Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 3, 1994 TAG: 9406030078
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"It rarely matters much, American government today having reached new lows of self-interest at all levels, but the sport of the effort to gain or hold public office still gives us, thanks especially to television, spectacular reminders that the vanity of human aspiration is endless and depthless and that high office provides us, year in, year out, not the best and the brightest but the worst and the dumbest." - Sept. 10, 1993
"[E]ven Republicans are allowed to have a good time now and then." - Jan. 21, 1994
"... Virginia Democrats have represented little more than a tedious worship of the status quo in all things." - Jan. 21, 1994
"Ronald Reagan was too somnolent to see the future, George Bush too stubborn to admit its existence. And Bill Clinton, alas, shows no appetite for its crushing reality." - April 16, 1993
"[T]ime passes swiftly, as do political reputations, and the glory in which the American people appeared willing to wrap Bush, like a returning Caesar, evaporated as the economy worsened." - Jan. 24, 1992
"History is already showing - not a quarter of a century afterward, but now - that Reagan's fancies were both idiotic and dangerous to the economic and civic health of the nation." - Oct. 8, 1993
"[Virginia Gov. George Allen] promised more than Bill Clinton, and cannot deliver a tenth of it." - Jan. 21, 1994
"Expediency has been the fundamental element in the administration of Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder since the moment he took office last January." - Nov. 30, 1990
"[Oliver] North is a knave and a hustler, but being either has never been a barrier to the U.S. Senate." - Dec. 31, 1993
"I cannot imagine what is 'Christian' about opposing equal rights for women and gays nor about teaching children at home, and I fail to see why it is especially 'Christian' to pretend that the great evil in America today is government." - June 11, 1993
On latter-day Puritanism:
"Puritanism ... loves whatever it deems orthodox ... whether it is this year's or last's, even if it contradicts the orthodoxy of the year before. Nowhere is this better demonstrated, outside the theocracies of latter-day Islamic Puritanism, than in the American South."- Dec. 17. 1993
"It is the old dream of the Puritans once more: Warn the sinner and he will eschew sin. But it ignores an essential human trait: Sinners love their sins." - Jan. 31, 1989
"Do Puritans have sex?" - Aug. 3, 1990
On education:
"[W]e do not want to admit - what would be, after all, an admission that we are not equal in intellect or, for that matter, in manual skill - that 'education' is not something from which everyone can benefit." - Nov. 12, 1993
"Any education worth the name ought to end by encouraging men and women to test their ideas and convictions ... in the cockpit of public discussion." - March 30, 1990
"My regard for the Virginia Military Institute has always been modest but genuine. As a one-year alumnus I had nothing but contempt for its officious brutality and ceremonious military dramaturgy, but certain features of life there left me grateful." - March 30, 1990
"VMI's movers and shakers, star-spangled stuffed shirts by design and decree, have never shown much appreciation of a joke, especially if it's funny." - Dec. 24, 1993
On war and peace:
"Sometimes, as with Hitler, real demons exist. More often than not, however, they're demons of convenience, and the mischief they leave behind proves nearly impossible to overcome." - Sept. 17, 1993
"Waging war in the Persian Gulf to proclaim the high level of George Bush's testosterone is hardly worthy of a nation that proclaims itself loudly and often to be the principal keeper of world peace." - Feb. 15, 1991
"[T]he nation's determination to impose [democracy] on others is a piecemeal enterprise. ... Our democracy loudly condemns what is closest and most visible and turns a blind eye on equally heinous regimes in a troubled world." - May 1, 1992
"Replacing NATO with some other form of international coalition - a peacekeeping institution, say, or a vehicle for resolving disputes - would be the thing to do. But that does not mean it will be done. Even the most arcane governmental institutions have, as we know, lives of their own." - Jan. 14, 1994
On the sexes:
```Women's liberation' is not invariably a happy term, but it and the word 'feminism' convey truths that, though they often reflect poorly on how men treat women, we ignore at great damage to our common humanity." - May 18, 1990
"Patricia Ireland and her hordes of humorless feminists notwithstanding, most of the 100 million males who make up our declining civilization agree, I will suspect, that life offers few greater pleasures than a pretty blonde almost in the altogether." - Dec. 24, 1993
"Among the many things I suppose I will never understand is the male doctrine of pain: the proposition that giving and enduring pain are part of the rite of masculine passage, that hurting others and accepting hurt from others without flinching are signs of manhood, that to do so is not only a virtue but ennobling and uplifting." - June 1, 1990
On living in tiny Fincastle:
"My hunch and experience suggest that 'economic development,' whatever that is, creates more problems than it solves and that living in a backwater can be a pleasant and even life-saving anodyne to the chaos and madness to which elsewhere the United States - and, for that matter, the world - seems committed." - Oct. 29, 1993
"Things get worse faster, fixed more slowly and last a lot longer in cities than they do out here in the backwoods." - Sept. 29, 1989
On aging:
"One comes to value manners more than orthodoxy, wit more than power, regularity and dependability more than mere show. ... But of all the benefits of age, none is more valuable to me than solitude." - Jan. 27, 1989
The tart commentary of Paxton Davis, who died last week of heart disease, was a fixture on Friday's Commentary page. Here is a sampling from columns of recent years.
by CNB