Search

The article presents reprints of articles, images, book reviews, and quotations from the publication between the years 1985-1995, including “Terrorism and Its Discontents” by Christopher Hitchens from the August 3, 1985 issue, “For Jesse Jackson and His Campaign” by Andrew Kopkind from the April 16, 1988 issue, and “What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?” by Alice Walker from the May 22, 1989 issue. A timeline of U.S. events for this period is also presented.

The article presents incidents related to the world politics. José Napoleón Duarte's, stunning defeat in the legislative and municipal elections was a long overdue and richly deserved come- uppance for a man who thought that becoming president was more important than maintaining political integrity in El Salvador. For most of the past decade he has been a pathetic hostage of the armed forces, failing to grasp that he might have secured his political future had he found the courage to attempt the reforms on which his populist reputation was based. Another incident refers to the political campaign of Jesse Jackson on television as a U.S. Presidential candidate.

The article presents information on the democrat Paul Simon. Simon is the perfect candidate for tain't season. He is a walking amalgam of every successful and failed Democratic candidate for President since Franklin Roosevelt, at least, with some Republicans thrown in for good measure He has craftily packaged a set of signifiers for policies and programs from the New Deal through the Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society and the Plains Deal. His jobs program ($8 billion in the first phase) recalls the Works Progress Administration. His long-term health care plan for the elderly expands on Medicare.

The article focuses on political conditions of the U.S., as of November 7, 1987. Beginning in the summer of 1983, Jesse Jackson set out to change the course of politics in that most resistant of regions. He convinced, cajoled and in some cases almost dragged blacks to registration desks and polling places with such success that more than 2 million "new voters" entered the political process. Not only that but blacks were encouraged and organized to run for office according to a strategy that would constitute a new progressive bloc within the Democratic Party at both the local and national levels.

Entrepreneur of dissent, staff psychiatrist, soother of outraged subscribers, salesman for shoestring dreams, promoter of political happenings, beggar for good causes, mediator, manager, cheerleader, Organizer, con man Hamilton Fish 3d has, during his nine and a half years as publisher of the journal "The Nation," worn many hats, all of them jauntily. Now, after almost a decade of presiding over the business side of this operation, he has decided that at age 35 it is time to move on and explore the possibility of running for Congress. To publish a grubby, trouble making, muckraking, independent progressive journal in the U.S. in the 1980's is neither a glamorous occupation nor a conventional launch pad for political office.

Iowa's party caucuses next February 8 will provide the first test of popularity for the countless candidates (there seem to be at least sixteen real or prospective entrants so far), and the long and expensive campaigns for a few votes constitute a major economic boost and cultural fillip for a state otherwise in desperate decline. The crowd lined up for registration and jammed into the narrow ballroom, which seemed too constricted for any dance more expansive than a fox trot, even when empty. A local comedian took the stage and delivered topical oneliners, performed magic tricks with audience participation.

Presents a letter to the editor about the political development in the United States.

The article focuses on issues related to South Africa's liberation movement. The deprivations of Blacks in the face of an abundance of cultural riches delivered to Whites has finally created the most disruptive, sustained, nationwide protest campaign in apartheid's history. The official banning of the African National Congress has forced the organization to internationalize its strategy on both the diplomatic and the military front; the imprisonment of authentic Black leaders has made their situation synonymous with the social enslavement of Black people, and thus has brought worldwide support for liberation.

The article presents information on a tiny enclave in the vast Los Angeles Basin, California, that, according to the author, inverts the demographics, politics and poetics of what Americans consider normal urban life. It is reported that it stands the traditional population pyramid on its head, that is only about 6 percent of its 36,000 residents are under 18 years of age, and a quarter are over 60. Its 1.9 square miles contain hardly an inch of undeveloped land; even without many conspicuous high-rises, it has the densest population of any city west of the Mississippi.

The article presents some political updates as of April 6, 1985. The article highlights that when South African police massacred a score of marchers near Langa, officials were forced to sharpen their customarily gentle criticism of the white regime. The article also adds that U.S. President Ronald Reagan was much less annoyed. Another update says that recent visiting Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Ozal will be wined and dined by President Reagan to celebrate the ties between Turkey's democratic government and the U.S.

