserts that college-educated vot- ers pay more attention to a candidate's "personal...
IODICALS
POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
those with less schooling.
Glass drew on data from the National Election Studies (NES) of the University of Michigan Center for Political Studies, which has been r&cording voters' "likes" and "dislikes" vis-a-vis presidential candidates since 1952. Among people with a college education, 55 percent of candidate evaluations through 1984 have involved such "personal attributes" as: "competence" (dependability, experience), &...
1992-for the first time in
U.S. history-Southerners and Westerners will together hold the major- ity in both the Electoral College and the House of Representatives.
FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
'Why We Should Stop Studying the CubanManagement Missile Crisis" Eliot A. Cohen, in The Nu tional Interest (Winter 1985/86), 1627Vs. Strateg)) Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C.
20009.
"There is no longer any such thing as strategy, only crisis management." So said Robert McNamara, the...
IODICALS
FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
the science, or art, of crisis management.
But Cohen argues that the 1962 showdown offers little "historical guidance for American statesmen." When JFK stood "eyeball to eye- ball" with Khrushchev, the United States had nuclear superiority and, indeed, a "first strike" -capability. Future conflicts will occur under conditions of approximate nuclear parity. The strength of conventional forces will play a larger role, and America's...
George F. Kennan, in Foreign Affairs (Winter 1985/86), 58 East 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10024.
"Whenever one has- the agreeable sensation of being impressively moral, one probably is not."
Such is Washington's chief conundrum, observes Kennan, professor emeritus at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. U.S. policy- makers, or those who would guide them, have consistently come up short in attempts to apply "morality" to foreign policy.
To begin with, notes Kennan, there...
these shortcomings, U.S. industries will continue to manufacture 'shoddy" products that cannot compete abroad.
The Europeans must contend with unemployment rates in the dou- ble digits (versus 6.8 percent in the United States). High wages and benefits-six-week vacations are the legal norm in Belgium-have made workers more expensive than machinery. As a result, European economies have generated no new jobs (on balance) since 1970.
Meanwhile, Japan has saturated its export markets. (Exports...
more than one-third, while their portion of the unionized jobs 3arely changed.
Surprisingly, the unions' often rigid seniority rules rarely barred the hiring and advancen~ent of qualified minority applicants. Indeed, judg- ing from the experienceoT black males, Leonard argues that unions in manufacturing open more doors for minorities than do federally man- dated affirmative action programs.
Looking Again "IS the Flat ax a Radical Idea)" James Gwertney and James Long, in The CatoJour...
James Q.Public Utilities Wilson and Louise Richardson, in Regulation (Seot./Oct. 1985). American Enternrise Insti-
. .
tute, 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Publicly owned utilities are supposed to champion the needs of con- sumers. They should promote energy-saving measures and offer lower rates than their privately owned counterparts.
But they do not, say Wilson and Richardson, both of Harvard's depart- ment of government.
During the 1960s, economies of scale ruled the day in...
Ed-Prisons Are .. ---win W. Zedlewski. in Public Administration Cost-Effective Review (Nov. 19'85), American Society for
Public Administration, 1120 G St. N.W., Wash-ington, D.C. 20005
The odds that an American will report having been raped or robbed are three times greater today than they were in 1964. To cope with this criminal onslaught, the number of beds in US. state prisons has steadily risen, roughly from 243,000 in 1978 to 365,000 in 1983.
Yet the nation's penal system is still under...
Nelson Smith, in Thejournal of the Insti-tute for Socioeconomic Studies (Autumn 1985),Airport Road, White Plains, N.Y. 10604.
Homeless people can be found everywhere in America, but exactly how many there are, nobody knows. The Community for Creative Non- violence, a Washington-based advocacy group, estimates two to three million. Smith, a U.S. Department of Education consultant, believes that 300,000 to 400,000 is a more accurate count.
Although critics blame President Reagan's federal budget...
the homeless, says Smith.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has allocated $210 million in direct aid to 3,650 volunteer organizations. And January 1985, the Housingand Urban Development Agency had distrib- uted roughly $53 million in Community Development Block Grants to
U.S. cities. On Capitol Hill, legislation to create a National Endowment for the Homeless is awaiting Senate approval. Costing $160 million per year, the endowment would supplant FEMA in financing programs for the...
John
Wicklein, in Columbia Journalivn Review
Public P/ ('Jan./Feb. 1986), 700 Journalism Bldg., Co. lumbia Univ., New York, N.Y. 10027.
