Liberals rejoice! There are gaping fissures within conservative ranks on the topic of the Promise Keepers.
If there were doubts, they are dispelled in the Nov. 10 issue of National Review, the increasingly snoozy bastion of right-leaning thought. It comes via droll Florence King’s critique of both the group and her fellow conservative columnists.
What irks her is the conservative belief that the Promise Keepers, who just lured at least 700,000 to the Mall in Washington, signal a victory for family values.
“When will we learn that religion does not a conservative make, nor atheism a liberal. Like all people driven by emotion, (Promise Keepers) could be swung like a lariat; the Right is in trouble if we think that 700,000 weeping men is good news in an era that is already close to rule by hysteria. Whatever happened to our traditional distrust of the mob?”
She also rejects the suggestion by some conservative pundits that the Promise Keepers represent a “fatal blow to radical feminism.
“After three decades of male bashing,” King wonders, “what is there to gloat about in the spectacle of 700,000 men curdling with guilt and begging for forgiveness? It sounds like successful brainwashing to me,” she writes.
Quickly: Oct. 31 Entertainment Weekly’s annual most powerful folks in entertainment is rife with usual suspects and top-heavy with corporate executives. The top 10 of its 101 big shots are Steven Spielberg, Time Warner’s Gerald Levin and Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Disney’s Michael Eisner, Oprah Winfrey, George Lucas, Seagram Co.’s Edgar Bronfman Jr., NBC executives Bob Wright, Don Ohlmeyer and Warren Littlefield, Jerry Seinfeld and Viacom boss Sumner Redstone. In case you wondered, No. 101 is a 25-year-old named Harry Knowles, who runs a gossip-filled web site at www.aint-it-cool-news.com but has apparently not figured out yet how to make money off it. Why this symbolizes clout remains a bit hazy. . . .
November Harper’s Magazine is definitely worth checking out for nine short, and good if not scintillating, stories by Anton Chekhov not previously translated into English. There is also an homage to author Don DeLillo, a look at the super-secret federal panel that rules on whether intelligence agencies can wiretap or search homes of suspected spies, a listing of salutations in letters to Chicago’s Nelson Algren from French writer Simon de Beauvoir (“My precious beloved Chicago Man,” “Dearest sitting and brooding local beast,” among others), and a quickie reminder of the corporate influence in higher education via names of endowed professorships (Northwestern’s Dow Chemical Co. Research Professor of Chemistry, and Texas’ La Quinta Motor Inns Centennial Professor of Business). . . .
Less is more seems to be the mantra as November House Beautiful polls 101 designers on their tips for the rest of us, as well as suggestions such as don’t get stuff for the house while you’re on vacation. . . . Nov. 10 New Republic has a cerebral skewering of the afore-praised Don DeLillo, by critic James Wood who opens by decreeing that DeLillo’s new lavishly praised opus, “Underworld,” is “at once distractingly centrifugal and dogmatically centripetal: its many characters dissolve an intensity that the novel insists on repeating and repeating.” Got it? . . .
The mix of genius, risk and mean-spiritedness marking the amazing life of Frank Sinatra is well captured by John Lahr in a terrific profile in Nov. 3 New Yorker which includes lots of unprintable (in a family newspaper) anecdotes about his dear old mother, who didn’t particularly like much of the family. “She always said to me and Nancy, `When I’m dead, everything goes to Frankie. You girls get nothing,’ ” recalls Frank’s daughter Tina. “She was a difficult woman.” But such tales are useful for Lahr since, “From the start, Sinatra embraced and bullied the world as his mother had embraced and bullied him.”
