Summer 1994
The Virtual Future
In Essence
Presi- dent Bill Clinton last December. Proponents, such as the editors of the New Yorker (Dec. 13,1993), hailed the measure as a first national step toward eliminating the deadly menace of unregulated fire- arms.Opponents, such as Jacob Sullum, managing editor of Reason,writing in National Review (Feb. 7, 1994), insisted that it "won't take a bite out of crime, but it will gnaw away at the right to keep and bear arms." Judging recent articles on the subject, there may be a third possibility:...
Patrick J. Maney, in Prologue (Spring 1994), National Archives, Washington,
D.C. 20408.
Should President Bill Clinton and his top aides have spent so much time and effort devising a detailed health-care reform bill? The legend- ary example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, brilliant mastermind of all that famous New Deal leg- islation, suggests that Clinton, an FDR ad- mirer, was doing the right thing. But the Roosevelt of legend, warns Maney, a Tulane University historian, is not the same as the Roosevelt...
Patrick J. Maney, in Prologue (Spring 1994), National Archives, Washington,
D.C. 20408.
Should President Bill Clinton and his top aides have spent so much time and effort devising a detailed health-care reform bill? The legend- ary example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, brilliant mastermind of all that famous New Deal leg- islation, suggests that Clinton, an FDR ad- mirer, was doing the right thing. But the Roosevelt of legend, warns Maney, a Tulane University historian, is not the same as the Roosevelt...
a hastily as- sembled league of colony/states against the world's most powerful nation." Soon after the British attacked a colonial arms cache at Con- cord, Massachusetts, in April 1775, delegates from the 13 colonies assembled in Philadel- phia. "In short order," Young writes, "they or- ganized themselves as a body, adopted rules of secrecy, digested reports of the battle and of British military activities elsewhere, and ad- journed into a 'committee of the whole on the state...
Ralph Peters, in Parameters (Summer 1994),U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pa. 17013-5050.
After decades of Cold War preparations, the U.S. Army today is finely tuned for battle with So- viet-style arnues. But the coming years are likely to bring a very different enemy, warns Peters, an anny major assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. Instead of disci- plined soldiers, he says, American troops will face brutal " 'warriors1-erratic primitives...
a late-20th-century warlord in Somalia, where its attempt to bring General Mohammed Farah Aidid to heel was an embarrassing failure. But the United Nations has experienced even more trouble in the former Yugoslavia, Peters maintains: "Imagining they can negotiate with governments to control warrior excesses, the United Nations and other well-intentioned orga- nizations plead with the men-in-suits in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo to come to terms with one another. But the war in Bosnia and...
"What Is Wilsonianism?" David Fromkin, in World Policy Journal (Spring 1994), World Policy Institute, New School for Social Research, 65 Fifth Ave., Ste. 413, New York, N.Y. 10003.
Woodrow Wilson is unique among 20th-century American presidents in having spawned an 'ismU-and Wilsonianism is far more than just a memory from decades long past. President George Bush's quest for a New World Order, for example, was certainly Wilsonian in character. But what exactly is this Wilsonianism that...
leaders of allthe democracies. FDR and oth- ers addressed reasoned pleas to the dictators them- selves. The democracies practiced disarmament and convened world disarmament conferences. The League of Nations declared an embargo on supplies to fascist Italy in the [I9351 Abbysinian matter. Roosevelt organized an embargo on oil sup- plies to militarist, aggressive Japan. They exhausted thisfull bag of Wilsonian tricks, and none of them worked."
Wilsonianism's "intellectual bankruptcy"...
boomers and others.
the newborns' net payout. (The forecast for women is depressingly similar.) This represents a "significant generational imbalance in U.S. fis- cal policy," the economists say. To correct it, they warn, "a much more significant sacrifice cur- rent generations than politicians seem to realize" will be needed.
MITI Misfires
"Growth, Economies of Scale, and Targeting in Japan (1955-1990)" by Richard Beason and David E. Weinstein, Harvard Institute o...
boomers and others.
the newborns' net payout. (The forecast for women is depressingly similar.) This represents a "significant generational imbalance in U.S. fis- cal policy," the economists say. To correct it, they warn, "a much more significant sacrifice cur- rent generations than politicians seem to realize" will be needed.
MITI Misfires
"Growth, Economies of Scale, and Targeting in Japan (1955-1990)" by Richard Beason and David E. Weinstein, Harvard Institute o...
