Summer 1993
Missing the Blues
In Essence
Japan and then World War I- set off the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, respectively, so they led to change in this case. The U.S. defense buildup and hardline policies of the Reagan administration during the early 1980s, Sestanovich argues, prompted the Krem- lin to rethink its policies. "showing that past policies had led nowhere, Western toughness al-tered the internal power balance of Soviet poli- tics in favor of fundamental change." Then, af- ter Gorbachev embarked on change,...
Oscar Handlin, in The American Scholar (Spring 1993), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.
Americans revel in their rights. Every educated American knows what the First Amendment says and even children know what it means to "take the Fifth." But nobody seems to know the Ninth Amendment, observes Handlin, the noted Harvard historian. They should, he argues, for it holds the key to a different, and wholly supe- rior, notion of rights from what we know today.
The Ninth Amendment states:...
Oscar Handlin, in The American Scholar (Spring 1993), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.
Americans revel in their rights. Every educated American knows what the First Amendment says and even children know what it means to "take the Fifth." But nobody seems to know the Ninth Amendment, observes Handlin, the noted Harvard historian. They should, he argues, for it holds the key to a different, and wholly supe- rior, notion of rights from what we know today.
The Ninth Amendment states:...
the state be brought to an as a morally legitimate way of life, until outraged parents objected. end. That means, in his view, ending the ban on homosexuals in theWhlitary and allowing people of the same of equality, while leaving all the inequality of
sex to marry. "These two measures . . . represent emotion and passion to the private sphere, a politics that . . . makes a clear, public statement where they belong."
FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
Vietnam: Who Served and Who Did Not?
A S...
~illiarnPfaff, in ForeignAffairs (Summer 1993),58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Many in the West believe that war in the Balkans stems from ancient and immutable hatreds, and that barbarism issomehow a natural state of affairs in that comer of the world. This fatalistic view has served to rationalize Western inaction in the former Yugoslavia, notes Pfaff, a columnist and author. Indeed, some of the combatants do see them- selves as avenging ancient wrongs, starting with the Battle of Kosovo...
Robert Eisner, in The Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (April 1993), Norton's Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
The sense of alarm over the nation's mounting national debt is now so widespread that it is re- freshing to read the occasional dissenter. One of these is Eisner, an economist at Northwestern University, past president of the American Eco- nomics Association, and a long-time critic of what might be called the "sky is falling" school of economics.
To...
Robert Eisner, in The Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (April 1993), Norton's Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
The sense of alarm over the nation's mounting national debt is now so widespread that it is re- freshing to read the occasional dissenter. One of these is Eisner, an economist at Northwestern University, past president of the American Eco- nomics Association, and a longtime critic of what might be called the "sky is falling" school of economics.
To...
?
A Survey of Recent Articles
social scientists have gathered masses of evidence that confirm what was once con- sidered common sense about families, writes Barbara Defoe Whitehead in the Atlantic (April1993):Children in single-parent families
132 WQ SUMMER 1993
are more likely to be poor, to have emotional or behavioral problems, to drop out of high school, to become pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, to get in trouble with the law, and to be victims of physical or sexual abuse.
And n...
iew (Feb. 1993). Over the past two centuries, since the Industrial Revolution began, there has been a shift away from the family as the basic unit of social organization. "As . . . many of its functions have moved outside the household [e.g., to the workplace], child rearing has moved increasingly out of the household as well. Con- structed social organization, in the form of the school, the nursery school, and the daycare cen- ter, [has] taken over many components of child rearing." These...
journalist (and future senator) Richard L. Neuberger, for ex- ample, Dorothy McCullough Lee was portrayed as both an "ethereally pale housewife" with a "frail, willowy" appearance and the hard-nosed mayor of Portland, Oregon, who had success- fully fought organized crime and was "headed for national distinction."
The magazines that set the tone of postwar America did not pretend that women were crea- tures only of hearth and home. In reality, Friedan, herself a veteran...
white society," explained a Warner as a very positive one, but one that was re- Brothers vice president.
RELIGION &PHILOSOPHY
The Secret Cabinet of Dr. Foucault
A Survey of Recent Articles
L ittle known outside the academy, Michel Foucault (1926-84) is an exem- plary figure to many tenured radicals within it and an influential one to many other scholars. 'Whatever else Foucault was, he was a great Nietzschean hero," Princeton's Alexander Nehamas writes in the New Republic (Feb. 1...
JeffreyK. Hadden, in The Annals (May 1993), the American Acad. of Political and Social Science, 3937 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104.
Since the sex scandals of the late 1980s that brought down TV preachers Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, evangelical religious broad- rhetoric. ...What positive conception he pos- sessed of a less oppressive society remains mys- terious."
some of Foucault's admirers fear that Miller's book will have an unwhole- some effect. It vividly demonstrates "why...