The US. Congress created America's public broadcasting network in
1967. The purpose: to free some of America's radio and television
airwaves from marketplace pressures.
Today the public broadcasting system costs almost $1 billion annually to operate; roughly 16 percent ($159.5 million for 1986) comes from congressional appropriations. Such financial support...
Roben 13.
--Bell, in Biography (Fall 1985), Dept. of Eng-
lish, Univ. of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822.
While visiting Beijing in 1921, Bem'and Russell fell gravely ill. "I was told that the Chinese said that they would bury me the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory," wrote Russell (1872-1970). "I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a God, which would have been very chic for an atheist."
Despite Russell's claims to godlessness,...
then the author of more than 50 books, including Authority and the Individual (1949), New Hopes for a Cfgangin World (1951). and Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959)-was plagued a feeling of "desolate solitude." His numerous philander- ings and three marriages all failed. His theories of knowledge had fallen out of favor in the academic world.
"The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the hun~an beings I love best," Russell wrote in his...
the clergy is not only justified but necessary. Black churchmen are a good example, Reichley says. They championed civil rights during the early 1960s, when secular black leaders were scarce. However, he be- lieves that their politicalactivity should fade as secular blacks gain influence in Washington. --
Excessive meddling in civil affairs threatens a cl~urch's standing as a moral arbiter, transforming its leaders into just another advocacy group. And raising the emotional pitch of debates about...
1993.
Yet Van Allen, an astrophysicist at the University of Iowa, considers space stations, and the U.S.manned space program, to be wasteful. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), he argues, could get more for its money using unmanned spacecraft: "Apart from serving the spirit of adventure, there is little reason for sending people into space."
To date, NASA has spent some $30 billion on a Space Transportation System that now includes four manned space shuttles. This...
J. Allan Hobson, in The Sciences (Nov./Dec. 1985), The New York Academy of Sciences, 2 East 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
"Psychoanalysis, born amid doubt in 1900, could well be dead the year 2000."
So says Hobson, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He maintains that doubt about the legitimacy of Sigmund Freud's method of probing the mind through the free association of words now looms large in psychiatric circles-even among Freudians. As a result, psychoanalysis itself...
Michael
R. Greenberg, in The Sciences (Jan./Feb, 1986), The New York Academy of Sciences, 2
Cause Cancer? -.
East 63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Cancer Alley. That was the name journalists gave America's Northeast- ern industrial corridor in 1974 after a National Cancer Institute (NCI) report revealed that the rates of cancer mortality in New Jersey and its neighboring states were far above the national average.
The Atlas of Cancer Mortality for US. Counties: 1950-1969 showed that New Jersey r...
the early 1970s, the two rates differed no more than a single percentage point.
This "convergence" of the rates, Greenberg maintains, had little to do with air and water pollution. Medical wisdom now links outdoor pollu- tion to only one percent of all U.S. cancers; tobacco smoking, eating fatty foods and other nutritional factors, and exposure to carcinogens in the workplace are responsible for 60 to 90 percent of all cancer deaths in America. By the time NCI had released its report,...
'Incineration of Hazardous Wastes at Sea: Go- ing Nowhere Fast" Pamela S. Zurer, in Chemical and Engineeri?zg News (Dec. 9, 1985), 1155 16th St. N.W, Washington, D.C. 20036.
'Eleven years after the [U.S.] Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials declared the technology environmentally sound, ocean incin- eration of hazardous waste is not [yet] a commercial reality," writes Zurer, a reporter for Chemicaland EngineeringNews. "There are many who think it never should be."
Among...
IODICALS
RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT
burned on land, where the process can be monitored more closely. Unfortunately, notes Zurer, only 10 percent of the roughly 250 U.S. onshore hazardous waste incinerators are available for general commer- cial use (the rest are small, specialized facilities), and they are already running at full capacity.'These incinerators are more reliable, albeit more expensive, than their floating counterparts. According to a recent EPA study, 30 incineration ships or 8...
40 percent during each of the past two years. Avery sees even more promising agricultural technol- ogies on the 11orizon.Genetic engineers are now perfecting viral insec- ticides, new varieties of ammonia-producing bacteria (to fertilize soil), and vaccines against the hoof-and-mouth disease in livestock.