A Survey of Recent Articles
The 1990 census made it official: The United States has become a suburban nation. Nearly half of all Americans live in suburbs, only about one-third in cities. Yet some thinkers argue that terms such as bed-room community and suburb are no longer ad- equate to describe places that have been trans- formed from bucolic retreats into centers of commerce and industry. For all intents and purposes, many suburbs have become cities. Robert Fishman, a historian at Rutgers...
what they see as a "suburban ide- ology" of exclusion and "female subordination." On TV, for example, outsiders such as the young black star of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air are made "objects of humor and suspicion." In films such as Fatal Attraction (1987) and Presumed Innocent (19901, more or less traditional housewives do battle witli career women who threaten to steal their husbands and tlieir way of life.
Garreau and Fisliman agree that what might be called the...
the 15th century. Not even criminals or prisoners could be turned into chattel slaves, if they were Euro- peans. Enslavement had become, in European eyes, "a fate worse than death and, as such, was reserved for non-Europeans." And the line divid- ing "insider" and "outsider," Eltis says, "was never drawn strictly in terms of skin color or race."
Among Africans and American Indians, how- ever, much narrower notions of who should not be enslaved prevailed;...
Tom Rosenstiel, in Fork Mediacritic (Vol. 1, No. 3,1994), P.O. Box 762, Bedminster, N.J. 07921.
There is nothing new about news editors using Associated Press (AP) or other "wire" stories to second-guess their own reporters. But inforrna- tion technology has taken the second-guessing to new heights-and that is a very mixed bless- ingr Rosenstiel/ writes politics and the media for the Los Atz2eles Times.
-
Editors at major news organizations now re- ceive a torrent of information fro...
rivals at AP, Reuters, the Mu York Times, the Washington Post, Nezusday, and other organizations. Drawing upon these sources, editors, with or without the assistance of the reporter, often turn the story into a seem- ingly comprehensive "take" on the day's subject, a presentation of the collective journalistic wis- dom of the day. It may not be the best that jour- nalism could offer, however. "Theoretically," Rosenstiel notes, "more sources of information should make the...
Daniel Cere, in Theological Studies (Mar. 1994), Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass. 02167.
In the modem academy, there is "a strange si- lence about ultimate questions of good and evil, life and death," observes Cere, a lecturer in reli- gion and theology at Concordia University, Montreal. Theology-the tradition of inquiry into the "God-question," the question of the "su- preme good-has been pushed to the margins of academic debate, replaced "religious stud- ies,"...
Kenneth R. Miller, in Technology Review (Feb.-Mar. 1994),Bldg. W59, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02139.
Creationists today tout "intelligent-design theory" as an alternative to evolution. They con- tend that living organisms have features that are so perfect that they cannot be the result of the random workings of evolution but must be the product of conscious design. However, says Miller, a biologst at Brown University, scientists argue "that complex organisms not only could have evolved...
Kenneth R. Miller, in Technology Review (Feb.-Mar. 1994),Bldg. W59, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02139.
Creationists today tout "intelligent-design theory" as an alternative to evolution. They con- tend that living organisms have features that are so perfect that they cannot be the result of the random workings of evolution but must be the product of conscious design. However, says Miller, a biologst at Brown University, scientists argue "that complex organisms not only could have evolved...
"The Once and Future Sun" Ron Cowen, in Science News (Mar. 26,1994), 1719 N St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036.
The sun's extinction may not be one of humankind's more pressing concerns, but the star that gives us life appears, like today's baby boomers, to be approaching middle age. At about 4.5 billion years of age, it is more than one-
PERIODICALS 143
third of the way through its expected life span.
Like a baby boomer, the sun is going to get
fatter, but it's also going to get b...
boomer, the sun is going to get
fatter, but it's also going to get brighter. The
long-term outlook for the sun's earthbound cli-
ents is not good. Astrophysicist I.-Juliana
Sackmann of the California Institute of Technol-
ogy and two colleagues recently tried to chart
the sun's fate, reports Science News writer
Cowen. During the next 1.1 billion years or so,
its brightness will increase 10 percent. Accord-
ing to a model proposed six years ago James
F. Kasting of Pennsylvania State University,...
Robert Lane, in ELH (Spring 1994), Dept. of English, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, Md. 21218.