Features four future epic films. 'Starman,' directed by John Carpenter; and '2010: The Year We Make Contact,' directed by Peter Hyams; 'The Terminator,' directed by James Cameron; 'Supergirl,' directed by Jeannot Szwarc.

The article focuses on the European Parliament. From Milan to Manchester and from Madrid to Munich, voters do not much care which of the 567 deputies represents them in Strasbourg, so when they do bother to go to the polls, they can express their preference without worrying about wasting their vote. The European elections, held every five years, thus serve as a glorified opinion poll, providing a good snapshot of the political mood of the moment, though not necessarily a guide to future national elections.

The article focuses on issues related to gay people. The issue of gay people fills the media, charges politics, saturates popular and elite culture. It is the stuff of everyday conversation and public discourse. Not for thirty years has a class of Americans endured the peculiar pain and exhilaration of having their civil rights and moral worth. Their very humanness has been debated at every level of public life. Lesbians and gay men today wake up to headlines alternately disputing their claim to equality under the law, supporting their right to family status, denying their desire, affirming their social identity. INSET: Flash: 15 million gays disappear..

The article focuses on the political condition of Russia. The breakup of the Soviet Union has accelerated the fall into an abyss of hyperinflation, shortages, unemployment and economic shrinkage. Rumors of coups, communal conflicts and civil war fill common conversation and the press. A very few have very quickly become very rich and are pleased to find an array of available consumables, from Cadillacs to Chanel, while many more have been plunged into poverty and can only window-shop for the new imports.

The electoral system in the U.S. is now being convulsed by the broadest, fiercest voter insurgency in perhaps 140 years, and is watching from the sidelines. Worst of all, the receptacle of these volatile political humors is Presidential candidate Ross Perot. Despite the mayhem he can inflict on an unresponsive system, Perot is a catastrophe for the progressive/activist spectrum. Insurgent labor, minorities, feminists, lesbians and gays, environmentalists, community organizers, peace internationalists, the coalition that once made up the Rainbow, are in varying degrees offended by Perot's campaign but, more important, excluded from it on any terms but his.

The U.S. Supreme Court will rule on Pennsylvania's restrictive abortion law in time for Election Day. Ironically, this announcement, which fast-tracks the inevitable gutting of Roe v. Wade, counts as a pro-choice victory. It is the Supreme Court, historically, that has been the last line of defense for hotly contested civil liberties. No one who cherishes a right would wish to see it voted up or down every four years, or worse, subjected to fifty annual recertifications by state pols elected for their views on taxes or highway repairs. Today is the time to demonstrate, to donate, to lobby, to join the clinic defense lines and to swear a solemn oath to withhold votes from all politicians, no matter how lowly, no matter what their other virtues, who do not explicitly support abortion rights, including those of teenagers and poor women.

Presents several letters to the editor commenting on an article "The Left and Clinton: As Bill Goes, So Do We," by Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin's in the previous issue of the periodical. U.S. President Bill Clinton's insurance company-friendly health plans and proposed welfare cuts; Prospect of the Republican Party's victory in 1996.

Focuses on the research in international studies in the United States. Help provided by practitioners of foreign policy to the U.S. in its war against Vietnam; Contribution of political scientist Robert E. Ward to the field of international studies; Role of the U.S. National Security Council in providing security to the nation.

Focuses on the emergence of the political culture of cold war liberalism in the U.S. Impact of the cold war on the political scenario of the U.S.; Features of the cold war liberalism; Types of changes that occurred in the political scenario of the U.S. due to cold war liberalism.

Focuses on the film 'Missing,' directed by Costa-Gavras. Plot; Characters; Film location.

Discusses the impact of United States President Ronald Reagan on the civic culture of the United States. History of the emergence of the Reaganism movement; Lack of ideological definition and programmatic coherence of the Reaganism movement; Policies of Reagan expected to have a long-term effect on the country.

Reports that the bulk of the surviving U.S. left has joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflect debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. Negation of the reasons for the left's own existence; View that Jesse Jackson represented an opportunity for the left in the Democratic Party.

