Winter 1992
The Second Coming of The American Small Town
In Essence
A SL~IJ~J
of Recent Articles
From its birth in 1917 until its death last summer, Soviet communism had a pro-found impact on Western political thought and behavior. The Soviet Union was not just another nation, but history's first fully "socialist" society. The Russian Revolu- tion, Martin Malia, a professor of Russian history at Berkeley, notes in Commentary (Oct. 1991), became "the great polarizing event in 20th-century politics," turning the division between Left and R...
? gundi (Fall 1991), Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
In the very hour of its greatest triumph, in the very nation that has been its champion, liberal capitalism is in an alarming state of decay. "[Tlhe signs of impending break- down are unmistakable," warns Lasch, an iconoclastic historian and author of The True and Only Heaven (1991). "Drugs, crime, and gang wars are making our cit- ies uninhabitable. Our school svstem is in a state of collapse. Our [political] parties a...
IODICALS
thought, would overcome the individual man's selfishness. Today, even "the higher selfishness of marriage and parenthood" is losing its influence.
"Liberalism promised progress, abun- dance, and above all privacy. The freedom to live as you please, think and worship as you please-this privatization of the good life was liberalism's greatest appeal. Hav- ing set definite limits to the powers of the state, at the same time relieving individ- uals of most of their civic obligations,...
Mary Ann
Run Amok
Glendon, in The Responsive Community (Fall 1991), 714 Gelman Library', The George Washington Univ., Washington,
D.C. 20052.
Under the spell of philosopher John Locke and the lectures on law of Sir William Blackstone, Americans from the beginning talked about property rights as if they were absolute. In practice there was a good deal of public regulation of property. The Fifth Amendment, for example, recognized the federal government's power of eminent domain. But the ext...
Mary AnnRigZits Run Anzok Glendon, in Tlle Re.~ponsive CoN?illuni,y (Fall 1991). 714
Gelman Library, The George Washington Univ., Washington,
D.C. 20052.
Under the spell of philosopher John Locke of privacy older than the Bill of Rights" and the lectures on law of Sir William protecting the "intimate relation of hus- Blackstone, Americans from the beginning band and wife" from state interference. In talked about property rights as if they were 1972, the Court extended the right...
some of the world's- new democracies, Plattner notes. But as great a misfortune as that would be for the people involved, he argues, it would not necessarily mean the end of de- mocracy's global prestige. Even if a major- ity of the new democracies failed, the pre- sumption would still be that liberal democracy is the only form of government suitable for mature nations.
"Democracy's preeminence can be seri- ously challenged," Plattner maintains, "only an ideology with universalist...
IODICALS
anticipate the attack "not for want of the relevant materials, but because of a pleth- ora of irrelevant ones." The "noise" of ex- traneous information, in other words, drowned out the "signal" of useful clues. In reality, Kahn states, there was a dearth of intelligence materials. "Not one [diplo- matic or naval] intercept, not one datum of intelligence ever said a thing about an attack on Pearl Harbor."
Some critics, including Admiral Hus- band...
? "The ~yth of the Coming Labor Shortage" Lawrence Mishcl and Ruy A. Teixeira, in The American Prospect (Fall 1991), P.O. Box 7645, Princeton, N.J. 08543-7645.
The United States will soon face a serious sufficient supply. So concluded Workforce labor shortage, with an increasing demand 2000, the oft-quoted 1987 report done by for highly skilled workers and a greatly in- the Hudson Institute for the U.S. Labor De-
WQ WINTER 1992
14
PERIODICALS
partment. Mishel, research director of...
the year 2000.
Will the quality of America's work force be adequate? The authors of Workforce 2000 fretted about the growing number of undereducated women and minorities in the work force. "Only 15 percent of the new entrants to the labor force over the next 13 years will be native white males," they warned. Actually, say Mishel and Teixeira, about one-third of the entrants will be non-Hispanic white males, and an- other third will be non-Hispanic white fe- males. The Hudson researchers...
Andre Millard, in Business and Economic Hisloy (Fall 1991), Dept. of Economics, College of William and Mary, Williams- burg, Va. 23185.
"Well, it's all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it!" Thomas Edison (1847-1931) exclaimed after losing his light bulb fortune in 1900 on a disastrous plan to mine iron magnetically. Henry Ford called his friend the world's greatest inventor and worst businessman, a reputa- tion that has stuck unfairly, in the view of Millard, a professor...