When Kenneth Branagh's much-praised film Henry V appeared in 1989, many critics com- pared it with Laurence Olivier's 19944 movie ver- sion of the play. They said that Branagh presents 'a much darker world" and a more complex King Henry than the earlier film did. That may be so. But when Branagh's version is compared with Shakespeare's, argues Lane, an English pro- fessor at North Carolina State...
Henry as ture. Four years later, he took his portfolio to surrogate parent), the king at once acknowl- Philadelphia, then to New York, and finally to edges and disavows any role in bringing England and Scotland, before he found financial about. The Boy's innocence, with his blood, backing and an engraver to copy his works. The spills over onto the king." Birdsof America, wluch came out in four volumes
Shakespeare acutely recognized "the persis- between 1827 and 1838, consisted of 435...
contrast, "sought to gain direct knowledge of his subjects in their natural set- tings traversing woods, plains, and swamps all over the land," May notes. He rarely painted stuffed specimens but instead "drew directly from freshly killed birds in order to capture the shapes, textures, and colors as accurately as possible. He threaded birds with wire to set them in poses which were both characteristic of their daily activities, such as foraging or hunting prey, and aesthetically pleasing."
In...
Mark Lilla, in Daedalus (Spring 1994),Norton's Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
During the years between the world wars, it was hard for even the warmest advocates of Euro- pean liberalism to imagine the whole of Western Europe living under stable liberal governments anytime soon. The future belonged to commu- nism, fascism, socialism-anything but liberal- ism. Remarkably, observes Lilla, a professor of politics and French studies at New YorkUniver- sity, liberalism has triumphed.
Yet...
Mark Lilla, in Daedalus (Spring 1994),Norton's Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
During the years between the world wars, it was hard for even the warmest advocates of Euro- pean liberalism to imagine the whole of Western Europe living under stable liberal governments anytime soon. The future belonged to commu- nism, fascism, socialism-anything but liberal- ism. Remarkably, observes Lilla, a professor of politics and French studies at New YorkUniver- sity, liberalism has triumphed.
Yet...
staying in Ireland and writing out of their experience of it, they have had to [deal with] a period of radical change and unsettlement" on the island, observes O'Toole, a columnist for the Iris11 Times. Their work, as a result, has aroused international in- terest in modern Ireland.
For artists from the North, such as Brian Friel (who lives in rural Donegal) and fellow play- wright Frank McGuinness (Someone Who'll Watch Over Me), dealing with change 'lias meant facing up to the traumas of...
one- third between 1991 and '92. In a 1992 survey, three out of four Muscovites said tliey were afraid to walk tlie streets at night. Such fears have built support for extremists such as ultra- nationalist Vladimir Zliirinovsky, who has ad- vocated shooting lawbreakers on sight.
Russia's new leaders, Handelman con-tends, "have failed to adopt any significant measures to curb organized crime." As the law stands now, police may arrest people tliey catch in a criminal act, but the "mastermind"...
the Soviet Union, North Korea has good reasons to want nuclear weapons, Mack points out in this collection of essays a dozen scholars of various na- tionalities. They would serve Kim's regime as a deterrent to the threat implicit in the U.S. "nuclear umbrella" over South Korea, and also against South Korea's smaller but over-whelmingly superior conven- tional military.
North Korea today is "the most militarized, brutal, and undemocratic country in the world," observes Yale University's...
Book Reviews
TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT HISTORY
By Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob.
Norton. 322 pp. $25
THE TROUBLE WITH BOYS
By Angela Phillips.
Basic Bvoks.272 pp. $23
WHAT MEN WANT: Mothers, Fathers, and
Manhood. By John Munder Ross.
Harvard Univ.Press. 242 pp. $29.95
THE CULTURAL STUDIES READER.
Edited by Simon During.
Routledge. 478 pp. $49.95
By Stephen Koch.
Free Press. 338 pp. $24.95
By Joyce Lee Malcolm.
Harvard. 248 pp. $29.95
Ed. by Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske.
Russell Sage Foundation. 416 pp. $39.95
By Lois G. Forer.
Norton. 204 pp. $23
By Charles T.Rubin.
Free Press. 312 pp. $22.95
By lan Buruma.
Farrar Straus. 330 pp. $25
By R. F. Foster.
Penguin.382 pp. $27.50
Ed. by John Rahn.
