When Magic Johnson announced that he was retiring from basketball because he had tested positive for the HIV virus, the nation fell into the kind of cultural coma that is all too common in recent history. The national television networks interrupted regularly scheduled programs for live coverage of Magic’s news conference and ran nightly retrospectives...

Italian politics get more “interesting” every day. Francesco Cossiga, the head of state, is continuing efforts to convert his largely ceremonial position into something like the benign dictatorship of Charles de Gaulle. His most risky stunt so far was to order the junior officers at a carabinieri station to go on alert last November. Actually,...

Where fringe feminism and environmentalism meet there is found a shrine to the “Goddess.” Last May Time magazine reported that “Goddess worship” is a “growing spiritual movement in the U.S.,” claiming as many as one hundred thousand adherents, most of them female. On May 12, 1991, the New York Times placed its imprimatur on the...

Howard Nemerov, one of our country’s titans of literature, died last July. He published his first book shortly after Wodd War II, and during the next 44 years a stream of 26 books garnered for him the country’s most prestigious awards. He won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer in 1978 for his Collected...

Congress, said H.L. Mencken, or perhaps it was Will Rogers, cost him about twelve dollars a year in taxes to support the institution, which was an unmatched bargain for entertainment. The statement was made during the raucous 20’s, when things seemed to be going along pretty well, and the antics of our leaders did not...

Baseball is reportedly replete with racism. Apparently concentrating on the World Series-bound Atlanta Braves was not enough for the Atlanta Constitution, for it came to the conclusion late last summer that the “White Game Is Alienating Many Blacks.” The white game? The problem, said the newspaper, is that while black players are a satisfying 72...

Patrick J. Buchanan had not even formally announced his candidacy for the White House last November than a platoon of the Beltway right suddenly fell out of ranks to denounce him and his challenge to George Bush. Divisive, polarizing, protectionist, nativist, xenophobic, anti-Zionist, anti- Semitic, ultra-nationalist, racist were the predictable sobriquets that buzzed from their...

Dwight MacDonald, one of our few perceptive political critics in that bleakest of decades, the 1940’s, wrote of the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948: “Populism today is a shell which can be filled with any content, even Stalinism, and hence offers its prophet no guide to behavior. Compare Bryan’s and Wallace’s audiences. Bryan’s favorite platform...

Washington public-relations and lobbying firms have begun to accept clients and staff from either party and from any point on the political spectrum, overcoming their former one-party only tradition. The newest example of this trend is the firm of Powell and Tate, the first half being Jody Powell, former press secretary to then-President Jimmy Garter,...

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, with a membership of some two million under the leadership of Archbishop Iakovos, suspended its relations last June with the National Council of Churches. This came as welcomed tidings to all who are serious about authentic belief in Christ. In an explanatory letter to the NCC bosses, the Primate of North...

When Clarence Thomas, our newest Supreme Court Justice, asked to be sworn in a week before the official ceremony, so he could go on the payroll early, it summed up the whole affair for me. Why are conservatives cheering his ascent to the judicial oligarchy? Yes, it’s fun to beat liberal senators, but not with...

Congress has cleared the way for women to fly in combat missions, and there can be little doubt that approval for the use of women in ground combat is not long in coming. If there are many who are disturbed by this aspect of the New World Order, they are remaining quiet. Apparently, most Americans...

Sweden experienced an unexpected eruption of right-wing populism this autumn. While news accounts focused on the electoral defeat of the ruling Social Democrats and the victory of a center-right coalition, the bigger story was the success of two new political parties: one telling the Swedes, “be good”; the other, “be happy.” The left suffered across...

A legal execution occurred last summer in South Carolina, the first in about two years. Donald (“Pee Wee”) Gaskins, a rural Bluebeard credited with 16 murders, was embraced by the electric chair amidst general public relief and the usual candlelight vigils by opponents of capital punishment. The public satisfaction, however, if it rests on a...

AIDS, like abortion, seems to have divided the religious community along conservative and liberal lines. One might suppose, in a reasonably rational society, that the increasing availability of contraceptives would reduce the incidence of abortion. However, in the United States at least, abortion has risen dramatically with the availability of contraceptives. Similarly, one might have...

Captain Thomas Santorno, who aspired to be chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, recently achieved fame, or notoriety, when he claimed that he legitimately changed his self-identification from Gaucasian (his father) to Hispanic (his mother). But Captain Roybal, also of the San Francisco Fire Department, alleged that Santorno falsified the grounds on which he...