1910, Thomas
A. Edison Incorporated (TAE) was making phonographs, film projectors, electric fans, and storage batteries. Edison was also an early practitioner of "vertical integra- tion": His company controlled each stage of production, from the raw materials to the finished product. To better serve his
SOCI ET17
lowed him to impose his old-fashioned tastes on TAE. Because he hated jazz, his company completely missed the great boom in popular music of the 1920s. Edi- son also hired pr...
the Na- tional Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) found that low birth weight has a much lower correlation with poverty than with heavy smoking pregnant women. Ba- bies born to mothers who smoked 15 or more cigarettes a day had an incidence of low birth weight three times greater than those born to nonsmokers.
Bearing a child out of wedlock is an- other symptom of irresponsibility, Eber- stadt notes, and it too significantly reduces an American child's chances of survival. A college-educated woman...
Norman Podhoretz, in Coii~tiiei7iaiy Date Rape? (Oct. 1991), 165 E. 56th St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
In the space of a few years, "date rape" has rape and thus to brand nearly all men as emerged as a major national concern, dis- rapists. cussed in campus seminars and on TV talk For millennia, he points out, there was shows. This, says Podhoretz, Commentary's no question about the definition of rape. It editor-in-chief, is a great victory for a femi- occurred when a man used violence or...
IODICALS
Rape has always been viewed as one of the most abhorrent of crimes. The new cate- gory of date or acquaintance rape expands the definition to cover a multitude of situa- tions ,in'which, as the editors of Acquaint-ance Rape: The Hidden Crime (1991) put it, "verbal or psychological coercion" is used to "overpower" the woman. Over-coming a woman's resistance with words, Podhoretz observes, "has in the past been universally known as seduction."
But to many feminists,...
the "evenhandedness" of the news, he contends. "The idea that all 'viewpoints' are somehow equal is the reason that we
do so badly in arguing our great social is-
sues." Yet at the same time, the news me-
dia-in the absence of any agreed upon
scale of values-may arbitrarily make
some particular value or cause, such as
helping the homeless, supremely impor-
tant. But only for the moment. Tomor-
row's news is almost sure to bring some
newer and more urgent concern. The...
47 percent, and almost two-thirds of the new clients credited the program as the catalyst for their visits.
Other countries have since begun to use television to promote family planning and other social causes, including several Latin
Vasectomies increased in Brazil after a pro-va-sectomy TV spot featuring animated "inale" and
"female" hearts was aired in 1989.
American countries, Kenya, Turkey, and India. In the Philippines, to encourage sex- ual responsibility among young...
Maurice Cranston, in Quud-rant (Mar. 1991), 46 George St., Fitzroy, Victoria, 3065, Austra-
Toleration lia.
Voltaire (1 694- 1778), battling religious ex- tremism in France but lacking any influ- ence on government or politicians, sought to persuade his countrymen to exercise more personal tolerance. English philoso- pher John Locke (1 632-1704), contrast, championed toleration as public policy- but thought it had limits. Locke's biogra- pher, Maurice Cranston, believes that both men's views ar...
cal disguise."
"Saving Therapy: Exploring the Religious Self-Help Literature' ~e ligion Wendy Kaminer, in Theology Today (Oct. 1991), P.O. Box As Therapy 29, Princeton, N.J. 08542.
Millions of Americans read religious self- help books. M. Scott Peck's first tome, The Road Less Traveled (1978), was on the best-seller list for years, and works by such authors as Charles (Grace Awakening) Swindoll and Gordon (Renewing Your Spiritual Passion) MacDonald also have worldwide audiences. Such...
cal disguise."
"Saving Therapy: Exploring the Religious Self-Help Literature' ~e ligion Wendy Kaminer, in Theology Today (Oct. 1991), P.O. Box As Therapy 29, Princeton, N.J. 08542.
Millions of Americans read religious self- help books. M. Scott Peck's first tome, The Road Less Traveled (1978), was on the best-seller list for years, and works by such authors as Charles (Grace Awakening) Swindoll and Gordon (Renewing Your Spiritual Passion) MacDonald also have worldwide audiences. Such...
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forests annually-a loss of 4,000 species
-per year if there are 2 million in the for- ests, and 40,000 if there are 20 million. Biodiversity is important for more than moral and aesthetic reasons, they say; it provides "enormous direct economic benefits. . . in the form of foods, medi- cines, and industrial products." To save "our fellow living creatures and ourselves in the long run," Ehrlich and Wilson pro- pose a radical worldwide ban on the devel- opment of "relatively...
any scientist's standard. To discard a drop, he had to find some mistake that would invalidate that datum." So he did. It
was not fraud, Goodstein says, just exercise of scien- tific judgment.
