For my sins, I turned the tv on in time to hear Pat Robertson at the Republican convention. His main accusation against Dukakis was that the Governor is a member of the ACLU—the godless American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU …
Tremendously important changes are taking place in the world today, so rapidly it often seems impossible to keep track. The great powers are starting to back away from their military interventions, not because they have concluded that lions should lie …
A clever and capable man, Michael Dukakis is the kind of politician the Democrats once could produce with ease from year to year. He happens to be the first of his kind whom they have found to run for president …
A society that won’t spend the money to keep murderers and rapists behind bars is understandably puzzled about how to deal with nonviolent criminals. We hesitate to toss bribe-takers and stock-manipulators into the pokey with cutthroats and muggers. Yet we …
The history of postwar Eastern Europe begins with “Yalta.” Why quotation marks? “Yalta” signifies more than the historical meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in the Crimea, in February 1945. “Yalta” signifies a major trend in the wartime diplomatic efforts …
American universities in the 1980s have witnessed some striking developments at that tender point where academic research meets big business and big government. Some of the most dramatic of these have involved technologies of genetic engineering—biotechnology, for short—with their much-contested …
I was embarrassed at first to admit how good I felt about the Democratic party convention; then I realized that the four evenings I spent in front of the tv were a training period—like an athlete’s spring training for a …
His is one of those lives that invites counter-factual questions. A founder of the Italian Communist party, a brilliant writer and devoted militant, Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by the Fascists in 1926 when he was only 35 and died in …
Is Socialism Doomed? is an elegant analysis of the experience of the French left in power after 1981. The general reader will learn much about France and its left from the book. Singer combines two rare qualities—a compelling writing style …
There is something fundamentally wrong in the country, and the country knows it. It is not that families sit around the dinner table talking about deindustrialization and federal deficits and the new underclass. It is rather that people feel what …
A debate is now going forward—sometimes raging, sometimes smoldering—over the kind of curriculum that should be offered to college students in literature and the humanities generally. For example, core humanities classes are sometimes offered to freshmen and sophomores as a …
As socially concerned people in labor unions, women’s organizations, welfare rights associations, church organizations, aboriginal groups, and other community associations, we are alarmed by signs of deepening social crisis in Canada today. Plant shutdowns, farm bankruptcies, business failures, and abandoned …
Many sociologists deny there is a ruling class. Paul Fussell says there is one—but it is “top out of sight.” Albert Gore, George Bush, Robert Dole, and Richard Gephardt accused each other of belonging to it but wouldn’t be caught …
Aleksander Wat was born in Warsaw in 1900 to a family of Polish Jewish intelligentsia. As a young man he was a founder of the Polish futurist literary movement; in 1929 he became editor of the communist magazine The Literary …
To speak the truth: that is the most urgent item on the next president’s agenda. We have been lied to, systematically and patronizingly, ever since the Gulf of Tonkin incident, deceived, manipulated, flattered and lulled by illusions. Call it glasnost, …