Title X funds to “family planning” clinics that dispense abortion counseling were prohibited last summer as a result of the Rust v. Sullivan U.S. Supreme Court decision, which single-issue organizations indignantly denounced. It is ironic that the very people who claim that government should stay out of abortion decisions are the very same people who...

Guns and rape are often deplored in the public prints as two of our nation’s worst plagues. One may be the cure for the other. Denver, for instance, is at the mercy of a serial rapist. It is increasingly clear that the police, if not exactly helpless, cannot cope with the massive violence that is...

Frederick the Great has been revived as a figure of national interest among the Germans. The anticipated attendance of German government leaders at a reinterment of the great Prussian king (ruling between 1740 and 1786) spread horror throughout the journalistic profession. In a particularly revealing report in the Washington Post of August 17, readers were...

Homelessness was the subject of a task force recently established by the mayor and county board of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its purpose was “to develop mechanisms and a philosophy of care that will break down the barriers to becoming ‘un-homeless,’ so that these people are given the opportunity to pursue stable and productive lives in this...

The botched coup in the Soviet Union should have been an occasion for somber reflections. For a few days it appeared that U.S. foreign policy, built almost entirely around the person of Mikhail Gorbachev, might be in ruins. The failure of the plot, while it has temporarily restored Mr. Gorbachev’s fortunes, could not disguise the...

Yugoslavia, the political centrifuge of the Balkans, is spinning its constituent nations into tenuous independence. Long-standing religious and ethnic animosities have finally erupted into bloody internecine warfare, and it appears that nothing and no one can prevent this crazy-quilt entity of three major religions, three alphabets, and at least five proud national identities from rushing...

Language differences figured prominently in rioting last spring in two largely Hispanic areas of the nation’s capital, Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan. The violence in early May began after a city police woman arrested a Hispanic man. The officer spoke English; the man spoke Spanish. The police officer said the man brandished a knife; she...

The National Endowment for the Arts has released its 1990 annual report. So have the various state arts councils, including the Illinois Arts Council (IAC). The Lyric Opera of Chicago received a $1 million grant and a couple of hundred thousand for spare change, all of which will supposedly “make a major long term commitment...

Forks, Washington, known as the “Logging Capital of the World,” has reportedly taken on the signs of a community under siege. In this small timber town there are rows upon rows of idle logging trucks, yellow “solidarity” ribbons tied to telephone poles and trees, with signs posted everywhere that read, “This Family is Supported by...

Immigration problems continue to plague Europe. In France the Front National is finally fed up with the Gaullist right, which expects the support of the and-immigrant nationalists but treats them with contempt. Jacques Chirac is alarmed enough to begin borrowing the Front National’s rhetoric. When the Prime Minister, ditzy socialist Edith Cresson, called for a...

The obscene carnival of digging up an American hero who died 141 years ago has come to an end. No arsenic was found in Zachary Taylor’s remains, proving that he was not poisoned, which any competent and sensible historian could have told you without this grotesque and impious exercise. (Even if significant traces of arsenic...

From a black background an eerie, white sphere illuminates three ice cubes in a glass of clear liquid. At first, there is nothing special about the pallid image, except maybe the lack of color. But look again. Below the glass the bold white letters read “ABSOLUT SUBLIMINAL.” Something tugs at your memory. The word “Subliminal”...

The World Council of Churches convened its Seventh Assembly at Canberra, Australia, early in February 1991, just in time to pronounce a verdict on the Persian Gulf War. The W.C.C. opposed the war on two grounds: that all war is wrong, and that it is not permissible to fight war to right an injustice unless...

“Politically correct” is this year’s catch phrase, and before Christmas it will be as stale as the new miniskirt or yesterday’s George Will. Always willing to outdo themselves in gullibility, decent Americans are routinely writing letters to the editor or calling up Rush Limbaugh to protest the infamy of thought control on the nation’s campuses....

Georgetown University, the foremost Jesuit institution in the United States, one that was called the “alma mater of Catholic colleges in America” by Pope Pius IX, and a university that boasts of a renowned Bioethics Institute, has recently allowed an abortion-rights group, GU Choice, access to the benefits extended to all student groups. These include...

The Hopi Indian Reservation of northeastern Arizona is no place for strict adherents to the doctrine of the separation of church and state. The 8,000 or so present-day Hopi, unlike members of many Native American societies, have cautiously preserved much of their traditional culture and belief; most Hopis are inducted into secret religious societies by...

Winnie Manela’s recent conviction shows that something like the rule of law survives in South Africa after the unconditional release of her husband. On a visit to Johannesburg several months ago, I found myself more than once, to my amusement, arguing the court had to convict Winnie Mandela, to South Africans who smiled at me...