The fine line between "harmless fudging" and real fraud is an important one, Goodstein maintains. If the work, and everything that flowed from it, of New- ton, Millikan, Ptolemy, Hip- parchus of Rhodes, Galileo, John Dalton, and Gregor Mendel-all accused Broad and Wade of involve- ment in...
(Nov. 11, 1991), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Hailed many critics as authentic street
group N.W.A., or Niggers With Attitude,
music and damned by others for the same
was the best-selling record in America.
reason, rap music has taken the country by
In the past, notes Samuels, a Mellon Fel-
storm. Last summer, Niggaz4life, a celebra-
low at Princeton, black music (such as jazz
tion of gang rape and other violence b...
the Beastie Boys, a white punk rock band that Rubin transformed into a rap group.
But Samuels writes that Rubin and oth- ers soon found that "the more rappers were packaged as violent black criminals, the bigger their white audiences be- came. . . . Rap's appeal to whites rested in its evocation of an age-old image of black- ness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld against which the norms of white society are defined, and, extension, through which they may be de- fied."...
Tom Bethell and "The Case for Shakespeare" Iwin Matus, in The Atlantic (Oct. 1991), 745 The Thing Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 021 16.
No .fewer 'than 58 individuals have been proposed at one time or another as the true author of the works attributed to Wil- liam Shakespeare (1 564-1 6 16) of Strat- ford. The anti-Stratfordians' current favor- ite is Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the 17th Earl of Oxford, a courtier who was a scholar, athlete, and poet. Journalist Tom Bethel1 contends the...
IODICALS
The Play's "The Case for Oxford" Tom Bethell and "The Case for Shakespeare" by Iwin Matus, in The Atlantic (Oct. 1991), 745 The Thing Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 021 16.
No .fewer 'than 58 individuals have been proposed at one time or another as the true author of the works attributed to Wil- liam Shakespeare (1 564-1 6 16) of Strat- ford. The anti-Stratfordians' current favor- ite is Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the 17th Earl of Oxford, a courtier who was a scholar,...
IODICALS
have found another way to protest: rock music with anti-establishment lyrics. Teen- age rock idol Cui Jian's latest album, "Jiejuey (Resolve), for example, begins with -these lines: "There are many prob- lems before us;/Therels no way to resolve them./But the fact that we have never had the chance/Is an even greater problem."
Its enthusiasm for defiant rock lyrics, Hooper says, is but one manifestation of the fact that the current generation of Chi- nese youth is openly...
Book Reviews
by Michael M. Thomas
SEX, DISSIDENCE AND DAMNATION: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages
By Jeffrey Richards.
Routledge. 179 pp. $29.95
THREE RIVAL VERSIONS OF MORAL ENQUIRY
By Alasdair Maclntyre.
Univ. of Notre Dame. 241 pp. $24.95
By Gregory Vlastos.
Cornell. 334 pp. $57.50
By Israel Chalfen. Trans. by Maximilian Bleyleben.
Persea. 214 pp. $24.95
By Phyllis Grosskurth.
Addison- Wesley. 245 pp. $22.95
By Steven Fraser.
Free Press. 688 pp. $29.95
By Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela.
Norton. 367 pp. $24.95
By Jonathan Kozol.
Crown. 262 pp. $20
By Anne F. Thurston.
Scribners. 440 pp. $24.95
By Juliet Schor.
Basic. 336 pp. $23
By George Johnson. Knopf.
255 pp. $22.95
By David Morris.
Univ. of Calif. 342 pp. $29.95
By Robert Kanigel.
Scribners. 438 pp. $27.95
Essays
urb, and the hus- the fragmentation band-wife arch- of civic life and itectural team of the radical eco-Andres Duany nomic segrega-and Elizabeth tion that have ac- Plater-Zyberk are companied sub- at the forefront. They see the urban sprawl. ~mericans long postwar suburbs as a grand ex- for community, the authors say, periment gone awry, ruined less and they could have it. The fu-consumers and developers ture, they suggest, does not have than by the ignorance of local to be imagined so much as re-...
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
Until very recently, there were fie engineers. These experts only two views of the American molded suburbs for cars, not suburb: You either loved it or people, a catastrophic mistake hated it. In the first camp were whose costs we can measure to- most suburbanites; in the second day in traffic congestion, in air were most writers, planners, and pollution, and in the vast sums of architects. Now a public money lav- new group of crit- ished on roads ics h...