36 percent over 10 years. The televangelists' forays into politics also hurt. In 1985, when talk of a presidential bid Pat Robertson started to be heard in public, Robertson's TV audience began to shrink. Even before the Jim Bakker scandal broke in 1987, the audience for The 700 Club had fallen by 21 per- cent over two years.
But the nimble entrepreneurs of faith have readjusted. Robertson, for example, restructured his Christian Broadcasting Network to present family-entertainment programs along...
a committee of the National Research Council, Reilly notes, "said that EPA has no com- prehensive inventory of waste sites, no program for discovering new sites, insufficient data for determining safe exposure levels, and an inad- equate system for identifying sites that require immediate action to protect public health."
"The existence of toxic wastes at a site does not necessarily mean that they pose a threat to nearresidents," Reilly notes. Recent research has shown, for...
Jonathan H. Adler, in Policy Review (Spring 1993), the Heritage Foundation, 214 Mass. Ave. N.E., Washing-ton, D.C. 20002-4999.
At the turnof the century,GiffordPinchot and other leaders of the emerging conservation movement warned that the United States would soon destroy the last of its once-vast forests. Their pessimistic forecasts were not without foundation, notes Adler, an environmental-policy analyst at the Washing- ton-based Competitive Enterprise Institute. The 19th and early 20th centuries...
Packaging in the '90s" and "Demographics & Discards," in Garbage (Dec. 1992-Jan. 1993), Dovetale Publishers, 2 Main St., Gloucester, Mass. 01930.
America the Wastefulcould be the tide of a hit song on the environmentalist pkebox. The lyrics would tell how Americans in 1990 each threw away about four pounds of solid waste-about a pound more apiecethan.they had discarded 20 years earlier. The villain of the piece: excessive packaging, especially plastic packaging such as the...
Wasted Words
Packaging in the '90s" and "Demographics & Discards," in Garbage (Dec. 1992-Jan. 1993), Dovetale Publishers, 2 Main St., Gloucester, Mass. 01930.
America the Wastefulcould be the tide of a hit song on the environmentalist pkebox. The lyrics would tell how Americans in 1990 each threw away about four pounds of solid waste-about a pound more apiecethan.they had discarded 20 years earlier. The villain of the piece: excessive packaging, especially plastic packaging...
ens Peale with Geranium conveys the intellectual and scientific bent of Peale's brother and suggests the New World's fertile environment.
Carol Baton Hevner, was the first full-length study of the artist. "It is now clear," Washington- based writer May says, "that over many decades of painting Rembrandt Peale produced an out- standing portrait gallery of his generation of Americans."
As a young boy in 1787, Peale watched with fascination as his father painted a portrait of...
Chandak Sengoopta, in The American Scholar (Spring 1993), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.
When baker Satyajit Ray (1921-92) died last year, not long after being awarded a special Os- car, it was said that his films were more appre- ciated in the United States than in his native In- dia. That is empty self-congratulation, says Sengoopta, a Calcutta psychiatrist and journal- ist studying at Johns Hopkins. Ray's limited appeal in the West dramatizes the plight of the Third World artist who...
Conor Cruise O'Brien, in National Review (Apr. 26,1993), 150 E. 35th St., New York, N.Y. 10016.
During more than two decades of terrorism in, and from, Northern Ireland, the prevailing po- litical wisdom has been that patient negotia- tions will eventually lead to a general solution, which will then isolate the terrorists and ren- der them harmless. This approach-exempli- fied the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985- has failed, Irish historian and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien argues. It is time,...
Shlomo Avineri, in The Brookings Review (Spring 1993), 1775 Mass. Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
The end of the Cold War has transformed poli- tics in the Middle East. The radical Arab forces have lost their Soviet patron, and the Israelis feel less threatened. But a second, less obvious con- sequence of the Soviet empire's collapse is also making for greater stability in the region, accord- ing to Avineri, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This development is the reforging of cultural...
Yale sociologist Albert J. Reiss, Jr., concludes that efforts to pre-vent crime eventually may prove as valuable as police work, pros- ecutions, and prisons.
Gun control is one often-de- bated crime-preventionmeasure. Research has not shown any link between the availability of guns and the number of violent inci- dents or injuries, the panel says. But since ps tend to be more lethal thaiother weapons, keep- ing them out of the hands of unsupervised juveniles and out of homes with histories of family...
Book Reviews
THE ANATOMY OF ANTILIBERALISM. By
Stepken Holmes. Harvard. 330 pp. $29.95
THE LOSS OF VIRTUE: Moral Confusion and
Social s is order in Britain and America. Ed. by
Digby Anderson. The Social Aflairs Unit and the National
Review. 258 pp. $22.95
RACE MATTERS. By Cornel West. Beacon Press.
105 pp. $15
THE PROMISE OF THE NEW SOUTH: Life
After Reconstruction. By Edward L. Avers.
Oxford. 572 pp. $30
By Paul Kennedy. Random House. 428 pp. $25
By Peter Skery. Free Press. 463 pp.