Presents several editorials which discuss different subjects. "Turkey's Big Bite," which discussed the declaration of independence and military protectorate in Cyprus by Turkey; "Greyhound Bust," which discussed controversies related to the reduction of employee benefits provided by Greyhound Lines Inc; "Window Dressing," which discussed the program of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development to improve the conditions of buildings in areas around the city.

The article focuses on Paul Tsongas, the one-term Senator from Massachusetts who left politics because of a diagnosis of incurable cancer in 1984. For most of the second half of the last decade he concentrated on making money and getting well, the former as a partner in a weighty corporate law firm, the latter as a subject of high-tech experimental therapy in one of the best urban health complexes in the world. Presidential politics seemed the last thing on his mind, but seeming was not being. Fate, and more than an intimation of mortality, delayed that next step, but it did not end the ambition.

The U.S. has been in a state of war as long as most citizens now living can remember. Now, after a half-century of construction, the warrior state is so ingrained in American institutions, has so saturated everyday ideology, and is so totalitarian, that government is practically unthinkable without it. The malignant post-Vietnam syndrome was as much on the war planners' minds as the threats of Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq. But there were pressing failures on the home front in summer 1990 as the gulf was simmering. The pathetic performance by both the administration of U.S. President George Bush and the U.S. Congress during the long budget negotiations convinced many die-hard democrats that the political system of their dreams didn't work anymore in the real world.

The article presents some political updates as of February 4, 1991. One of the updates discusses the military policy of the U.S. after dropping the first bomb on Iraq. The deep split between the national security crisis managers and the foreign policy elite strategists over the advisability of war marked it. U.S. President George W. Bush's small coterie of military and political fixers assumed a war-making posture. Another update reports that on January 12-13, a delegation of the Federation Council, the new highest executive organ of Russia, was sent to the Lithuanian capital to negotiate. But Russian troops simultaneously stormed the television tower, killing fifteen people and wounding more than a hundred.

The article focuses on the murder of Carol Stuart in Boston, Massachusetts. The murdered is now attributed to her husband, Chuck Stuart. When Charles Stuart described a black man as the murderer, the white authorities in Boston sent a small army of occupation into the black neighborhoods. Police invaded the housing projects of Mission Hill, knocking down doors, bursting into apartments, slamming and insulting residents. Young black men were stopped, searched and detrousered on the street for no cause more reasonable than their skin color.

The article presents information on political developments around the world. The 1987 real average hourly wage of $8.98 and the real average weekly wage of $312.50 are at the lowest levels in twenty-five years. Since the last peak in the business cycle, in 1979, employment in manufacturing, with relatively high average weekly wages of $398, has declined by 1.9 million jobs. When a tyrant fails, the world's shadows lighten and only hypocrites grieve and Mohammad Zia ul-Haq was one of the cruelest of modern tyrants, whatever his great friend U.S. President George Bush and his staunch supporter Margaret Thatcher would have people think.

The article reports on the issue that created misunderstanding between Jesse Jackson and white social democrats. The New York Times' reporter Michael Oreskes wrote a story that asserted that Jackson had asked the Democratic Socialists of America (D.S.A.) to withhold its expected endorsement of his candidacy on the eve of D.S.A.'s national convention. Appended to the endorsement story was Oreskes's short list of Jackson's betrayals of the left, which include, Jackson recently refused to repeat a remark he had made at the United Nations last year comparing the movement against the U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico with the black struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

The article presents information about three movies "Out of Africa," "Sugarbaby," and "A Chorus Line: The Movie." The movie "Out of Africa purports to be about Dinesen, her husband, Baron Bror Blixen and her lover Denys Finch Hatton in Kenya during and after World War I. The movie "Sugarbaby," is immediately recognizable as one of the those new Euromovies with the look of a perfume commercial and the erotic tension of peep-show porn. The movie "A Chorus Line: The Movie," destroys the participatory element of the play and brings back to the dead language of the musical.

The article reviews the film "Rambo: First Blood Part II," starring Sly Stallone and "Birdy," starring Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine.