KGROUND BOOKS
THE SECOND COMING OF
THE AMERICAN SMALL TOWN
City and town planning is not a profession that many parents would encourage their children to enter. Especially since the disillusionments of the 1960s, the profession has fallen into pop- ular and intellectual disfavor. One recent his- tory, Diane Ghirardo's Building New Commu- nities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy
(Princeton, 1989), even suggests that the inten- tions of New Deal town builders were little dif- ferent from t...
Seymour Martin Lipset
o achievement of 20th-cen- tury American politics sur- passes the creation of an enduring national consen-sus on civil rights. This consensus was forged dur-
ing the past quarter century a civil-rights
movement that compelled Americans fi-
nally to confront the wide gap between
their treatment of blacks and the egalitar-
ian values of their own cherished national
creed.
In recent years, however, the leaders of the civil-rights movement have shifted the focus from the...
Despite the great civil-rights triumphs of the 1960s, the politics of race once again occupies center stage in American life. Yet what appears to be a conflict between blacks and whites, Seymour Martin Lipset argues, is more a struggle between the American public and the nation's political elite over the true meaning of equality.
Frank B. Gibney
n his pioneering work on the Medi-
terranean world in the age of
Spain's Philip 11, historian Fernand
Braudel claims that the Mediterra-
nean region lacked any unity apart
from that "created the move-ments of men, the relationships they imply and the routes they follow.. . . The whole Mediterranean," Braudel continues, "con- sists of movement in space. Anything enter- ing it-wars, shadows of war, fashions, techniques, epidemics, merchandise light or heavy, pr...
by FvaMk B. Gibney
I n his pioneering work on the Medi- terranean world in the age of Spain's Philip II, historian Fernand Braudel claims that the Mediterra- nean region lacked any unity apart from that "created by the move-ments of men, the relationships they imply and the routes they follow.... The whole Mediterranean," Braudel continues, "con- sists of movement in space. Anything enter ing it--wars, shadows of war, fashions, techniques, epidemics, merchandise light or heavy,...
was born in New Haven, Connecti-
cut, scarcely a year after World
War 11 ended, a child of the G.I.
Bill that financed my father's edu-
cation at Yale. Soon afterward my
parents moved to California, taking me along at the tender but obliging age of two years. My earliest memories therefore hang on Pacific horizons-glimpses of beach cliffs from toddler's eye-level just above the back seat of a 1940 Ford.
Westward movement was to become the constant of my life, a journey ever far- ther in...
Frank B. Gibney
n his pioneering work on the Medi-
terranean world in the age of
Spain's Philip 11, historian Fernand
Braudel claims that the Mediterra-
nean region lacked any unity apart
from that "created the move-ments of men, the relationships they imply and the routes they follow.. . . The whole Mediterranean," Braudel continues, "con- sists of movement in space. Anything enter- ing it-wars, shadows of war, fashions, techniques, epidemics, merchandise light or heavy, precious...
hat can a mere writer writer can deal only with the externals or say about Mozart? Mu- superficialities of a musician's achieve- sic is the art that takes ment. The Life of Mozart has been delin- over from words when eated far too often, sometimes with melo- words prove inade-dramatic falsehoods. The truth is mostly quate, and I've spent banal and has a great deal to do with much of this bicentennial year trying to de- money. I set up for myself a dialogue be- vise a verbal approach to Mozart...
certain tricky questions arise from time to time in literary circles. No one knows who first asked them, and they of- ten seem a pointless game. For instance: Would you, as a writer, continue to write if you ended up on an uninhabited island and it seemed that no one would ever read your work? Many writers answer: Yes, of course I would, I don't need a reader, I'm my own reader, I'm incapable of not writing, I am my own source of inspiration, no one should come between me and God, and so forth....
The world of thought is both-
ered and bewildered about ideology: the world of educa- tion above all. Distortions of the vantage point, such as Eurocentricity or linear logic,
it fears, invalidate everything that histori- ans, critics, even scientists have ever done or may ever do.
In seminars the word acts like a si-lencer. It can bring rational debate to a stop, and the fear of its use can inhibit criti- cal debate even before it begins. Softened, at times, into vague, emollient talk about...
Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions
-
. "National Guard: Peacetime Training Did Not Adequately Prepare Combat Brigades for Gulf War."
U.S. General Accounting Office, P.O. Box 6015, Gaithersburg, Md. 20877. 55 pp. No charge.
(GAO/NSIAD-9 1-263)
Since the mid-1970s, the U.S. Army has been critically de- pendent on its reserves. Not only was the Army Reserve given vital support responsibil-ities (e.g., transportation) but Army National Guard combat units...