$27.95
By Daniel Patrick Moynikan.
Oxford. 221 pp. $19.95
By Nancy Scheper-
Hughes. Univ. of Calif. 614 pp. $29
By Wallace Stegner. Random House.
227 pp. $21
By
Christa Wolf. Trans. by Heike Sckwarzbauer and
Rick Takvorian. Farrar Straus. 295 pp. $25
THE AUTHOR'S DIMENSION: Selected
By Robert Hughes. Oxford Univ. Press/
New York Public Library. 210 pp. $19.95
By Joseph J. Ellis.
Norton. 277 pp. $25
By Robert D.
Putnam, with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y.
Nanetti. Princeton. 258 pp. $24.95
By Kay
Redfield Jamison. Free Press. 370 pp. $24.95
By Richard Leakey and
Roger Lewin. Doubleday. 375 pp. $25
By Thomas Powers. Knopf.
610 pp. $27.50
Essays
Selected and Introduced by Joseph Brodsky
MARTHA BAYLES
It still makes millions of dollars, but rock has lost its soul.
While the blame is often placed on crude commerce, Martha Bayles finds that American music went astray when if misunderstood, and then lost touch with, the rich blues tradition.
, eople used to tap their feet and smile
when they listened to American
popular music. Now they sit open-
mouthed and stare: at "speed metal" rockers with roadkill hair who, despite a certain virtuosity on guitar, treat music as...
It still makes millions of dollars, but rock has lost its soul.
While the blame is often placed on crude commerce, Martha Bayles finds that American music went astray when if misunderstood, and then lost touch with, the rich blues tradition.
, eople used to tap their feet and smile
when they listened to American
popular music. Now they sit open-
mouthed and stare: at "speed metal" rockers with roadkill hair who, despite a certain virtuosity on guitar, treat music as a form of...
AFRO-AMERICAN AND THE MAINSTREAM
MUSIC
LAWRENCE M. MEAD
W hen the problem of en-equality,on conduct and not class. This repre- trenched poverty suddenly sents a sharp break from American politicsas it appeared on the public was practiced during most of the 20th century, agenda during the mid- and it helps explain two of our current per- 1960s,it transformed the character of political plexities:the rise of divided government with debate in America. Since then we have seen DemocratsdominatingCongressand Repub- nothing less than a sea...
<p>When the problem of entrenched poverty suddenly appeared on the public agenda during the mid-1960s, it transformed the character of political debate in America. Since then we have seen nothing less than a sea change in our national...</p>
America was born the world's first bourgeois republic and has proudly defined itself ever since as, above all, a middle-class nationa. Yet the 1992 was the first in recent memory in which both parties wrapped themselves unambiguously in midde class symbols...
Easily the most conspicuous building in the flossy New York neighborhood of Madison Avenue and 72nd Street is the blown-up replica of a High Gothic reliquary whose original, one suspects, is to be found in some unvisited room of the Metropolitan Museum...
per- sonal ties of one sort or another." In place of this rigid society, the Founding Fathers proposed to create what Thomas Jefferson called a "natural aristocracy" of talented men like themselves- liberally educated gentlemen of the Enlighten- ment who had risen from modest circumstances yet had been excluded under the old order. "For many of the revolutionary leaders," Wood ob- serves, "this was the emotional significance of republicanism-a vindication of frustrated...
Many great minds of the modern world, from Karl Marx to James Joyce,
have claimed Giambattista Vico as an intellectual forefather.
But Mark Lilla finds that these admirers usually misread the arguments
of the West's first antimodernist.
iambattista Vico was born in Naples in 1668and died there in 1744.The son of a modest book- seller, he received an unconven- tional education, tutoring himself in his father's shop between short and difficult pe- riods in Jesuit schools. At the age...
No reader or writer of any serious- ness can do without a good dic- tionary. This, anyway, is the modern view. With some awe we have to remind ourselves that writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton had no ac- cess to what we would call dictionaries. Spell- ing did not much worry them, as it worries a modem author who runs to his dictionary to check on difficult words like hemorrhage (my personal blind spot). Milton spelt in his own creative manner, preferring mee to me when he wished to...
Revealing the dark side of the best-loved English poet of his generation, the recently published biography and selected letters of Philip Larkin sent shock waves through the litera y world. How might readers respond to the work of a man who gleefully raved against women, minorities, and almost everybody else, including himself? Edward Hirsch ponders the question.
hilip Larkin has increasingly
come to seem the greatest English
poet after W. H. Auden, though
the word "great" is perhaps
mildly...
its Republican predecessors, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the larger General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Talk of an interna- tional trade war, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930s, was thick in the
more than 200 years ago Adam Smith and later elaborated by David Ricardo. It says, with blinding simplicity, that the best way for all to prosper is for each region to produce the goods it can manufacture most cheaply and efficiently and to trade them w...