The sad exception to this otherwise rosy picture is famine-ridden sub- Sahara Africa. Avery blames bad planning government leaders (and Western advisers) who rushed to industrialize backward societies....
Curtis Bill Pep-Da Vinci'sJesus oer. in The New York Times Maeaziize (Oct.
L, "
13, 1985), 229 West 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
After eight years of effort a Milanese art restorer, Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece, The LastSupper, may once again see the light of day.
Encrusted in grime and the residue left by earlier restorers, Da Vinci's vision of Jesus seated anlong the Twelve Apostles at his final Passover meal was, until 1977 (when the restoration began), just a shadow of its original...
Curtis Bill Pep-Da Vinci'sJesus oer. in The New York Times Maeaziize (Oct.
L, "
13, 1985), 229 West 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
After eight years of effort a Milanese art restorer, Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece, The LastSupper, may once again see the light of day.
Encrusted in grime and the residue left by earlier restorers, Da Vinci's vision of Jesus seated anlong the Twelve Apostles at his final Passover meal was, until 1977 (when the restoration began), just a shadow of its original...
? The New Khmer Rouge" Ross 1-1. Munro,
in Commentary (Dec. 1985), 165 East 56th
St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
On the outskirts of Manila these days, Communist insurgency is no longer a minor nuisance inflicted by a handful of lackluster guerrillas. It is a real-and growing-threat on which Philippine president Ferdi- nand Marcos, and Washington, had best keep a watchful eye.
So says Munro, New Delhi bureau chief of Time-Life News Service. In 1974, he notes, members of the New People's Army...
the CPP has thrived since 1978 under Sison's pr-otkgk, Rodolfo Salas. The 37-year-old former engineering student has forged a formidable sierrilla network now active in 59 of the nation's 73 provinces.
Many U.S. and Filipino analysts blame the "corrupt and exhausted" Marcos regime for the Communists' rise. During his 20 years in power, Marcos has presided over the virtual collapse of the Philippine econ- omy and the unraveling of Manila's authority. But Munro points out that "trashing...
relative prosperity, the country has won the admiration of more than one Western observer.
But Volgyes, a Rutgers political scientist, warns of troubles to come. Outwardly stable, Hungary's "economic, social, and political life," he argues, "is very close to a major crisis."
In 1968, Hungarian Communist Party chief Janos Kadar launched a series of reforms known as the New Economic Mechanism. Stressing a flexible price structure, upgrading the role of the consumer, and mini-...
public agencies and private institutions
"Choosing Elites."
Basic Books, 10 East 53rd St., New York. N.Y. 10022.267 pp. $19.95. Author: Robert Klitparcl
At Harvard, 7.1 percent of all incoming freshmen are black. If the admissions committee were to choose students only on the basis of their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, that figure wo~ild fall to 1.1 percent.
So reports Klitgaard, former special as- sistant to Harvard president Derek Bok, in a statistics-laden study of the...
Book Reviews
McDonald Smith Moore Indiana, 1985 213 pp. $20.50
John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson Brookings, 1985 409 pp. $26.95
T. H. Breen
Princeton, 1985
216 pp. $19.95
Hugh Trevor-Roper Univ. of Chicago, 1985 312 pp. $22.50
Georges Duby Pantheon,1986 155 pp. $15.95
Eileen Barker Blackwell, 1984 305 pp. $19.95
Wm. Roger Louis and
Robert w. Stookey
Univ. of Tex., 1985 197 pp. $20
Leon Edel Harper, 1985 740 pp. $24.95
Robert Alter
Basic, 1985
228 pp. $17.95
Oliver Sacks
Summit, 1985
233 pp. $15.95
Peter H. Schuck_and Rogers M.
Smith. Yale, 1985. 173 pp. $22-:50
Jules Laforgue.
Translated by Willian Jay Smith. New
Directions, 1985. 160 pp. $8.95
David
Miller. Princeton, 1985. 479 pp. $9.95
(cloth, $32.50)
Essays
sheep and English traditions. Then Prime Minister Da- vid Lange hit the headlines. He told Washington to keep the
U.S. Navy's nuclear-armed ships out of his country's ports. Sur- prised, the Reagan administration said that New Zealand's sud- den self-assertiveness threatened the 35-year-old ANZUS alli- ance. Nevertheless, New Zealand's parliament will soon vote on a bill formalizing Mr. Lange's anti-nuclear ban. Our contributors examine New Zealand's changing society and its new dilemmas as a South...
at all, they probably thought of it as an old ally, a faraway vacationland something like California, a pair of picturesque islands domi- nated by sheep and English traditions. Then Prime Minister Da- vid Lange hit the headlines. He told Washington to keep the
U.S. Navy's nuclear-armed ships out of his country's ports. Sur- prised, the Reagan administration said that New Zealand's sud- den self-assertiveness threatened the 35-year-old ANZUS alli- ance. Nevertheless, New Zealand's parliament will...
