ABC launched Call to Glory with an heroic promotional effort during the Summer Olympics. The series, which chronicles the life of a reconnaissance pilot and his family in the early 1960’s, is frequently described as unabashedly pro-American. Obviously, ABC hoped to cash in on the “New Patriotism” generated by the games. The show was an...
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American Proscenium (Part 3)
Richard Brautigan was a familiar American type that has been with us since the days of the Yankee peddler: the self-appointed Job who wants to take on the powers that be from his chair behind the cracker barrel, the freshman who writes a history of the world without a bibliography, the guttersnipe journalist who runs...
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American Proscenium (Part 4)
Cleanth Brooks has been named the 1985 Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mr. Brooks, who is best known for his works of literary theory and his expositions of William Faulkner, is one of the last of the band of prophets who found themselves at Vanderbilt University in the l 920’s. Too...
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The American Proscenium
French Proscenium William Styron was recently honored by the French government, which made him a Commander of Arts and Letters. In accepting the award, Styron remarked, “Vive la France, Vive l’Amerique and all good things.” Styron may not have a very strong grasp of French, but he loves the country: “I feel particularly good here,...
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Who Cares?
The anonymous reviewers at Chronicles of Culture don’t seem to like any thing except right-wing polemics. The problem is the usual plague of the selfrighteous: they have no sense of humor. For them, Roy Blount Jr. is “a humorist of sorts.” What’s the worst thing that can be brought up against him? He wears makeup...
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Caveat Emptor
In Art, as in most areas of life, California is ahead of the rest of us. A new set of California laws, collectively known as “An Artist’s Bill of Rights,” prohibit the buyer of a work of art from making any alterations in that work without consent of the artist. According to a recent issue...
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Commedia dell’Arte
George Balanchine died a year ago April. Last July the Ballet Master of the New York City Ballet, John Taras, was finally persuaded by Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the American Ballet Theater. In a recent interview with Dancemagazine, Taras observed that with Balanchine gone “things will not be the same.” How right he was. The...
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The American Proscenium
Politics and Prayer One of the high points of this fall’s campaign season was the vigorous debate over the place of religion in America’s public life. In retrospect, it may some day be regarded as the most meaningful public discussion of the question in this century. The exchange began early in the campaign when...
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American Proscenium – Non-Sentimental Education
The magnitude of mental confusion in which this society exists–actually, considered normal and permanent by historians endowed with a sense of humor–overwhelms us on occasion. In August, three months before the election, a Gallup poll found that Walter Mondale and his ultra-liberal Democratic Party are believed by the majority of Americans to be better suited...
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The American Proscenium – Peace Mongers
We received a piece of direct mail sent to us from an outfit in San Francisco entitled U.S. Out of Central America. There we could read: We are not from the left or the right, we are not from the same political organization, and we probably have different opinions on many things. As the very...
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The American Proscenium
Representation Ms. Geraldine Ferraro, a Democratic party hack, a Catholic feminist (what a spiritual and spirited concoction, brewed according to the recipes of the Queens-Long Island bourbon culture!) whom the amalgamated USA womanists (the newest vocable) wished to see as the next vice president, said of late: “The only real threat to women in America...
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The American Proscenium
Bertolt Brecht, the cultural left’s most astute perceiver of poignant ironies embedded in social injustices, never commanded our rapt allegiance, yet we wouldn’t mind listening to what he might have said about the Memorial Day spectacle. Watching it, we thought we could have appreciated, at that particular moment, some of his biting existential sarcasm, always...
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The American Proscenium
Red Rainbow What’s astonishing (or, perhaps, moderately surprising, if we remain aware of what life in liveral America has taught us over the last two decades) is the media’s color blindness when it comes to making an ideological evaluation of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s programmatic rhetoric. At a closer look, this agenda followed by the...
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The American Proscenium
At the Crossroads Not long ago, Mr. Theodore White, connoisseur of presidential elections, crafted a well reasoned, though intellectually prefabricated, article for the New York Times Magazine. His was a solid analysis of this country’s shifting political geology: some major social forces are in the process of crystallizing into defined political powers, moved by ideas...
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Demo Liberal Chutzpa
Once again, President Reagan has spoken out about the collapse of the American educational system (and correctly so) and stated facts that will hit anyone who has an average IQ, and one that is uncontaminated by liberal orthodoxy, with a force of a brick: Classrooms across the country are not temples of learning, teaching the...
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American Proscenium
The Ingersoll Prizes On December 8, 1983, in Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, The Ingersoll Prizes were awarded for the first time. Mr. Jorge Luis Borges was the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, and Mr. James Burnham received the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters. The Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, theologian and...
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The American Proscenium – What Happened?
In the days after the Beirut massacre of October 1983 both the print and electronic media went into their instant business of interviewing. People’s most frequent reaction to the reporters’ questions was in the form of a question: “Why are we, that is the Marines, there in the first place?” Of course, a phalanx of...
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American Proscenium – Gott Strafe England!
Voices are heard from the British Islands that are highly critical of Mr. Reagan’s decision to do something about that other little island–Grenada. Let us take a brief peek at what for the last two centuries has been called in history books the perfidyof Albion. Once it was a world calamity, but today it seems more...
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American Proscenium – Ship of Fools
The debate on how to render America impotent has reached orgasmic intensity. Suddenly, everybody sees atomic war just around the corner; the conventional liberal media are organizing giant scare campaigns (in the name of the people’s right to know), while the radicals, the professional freezeniks, the regular pro-Moscow troops, and all the incorporated communist- front...
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American Proscenium – Methodology
Once again (though it is only the second time), there is a black contender for the Presidency–and it is a glorious moment, for it shows that we are true to ourselves in that we are living up to the most intrinsic promises of our free society, pluralistic democracy, and the Constitution–the sources of all our...