The article focuses on Godkin Lectures, an occasion endowed in 1903 by friends of E.L. Godkin, a founder and first editor of this journal, that was held at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, a multi-modular Lego set of a building, where the rich and famous of the political establishment sometimes spend their holidays studying the lifestyles of the poor and powerless. At the lecture the U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, revived the thesis about poverty that propounded in "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," a report he prepared for former U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson twenty years ago. That document was a nodal point in social policy-making in postwar United States. It identified the poverty class as a black Lumpenproletariat, created by the strictures of slavery and perpetuated by a "domineering" matriarchy. The locus of poverty was not the economic system, the political hierarchy or institutional racism, as various scholars and activists had claimed, but the "pathological" fatherless black family.

An ideological gulf is about to be crossed from the privatist eighties to the activist nineties, from Reagan-Bush laissez-faire to Clinton-Gore industrial policy, from the past decades of decline to a future of growth. In a term that George Bush must wish he had never heard, a "new paradigm" for the American political economy is being born. Robert Reich's name comes up time and again as the "change agent" who will lead the brain trusters of Clinton's New Covenant. Reagan and Bush exacerbated the problems, both by omissions (failure to improve education, train the work force, modernize transportation, rebuild cities, improve the environment) and by radical actions.

The article presents information related to health care in the U.S. After every other rich capitalist country and every socialist state present or past has instituted a national health system, the U.S. is in a corrosive crisis of care, cost and comprehensiveness. Certainly no one is happy with the way health care is handled now. Across the political and ideological spectrum, almost everyone sees the need for some action, if only to blunt the rising anger of the victims of the crisis. The immediate danger is not only that reform will be utterly defeated but that incremental corrections will be allowed specifically to abort the process of perestroika that will produce a health security system.

Focuses on views of Derek Bok, president of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on nuclear disarmament. Impact of political demonstrations on decisions regarding nuclear weapons; Features of a book written by Bok on nuclear policy; Members of the U.S.-based Center for Science and International Affairs and the Center for International Affairs, who presented their views in Bok's book on nuclear policy.

Discusses the motion picture 'The Killing Fields,' directed by Roland Joffe. Theme of the motion picture; Plot synopsis; Positive aspects of the motion picture; Negative aspects of the motion picture.

Features several motion pictures in the U.S. in 1984. "Places in the Heart;" "Country;" "Paris, Texas".

Focuses on the de-alignment of Western Europe from the United States. Impact of the de-alignment on the West; Reason behind this de-alignment; Characterization of the de-alignment as a reference for the struggles and efforts made to expand East-West trade and as a reference for arguments within the alliance over economic policy, foreign interventions and negotiations for disarmament and peace; Overview of the origin of the de-alignment; Factors responsible for making de-alignment a problem.

The article focuses on the Italian Communist Party (PCI), a political party that controlled scores of city and regional councils, commanded the allegiance of millions of workers and represented the major parliamentary opposition to the ruling Christian Democrats. It is reported that now the party has changed its name and its program, its hold on local politics is loosening, the favor of many workers and voters has been lost and it constitutes a barely credible opposition. Last winter in a wrenching national convention, the PCI became the PDS, the Democratic Party of the Left. Meanwhile, the old PCI managers and party functionaries in their central Italian strongholds go about their political and economic businesses as if nothing very much has changed, except their spots.

The article focuses on the book "Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey," by Martin Duberman. Duberman was incurably attracted to his own sex in a time and place when the theology of heterosexuality offered the only hope of earthly salvation. Determined to find the happiness and stability, he embarked on a psychotherapeutic "odyssey" that he hoped would bring him back to a Penelope and the kids in his own heterosexual home. His stories are much scarier, and besides, he kept a meticulous journal that has allowed him to construct a moving chronicle of his transition from closet case to liberated gay man in an autobiography that is at once historically significant and personally instructive.

Bennett Cerf, co-founder and publisher of Random House, once remarked in the early 1960's, "Jason Epstein is my class editor and Robert Bernstein is my mass editor," partly by way of explaining that Random House was dedicated to accommodating both tendencies. Jason Epstein, the inventor of the quality paperback who was dubbed the Robespierre of the paperback revolution, went on publishing quality lit, but Robert Bernstein, who in those days brought in such best sellers as a Shirley Temple scrapbook, went on to become president of Random House.