The now famous video of the Los Angeles police beating did not, for me, evoke the formulaic outrage that the media intended. Instead, strangely, it brought back a flood of memories from my misspent youth, a year of which was passed as a reporter on the “police beat” of a daily newspaper in a medium-sized...

Political correctness has finally made its way from our universities to our junior high schools. Last March, in the northern Illinois town of DeKalb (population 32,000), 75 students of Huntley Middle School walked out of class, held a press conference, demanded the resignation of their principal, and called for the punishment of two classmates who...

American ignorance of European politics is as sublime as ever. All eyes switch back and forth (as in a tennis match) from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, and what goes on among the allies who gave us our civilization—France, Germany, Italy, Britain—remains a closed book. Of England we hear occasional tidings from her expatriate...

Few people, apart from film buffs, recognize the name Donald Siegel, but since the 1940’s Mr. Siegel had directed some of the best American films ever made. Critics either hated or despised him both for pandering to popular tastes and for refusing to pander to the political prejudices of the intellectuals. The original Invasion of...

Enterprise Zones are the subject of Jeffrey Tucker’s article in this issue; Mr. Tucker found that despite the free-market wrapping paper Jack Kemp’s gift to the American public is only more welfare, this time for businessmen. The original idea, as it was transported here from Thatcher’s England by Stuart Butler, was that economically depressed areas...

Last December, almost five hundred black men, women, and children met on Jekyll Island, Georgia, for the first National Kwanzaa Celebration. No whites were allowed. Solemnized with what the Atlanta Constitution called “none of the usual holiday hype,” Kwanzaa is a week-long black religious festival founded in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, a professor of black...

All In The Family, the 1970’s TV series in which Norman Lear sought to convince the world that Middle Americans were ignorant bigots like Archie Bunker, recently had its twentieth anniversary special on CBS. It brought back fond memories. Sure, the show was always—as Archie would have put it—your basic pinko propaganda through and through,...

Martin Luther King’s plagiarism continues to send after-shocks. Ralph Luker has been dropped as the associate editor of the King Papers Project; his contract was not renewed last January. Clayborne Carson’s staff has reportedly been in disarray for quite some time, and sources associated with the Project called Luker “expendable,” the “fall guy,” the “sacrificial...

The Persian Gulf was recently the scene for a replay of the Spanish-American War. This time our “Manifest Destiny” was the “New World Order.” Our Teddy “Rough Rider” Roosevelt was “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf Our “Butcher” Weyler was “Hitler” Hussein. Our Frederic Remington was Peter Arnett. Our “Cuban sugar” was Kuwaiti oil. Both wars were crusades...

As the shock of American cluster bombs and the distinctive rumble of Abrams tanks fade from the Arabian nights, we world-citizens must begin to sort through the events of the last eight months. Many lessons could be drawn. Allow me to suggest two. First, it seemed clear by the sixth week of open combat that...

After we’ve attrited all the enemy, we’re going to have the New World Order. In the New World Order there will be no more disorder, that much we know. All those people who litter, laze, sprawl, and don’t do a lick of work in all those countries that don’t function too efficiently because everybody takes...

In Moscow, several months ago, I telephoned an American friend to confirm an office appointment. Since I was going by taxi, I asked him how much I ought to pay for the ride. Moscow cabdrivers outside tourist hotels are no better or worse than those in other metropolises, but it always pays to know from...

Bishop Spong’s agitation for the ordination of practicing homosexuals received “moral” support last February from the Special Task Force on Human Sexuality of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The Presbyterian commission recommended the ordination of homosexuals as well as the provision of medical and pension benefits to same-sex couples, and their recommendations will be submitted to...

The New World Order promised by George Bush is turning out to be something like a unisex barbershop that can buzz off a woman’s locks while giving male customers a wave and a perm. Over and over we have heard the phrase “our men and women stationed in the Gulf.” As the war went on,...

When NEA Chairman Frohnmayer announced last September that the funds Congress left to the NEA after taking out a big chunk for the state arts agencies would from now on be spent on strengthening arts in education, international projects, expanding audiences for the arts, and the infrastructure of the arts, many of us took heart....

Guns N Roses, the rock group, said they liked being white, the music business fell on them like a ton of discs. But racial music is not always insensitive. With what Washington Post music critic David Mills calls “unprecedented directness,” Black Muslim rappers are hitting the charts with records preaching their esoteric doctrines. These include...

The Insensitivity Squad has struck again: this time against a board game and a marching band. Parker Brothers, venerable producer of board games, was recently denounced by the head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, left-Republican Susan Engeleiter. It seems that its new game, Careers for Girls, for ages 8-12, lists six “careers” for the...