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Other languages #26
The American stronger sex - men are tough on the outside, but rotten inside . A columnist for an Anglo-American magazine, who moved to America 30 years ago as a child, now not an old man at all, wrote an article on the topic “about times, about morals.” In his opinion, the character of American men by the end of the twentieth century had changed in an unpleasant and paradoxical way: they wash their hair with increasingly mild shampoos, anoint their bodies with deodorants and other men's cosmetics, and have a special weakness for high technologies that provide coolness in summer and pleasant warmth in winter. , - and at the same time trying their best to look cool, strong and tough macho. And their sons are there too.
Quotes: Once I was invited to a boat trip, in which my companions were ten-year-old schoolchildren with their dads. I took anti-seasickness pills with me... Soon the fathers slowly crept up to me one by one, one after another. “Uh, excuse me, do you still have these pills in stock?” - they asked. Neither could allow boys or other fathers to see him at the same time: they would still think that this man was not cool enough.
"Die, fish, die!" - a ten-year-old boy yelled when he couldn’t immediately catch a perch. "We pierced her eye!" - another excitedly boasted. The fathers looked at all this with approval: yes, the boys were turning into men right before their eyes!
Order a full translation of an article?Nixon On the Couch (Analyzing Nixon) Charles Krauthammer (Charles Krauthammer) Washington Post
Nixon did not like Jews - this is common knowledge. The author of the article is a Jew, and in addition, a psychiatrist by profession. He is convinced that we should not have any illusions about public figures like Nixon, drawing far-reaching conclusions from the words they say. In order to isolate his innermost thoughts from the speech of this or that person, you need to make this speech the subject of special analysis - and even then you will not immediately understand what is in the person’s soul. That’s why people go to psychoanalysts for ten years. What Nixon or Reagan say in their hearts is their personal problems, which should be dealt with by a psychoanalyst or at least a psychiatrist. But it’s better to look at what they do as persons vested with supreme power.
Quote: What did Nixon do when he found himself face to face with the Jews? For example, in 1973 he provided decisive and life-saving support to the State of Israel during the Yom Kippur War . He even put the United States military on alert to prevent the Russians from interfering in the conflict by siding with Egypt.
Order a full translation of an article?The Next Intellectuals (Intellectuals. Generation next) Judith Shulevitz (Judith Shulevitz) Slate
A year ago, Florida Atlantic University opened a new specialty - "public intellectual." It may seem that this is entertainment for those who don’t want to spend the winter in northern latitudes and want to go to sunny Florida - sunbathe, swim in the ocean, and at the same time learn a completely meaningless profession. However, progressive humanity, the author of the article believes, has been waiting for this event, perhaps since the time of Plato: it has always needed active thinkers capable of popularizing ideas and bringing them to the public. In essence, this is a course for politicians and public figures who could defend humanitarian values. Something like the Faculty of Public Administration, only the students will not be heavyweight political candidates, but, on the contrary, leftist intellectuals armed with the skills to fight for survival.
Quote: The university will produce a kind of “organic intellectuals.” This is what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called any person who is in one way or another involved in intellectual activity, be it a professional philosopher, an artist, or simply, say, a connoisseur of painting. Gramsci believed that every “organic intellectual” inevitably has his own unique worldview and system of moral values. And the task of an intellectual is to articulate his thoughts and ideas.
Order a full translation of an article?Ignorant, but full of self-esteem Mark Goldblatt New York Post
There is a lost generation growing up in America . And most importantly, it does not suspect it. College students confidently claim that AIDS was invented by the CIA, not knowing how these acronyms stand for. Or they argue that organized religion is an inadequate institution, having no idea what the first book of the Bible is called . The author of the article, an experienced teacher, has discovered two problems among school graduates in recent years: they do not know as much as they should know at their age, but at the same time they are confident that they know almost everything, or at least much more than they need.
Quote: Every year I ask new college students who owns the words: “Religion is the opium of the people.” In 10 years, only five people immediately said that the author was Karl Marx . This semester, as usual, I asked my question and also gave a hint: the author was German. The black student raised her head: “Was that Martin Luther ?” The class exploded with laughter. This confused me. After all, the guess was not without meaning: Luther was a German who undoubtedly wrote about religion. One student touched her shoulder: “Don’t you know that Luther was your brother?” Only then did the meaning of their laughter dawn on me: the whole class was convinced that she meant Martin Luther King . That is, the students not only had not heard the quote, perhaps the most popular of the last two centuries, not only had no idea about the leader of the Protestant Reformation, but they also felt confident enough to laugh at a more educated person who expressed a guess much closer to the truth than they could imagine.