The article presents socio-political updates from the world, as of June 5, 1989. Now comes a case involving an unauthorized and critical biography of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and the same U.S. Court of Appeals has pushed the doctrine of the inviolability of unpublished letters to its most ridiculous extreme. The book in that case, "Bare-Faced Messiah: The Story of L. Ron Hubbard," was a full-length biography of Hubbard, which contradicted many of the claims made by the Scientologists about his life and, in the court's words, "depicted him as a charlatan and poseur." At midnight, after the polls closed in Panama, the military stopped the count. The next day, when opposition supporters gathered to protest the fraud, the regime's goons opened fire on the crowd, killing one and wounding scores. Soon afterward, the election tribunal declared the official candidate the winner.

This article focuses on the U.S. Presidential election in 1988. Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson did not take over the U.S. Democratic party in 1988, although he had already changed politics in ways that few predicted at the start and that will be extremely difficult to reverse. Jackson's apparently coy but reportedly genuine bid for "serious consideration" as Michael Dukakis's running mate may have been partly a gambit to keep his campaign alive in the media during the dull days between California and Atlanta.

This article presents the author's views on U.S. politician and economist, Michael Dukakis's candidacy for U.S. President during the Presidential election in 1988. Dukakis does not lack for material for every possible rationalization of his shortcomings in the department of ideology and issues. He stands in the middle of the party between the military-racist faction on one side, and the Jacksonian progressives on the other. Most civilized U.S. Democratic voters will see that he is better, in some essentialist reading, than Vice President George Bush.

The article focuses on the book "The Year Left 2: Towards a Rainbow Socialism," edited by Mike Davis, Manning Marable, Fred Pfeil and Michael Sprinker. The New Left of the 1960s generated an extraordinarily rich and voluminous record of intellectual research, analytical experimentation and polemical activism, much of which has been lost or buried in the dim ages that followed. The book is organized around the theme "Toward a Rainbow Socialism" and explores race, ethnicity and gender. A concluding section takes Rainbowism somewhat far afield to Central America and the Caribbean, which was also a major topic of the 1985 series opener.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. Efforts to block the confirmation of judicial nominee Daniel Manion to the U.S. Court of Appeals; Refusal of the U.S. visa for speaking tours; Struggle to restore the reputation of the quagmire.

The article discusses the issue of apartheid with reference to South Africa in particular. The hope is that a victory against apartheid in South Africa can be shared by others similarly oppressed. There is a worldwide apartheid that expresses on a grand though less obvious scale the prejudices, the priorities and the restrictions of the diabolical model developed in Pretoria. A "White" minority controls the wealth, monopolizes the weapons and determines the crucial policies for a dark majority of the earth.

The article presents an interview with Gore Vidal, the first well-known American writer to talk freely about his same-sex orientation. In response to query about his first book "The City and the Pillar," Vidal said that it was the first book, at in the U.S., that made the point that perfectly normal boys fall in love and have sex with each other-a subject on which he was an expert, having spent three years in the Army, in the Pacific and aboard a ship. This was the great secret of the male lodge. In response to another query about any kind of a cultural community that comes out of the oppression, he said that there's ghettoization, and people in a ghetto will camp around in the same way. It's like the Jews. The best humor in the U.S. for a long time was during the days when the Jews were despised and they made jokes about themselves.

The article focuses on various political and social issues in the United States. "I'm walking a tightrope," Donna Shalala said with more relish than regret, plumping down on the nubby beige sectional sofa in her vast Health and Human Services office, just a slingshot away from the Capitol. The family medical leave bill rushed through Congress by the Democratic leadership to demonstrate the end of U.S. President George W. Bush's era gridlock is also an illustration of timidity. Candidate Bill Clinton promised not to touch Social Security because, as he explained candidly, he had been warned that it was a political third rail.

This article presents information related to U.S. politics. Andrew Kopkind writes that the author's presidential campaign in New Hampshire was "bizarre," that it "had no serious political strategy and proved ultimately pointless." Kopkind has simply failed to do the kind of job worthy of this periodical and its readers. Never once did he bother to interview the author or try to find out what the "point" was of the author's campaign. An election strategy is a plan, a program to organize a constituency, a scheme to amass support. The goal is to win elections or, failing that, to accumulate enough electoral power to influence an election, to impose an agenda, to remake a party or realign parties.