In places where life is reasonably ordered, the violence that rages in the Third World is masked by a propensity to integrate it in some favorite sequence of meaning. For those beholden to a vision of gradual progress, such violence …
Sid Caesar and his band of comic players (Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, and Imogene Coca, Nanette Fabray or Janet Blair) ruined Saturday-night business in theaters and movie houses. They burst onto TV in 1949, and continued through eight years of …
William Barrett’s The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Anchor/Doubleday, 1982) is a slippery and maddening book. It is an account of one man’s intellectual coming of age, and it has the qualities of a backward glance at a busy, crisscrossed …
The Catholic bishops have a nice sense of timing. Last November, just before the election, they released the second draft of a pastoral letter that called for a “halt” to the “testing, production and deployment of new strategic weapons” (Dissent, …
Persistent unemployment and pervasive mismatches between skills and job opportunities are symptoms of a basic problem: America’s labor force is not participating in the growing segments of the world economy. One out of every six jobs in the American economy …
The revolution is not at hand. Although this fact is no surprise to anyone, it does merit some reflection. At the very moment when the industrialized West faces something akin to those “crises of capitalism” that Marxists have talked about …
A writer named Tang Tao, who came to see us in Peking, presented us with a book of his newly published essays open to a page with a photograph that he eagerly pointed out to me because I was in …
The agenda for the 1984 presidential election has changed suddenly and drastically. What happened was Chicago. Black participation in all aspects of American governance and the continuing problem of equal rights landed in the center of the American political scene. …
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General Jaruzelski’s desperate coup against his own people bought his bankrupt regime some time. It also had the effect, no doubt quite unintended, of freezing Solidarity in time, and of ensuring that movement a permanent place in Poland’s national mythology. …
At mid-term, the bellicose momentum of the Reagan administration’s policies toward Nicaragua, and toward Central America as a whole, has stalled. The reactionary impulse behind these policies (in the sense of an attempt to roll back change to the status …
American academia has become the scene of a kind of ideological warfare. Although the confrontation affects the humanities and other disciplines, the principal battlefield is the domain of the empirical social sciences. The self-confidence of the social sciences in the …
After recently spending a month in Chile—meeting with teachers, human rights workers and lawyers— it is clear to me that the contradictory maze of constitutional laws, penal codes, executive decrees, and ministerial directives provides the Pinochet regime with a constitutional …
Michael Harrington argues persuasively in his article in Dissent, Fall 1982 [“A Path for America”] that we will soon be entering the age of social democracy in America. The failure of Reagan’s policies to end the recession is becoming apparent …
At the start, the uprising of the Afghan population against the Communist regime was a spontaneous movement, centered around the village elders. But very soon and of necessity, the character of the resistance changed: to fight a machine as formidable …