Norton. 386 pp. $35
Ed. by Robin Hansbury-Tenison.
Oxford Univ. 530pp. $30
By Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.
Johns Hopkins. 328 pp.$25.95
Essays
The race is on to build the information superhighway.
The end is Nil. That's the National In- formation Infrastructure, of course, the amorphous web-to-be that has become an inkblot test of the na- tional psyche. Some proponents dream of a 24-hour global symposium combining the best of Madame de Stael and Mortimer Adler, while skeptics fear a future of conference calls with the likes of John Wayne Gacy and Joseph Goebbels. Some fear a surveillance machine of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Inter- nal Revenue Service, others a witches' sabbath...
he coming of the information super-
concerns may be, such a neo-Luddite view of
highway, or, more modestly, the
the NII seems beyond the pale of serious con-
National Information Infrastructure
sideration. As a people we are wont to explore
(Nil), has reanimated America's
the paths along wluc11 our desire leads us, and
running debate about the vices and virtues of
it seems virtually foreordained that our desire...
Eric S. Raymond. There, among the inscrutable definitions of inscrutable terms sucli as "pessimizing compiler" and "sandbender," one learns tliat to gweep is "to liack, usually at night," and tliat to liack is, among otlier things, "to work 011 sometliing (typically a program)." One definition seems to distill tlie essence of liacker existence:
ha ha only serious [from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, 'Ha Ha Only Kid- ding'] A phrase (often seen abbreviated a...
GEORGE MOFFETT
Despite su~rising reductions in birth rates in many parts of the world, more than 90 million people are being added to the Earth each year. World popula- tion is now approaching six billion, up from only three billion in 1960. During the next 20 years, it could increase as much as 40 percent, to almost eight billion people, or by less than 30 percent, to about 7.2 billion. The difference will depend in pad upon decisions that are made by the United Nations International Conference...
Despite su~rising reductions in birth rates in many parts of the world, more than 90 million people are being added to the Earth each year. World popula- tion is now approaching six billion, up from only three billion in 1960. During the next 20 years, it could increase by as much as 40 percent, to almost eight billion people, or by less than 30 percent, to about 7.2 billion. The difference will depend in pad upon decisions that are made by the United Nations International Conference on Population...
fter the revolutions of 1989 tions on the remnants of Soviet colonialism.
brought down communism in This oversight is puzzling, if not tragic, be-
Eastern Europe, many of the po- cause Hamilton was perhaps the most practi-
litical and intellectual leaders of cal nation builder among the Founding Fa- the emerging democracies turned for thers. Thanks largely to his vision guidance to the United States. and energy, the United States Americans of all political per- became what it is today: a suasions...
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Language
on the
Verge
Nervous
Breakdown
ATOLY AIMAN
An Englishman in Moscow, by K. Malevich
Shortages of all kinds contribute to Russia's turmoil today, but none is more damaging than the dearth of meaningful language. Anatoly Naiman here tells how decades of totalitarian rule have enfeebled language, making political discussion next to impossible and paving the way for the ascent of extremists.
t happened in Moscow sometime in the his own. Naturally, lus application was t...
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John Ralston Saul, the Ganadian novelist and essayist, would probably have felt meat home in the 18th centu y,a centuy he visited in Voltaire's Bastards(1992). But he would likely have steered the Enlightenment toward a somewhat different conclusion. %Age of Reason, in Saul's view,has brought too much certainty to todays world, from politicians who think themselves the panacea for the world's ills to a populace mesmerized by the authority of "experts." As he suggested in that...
By Theoy Possessed
y father offered few words on the state of the world, but the few he volunteered were usually shrewd. I remember, in particular, what
he used to say about college tuitions-"The more you pay, the less you seem to go."
Alas, my father didn't know the half of it. It was not merely that steeper tuitions bought less time. They also bought less content. A grossly oversimplified history may help ex- plain.
Beginning in the mid-1960s or thereabouts, a revolution o...
KATHERI HOSKI
Selected and Introduced by Antlzony Heckt
I f I were still teaching graduate students in modern English and Ameri- can poetry and had assigned to me an especially gifted student, widely conversant with the whole rich canon from, say, Chaucer right up to the last minute, a student who was enthusiastic, willing to work, irnagi-
native, painstaking, and keenly sensitive to poetic nuance, I think I could do him or her no greater favor than to suggest a careful poem-by-poem comrnen- t...
