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Harper's |
July 1985
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Almost since its beginning, the nuclear age has defined itself as a tug
of war between technicians and diplomats, a match in which the
diplomats seem forever doomed to finish in the mud.
Tags: Harper's Forums | arms control
Harper's |
June 1985
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Eighty years ago this summer the birth of a new era was announced not
by a star twinkling over Bethlehem but by a mushroom cloud rising over
Alamogordo. By miraculous intellectual effort mankind had acquired the
power to destroy the earth.
Tags: Harper's Forums | arms control
Harper's |
May 1985
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Crime long ago emerged as one of those peculiar
phenomena of modern life - the permanent crisis.
Tags: american politics | Crime | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
April 1985
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
In the ten years since the last Marine was
plucked from the roof of the besieged U. S. Embassy in Saigon, "Vietnam"
has come to stand for a good deal more than America's first military defeat.
Tags: Vietnam | Foreign Affairs | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
March 1985
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Disparaging television has long been a favorite national pastime - second in popularity only to watching it.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Television | Media
Harper's |
February 1985
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
In the American religion there stands no icon more sacred than the "free market," embodying as it does the belief that Americans must trust in the benevolence of unseen forces to fulfill their destiny of wealth and power. In times of economic unrest, however, when factories close down, workers lose their jobs, and towns
become impoverished, the prayers to the mysterious market gods give way to cries of anger and disbelief.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Economics
Harper's |
January 1985
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When General Westmoreland hauled CBS into
court for libel last year, the American press responded with a flood of
sober commentary on a cherished subject - itself.
Tags: Journalism | Media | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
December 1984
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When in 1947 the UN handed down the Solomonic
judgment that to resolve the "Palestine problem" the Holy Land
would be divided into two nations bound together in "economic union,"
the laughter on Sinai must have been loud indeed.
Tags: middle east | foreign policy | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
November 1984
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When no less sacred a national symbol than
Miss America found herself displayed in a pornographic magazine last summer,
the public was duly outraged - at the pornographers, for profiting from
a young woman's inexperience; at the pageant committee, for demanding
she relinquish her crown; and finally at Miss America herself, for not
knowing better.
Tags: american politics | Pornography | Media
Harper's |
October 1984
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When Yasir Arafat spoke at the United Nations some years ago with a gun
in his belt, he was giving a performance in what has become the
terrorist theater.
Tags: Terrorism | Media | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
September 1984
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Almost from the moment the first "contra"
was issued his American, made combat boots, the Reagan Administration's
secret war against Nicaragua has been embroiled in a vociferous if somewhat
bizarre public debate: Congressmen proclaim their outrage, editorialists
confess their misgivings, while officials in Washington - who are running
the war - blandly "decline to comment on intelligence matters."
Tags: secret wars | foreign policy | Latin America | CIA | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
August 1984
| INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Thus
Walt Whitman, in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, expressed what
has been the American poet's struggle from the beginning-to wrest from the land a separate work of art.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Landscape | Poetry
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