In The Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat and Renewal by Richard Nixon Simon and Schuster, 1990, $21.95 Richard Nixon and His America by Herbert S. Parmet Little, Brown, 1990, $24.95 We live, apparently, in a time of the composure …
Shortly before Christmas, on my way to Lauubeck from Gauottingen, I was changing trains in Hamburg when a young man approached me, practically cornered me, and called me a traitor to the fatherland. He left me standing there with the …
The media business operates with a pair of avowed purposes—to provide a public service and to make money. As a result, mixed messages are typical. America’s three major newsweeklies, for instance, have published occasional articles critical of the tobacco habit. …
Readers of the financial pages are familiar with resignations or firings (“has left to pursue other interests”). Nothing remarkable here, as the continual movement of people in and out of jobs is a capitalist fact of life. It must have …
History, said Oswald Spengler, is destiny. Combined with myth, the taproot of emotion, it becomes the fate of a people. Was destiny the foundation of the sonderweg, the “special path” to modernity that joined the powerful drive of Prussia with …
Editors: Robert Post’s critique of “liberal” First Amendment theory, “Outrageous Speech and the Constitution: Thoughts on Hustler v. Falwell” [Dissent, Summer 1990] raises more issues than can be treated in a letter. However, a few points should not pass without …
Returning to Warsaw after a lapse of nine years, a visitor expects visual changes as dramatic as the political. That expectation is quickly dashed. The Polish capital simply looks more tired than ever, with its heartbreaking Stalinist architecture, mercifully relieved …
There seems to be a connection, historical and perhaps even logical, between metaphysics and morality; that is, between views about the nature of being or knowledge and views about justice and the good. A vague sense (which is surely all …
The cold war is over. There is simply no rationale for a defense budget of the size now contemplated by the Bush administration. One need not be an expert in military strategy or international affairs to understand that spending anywhere …
The following study (that is, etude) was originally submitted under the title “Strategies of Subversion: Discourse, Desire, and The Other in ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ “—Ens. The hegemonic discourse of postmodernity valorizes modes of expressive and “aesthetic” praxis which preclude any dialogic …
All too often the impression conveyed by recent coverage of Eastern Europe’s revolutions is that the collapse of totalitarianism has already ushered in an era of “capitalism triumphant.” Stories of nascent entrepreneurial spirit sweeping the region saturate the press while …
A few days before the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in 1979, Anastasio Somoza Debayle called a demonstration for himself in central Managua. A vast crowd descended on the rally grounds. A Nicaraguan journalist tells me that, looking at the immensity …
The Berlin Wall falls down, and the electoral fortunes of the Italian Communist party (PCI) come tumbling after. The party plummeted by 6.2 percent in regional elections in May. The drop was massive, from a regional average of 30.2 percent …
In 1915 a consortium of private British and French borrowers approached the New York banks and asked for a wartime loan of $1 billion. Wall Street raised half the requested amount, but given the magnitude of the sum and the …
Violence in America, Volume 1: The History of Crime in America edited by Ted Robert Gun Sage Publications, 1989, 279 pp., $17.95 Violence in America, Volume 2: Protest, Rebellion, Reform edited by Ted Robert Gun Sage Publications, 1989, 279 pp., …