's North Island. Even today, facing the quiet waters of mile-wide Waitemata Harbour and flanked by a phalanx of 60 volcanoes, Auckland retains a certain South Pacific flavor.
In the shadows cast by Air New Zealand's glass and con- crete office tower, Polynesian greengrocers sell taro, yams, and coconuts to Maori housewives along Karangahape Road. Amid the hibiscus, frangipani, and banana trees in Albert Park, brief- case-toting bankers dressed in shorts, knee-socks, shirts, and ties discuss the...
many pilgrims," Guthrie-Smith testifies to New Zea- hinders' passionate, but ambivalent, love of their land.
Unlike Guthrie-Snlith, who cher- ished the countryside as it was, many British colonists were bent on domes- ticating both the wild bush and the na- tive Maori. In archivist Ray Grover's
Cork of War: An Historical Narra- tive (John Mclncioe, 1982), a fictional Scottish settler, moving through real history, watches as English and Austra- lian speculators in 1839 buy one-acre plots of...
in America's intellectuals and artists have long been known for their leftist, even Marxist, sympathies. Few today emulate the late Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who remained loyal to Moscow even after the horrors of the Stalin era. But Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Mhrquez, Argentina's Julio Cortazar, and others have ritu- ally clenounced Washington's imperzalismo while singing the praises of Fidel Castro. Mexico's Octavio Paz is one of the ex- ceptions. The widely read poet-essayist and former diplomat...
"Reading maketh a full man," Francis Bacon declared in 1597, "and writing an exact man." His aphorism, penned a century and a half after Gutenberg's creation of the printing press, expressed the West's revived faith in the awesome power of literacy—to elevate the human mind, to uplift the citizen
ot;Reading maketh a full man," Francis Bacon declared in 1597, "and writing an exact man." His aphorism, penned a century and a half after Gutenberg's creation of the printing press, ex- pressed the West's revived faith in the awesome power of liter- acy-to elevate the human mind, to uplift the citizenry, to spur progress. Today, many Americans, awash in memos and junk mail, take the written word for granted. Yet perhaps 27 million of their countrymen are "functionally illiterate."...
How is the West's attitude toward "reading" beginning to change?
p>
"Learn them to read the Scriutures, and be conversant therein," the Reverend John Cotton urged his Boston parishio- ners in a 1656 homily on child rearing. "Reading brings much benefit to little Children."
"Benefit" was an understatement. In the harsh moral uni- verse of Cotton's New England Puritans, ignorance was no ex- cuse for sin: A child who died young (as many did) could ex- pect no mercy in the hereafter merely because he had not been able to read the Bible....
Adam Parry and Richard M. Dorson, shocked his fellow scholars arguing that the Iliad and Odyssey had been orally composed and recited by wan- dering bards for several generations before being written down.
For at least a century, scholars of an- cient writing have split hairs over such questions as whether Homer was the sole author of his epics and whether the alphabet spread from a single source or was independently invented in several places. Among the notable works in this tradition are archaeolo-...
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RAINER MARIA RILKE
It seems an unlikely story. An unhappy, somewhat affected young man from turn-of-the-century Prague begins his career as a highly imitative versifier. By dint of hard work and ascetic discipline, he becomes a poet, indeed the foremost European poet of his generation. He dies in 1926, but for the next 60 years, poets from all over the world-from Boris Pasternak in Russia to Ranclall Jarrell in America-claim him as their inspira- tion and model. This man, Rainer Maria...
dpdf-doc>
AFTER MA0
American scholars analyzini contemporasy events in Commiinist China prior to its post-Ma0 "opening" to the West in 1777 had to rely largely on the official press. This did not deter some of them from hailing Mao's Cultural Revoliition during the 1760s and pooh- poohing refugees' grim accoiints. Indeed, the American Academy of Political Science held a 1772 meeting to consider (among other things) how the Cultural Revol~ition co~ild serve as a model for the West in...