PS However, this is not surprising: now ignorance in the United States is enforced as good manners . To some extent, Bush's election campaign was built on this: a “simple guy” defeated an intellectual opponent burdened with “extra” knowledge. And now, by the way, many complex issues will be resolved: about AIDS, and about religious institutions, and about defense policy, and about various other, no less interesting things.
Order a full translation of an article?Table Talk Leonard Michaels The Threepenny Review
People are less likely to watch movies again than they are to re-read their favorite books. Remakes of black and white films are usually worse than the originals. The most idiotic black and white films look profound. There is something optimistic and subtly trivial about the bright colors of modern cinema. Therefore, the most serious color film inevitably turns into a comedy. The author of the essay - a writer - takes a professional, figurative, artistic and biased look at cinema and other arts: the aphoristically scattered observations are quite curious, controversial and dialogue-oriented, as if in anticipation of a response from the reader (hence the title).
Quote: Actors die. Madame Bovary never dies. Her appearance doesn't matter - she has a soul. But for actors, appearance is most important, and they die, and when they are dead, they are more dead than other people. Although their appearance remains with us, they were, in a sense, never present here. Anyone who is truly present here will never become an actor. For example, a film was shot in Hawaii about the local fishing industry. They found one fisherman, brought him to a rock and asked him to cast his nets. He stood silently, looking at the ocean. The film crew was losing patience, they were rushing him to quickly cast the net. He said: “But there are no fish now.”
Order a full translation of an article?The end of grand narrative Godfrey Hodgson Prospect
Look out the window - there is an information boom in the yard. Everyone has a computer, or even one with Internet access; any distance is no longer a problem for those who want to travel; new technologies are born every day. It seemed like a golden age for the news industry. However, all sorts of CBC, NBC and ABC are rapidly losing their audience. The Western public is becoming less and less interested in news channels and programs. This is especially true for international news and big politics. Perhaps it’s just that there haven’t been world wars or other global upheavals for a long time, when the average person was intensely following the vicissitudes of diplomatic negotiations. In addition, almost all empires fell - colonial and others (for example, the USSR or Germany); The Cold War ended. People have relaxed, big politics and the accompanying “big narrative” have become a special matter that ordinary citizens do not want to devote time to. They got completely greedy there, apparently...
Quotes: The director of CNN recently shared with me the problem that the company is making more and more programs about health and lifestyle and devoting less time to actual news.
When people say: “There is a war in Europe,” meaning NATO bombings in Bosnia or Kosovo, it is “war” in a completely different sense from the war in Europe of 1914-18 or 1939-45.
The end of the grand narrative means the death not of news in general, but of a certain kind of news dedicated to high politics - domestic and international... Most people do not pay attention to what happens in parliament, except on some special occasions. This does not mean that they have lost interest in public affairs. For example, they are more concerned about dangerous diseases, global warming, etc. than ever before.
Order a full translation of an article?Are you a Learjet Liberal? Take a Simple Test (Who are you, a Boeing liberal?) Jonathan Rauch National Journal
The struggle for power forces people to part with the most precious thing - a lot of money. A columnist for the American National Journal did a strange thing: he calculated how much money was spent by people promoting themselves to the position of senators in different states. A whole social phenomenon has emerged. For example, a person with an income of a maximum of 400 million dollars a year did not regret spending $60 million on a self-promotional campaign. In addition, it turned out that Democrats prefer to spend personal money on elections (rather than party or, say, state money), although Republicans are traditionally considered the party of the rich. Rauch offers several explanations for this trend: First, the high-tech boom under Clinton made many Democrats rich overnight. In addition, Republicans are embarrassed to demonstrate their personal wealth when moving into power structures. The Democrats are not ashamed: they are justified by the fact that they belong to the liberal party and, by going to defend democratic values in the Senate, they are “betraying” their class. They can shake millions with a calm soul - no one will think anything bad about them.
Quote: Let us divide the candidates who finance themselves with huge sums of money into two groups. In the first, we will include those who spend from 1 to 4 million dollars running for the Senate or the White House. Let's call them "limousines". The second will include those who spend more than 4 million dollars. Let's call them “Boeings”. Boeings fly in truly rarefied air: in six elections between 1990 and 2000, I counted 64 Limousines and 20 Boeings. Among Democrats, the number of “Boeings” is constantly growing. In 1992, a third of Boeings were Democrats, in 1994 and 1996 - half, in 1998 - two-thirds, and in 2000 - all Boeings turned out to be Democrats.
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