The American Enterprise articles from May 1997

The American Enterprise archives from May 1997

Days of confusion. (the sixties generation)
May 1, 1997... When I was in college in the late '70s I picked up something called The Commune Cookbook, written in 1969 by a quintessential hippie named Crescent Dragonwagon (honest). In addition to presenting lots of nutrition tips and some decent recipes,...

Indicators. (tax review)
May 1, 1997... REVIEWING YOUR TAXES With American workers having just passed through another tax season, this is an appropriate occasion to look at the big picture on taxes. The Tax Foundation reports that total tax collections reached a record $2.3...

How did the '50s ever beget the '60s?
May 1, 1997... A LIBERAL AND A CONSERVATIVE FIND PRECURSORS TO THE AGE OF AQUARIUS IN THE EISENHOWER ERA Nostalgia for the 1950s looms large in American politics, crossing partisan and philosophical lines. The Right yearns for the stability, order, and...

Two men who represent different generations and different branches of conservative thought find they have a lot in common. (Robert Bork and P.J. O'Rourke)(Interview)
May 1, 1997... If you'd asked P.J. O'Rourke in 1967 where he'd be three decades later, he probably wouldn't have guessed the truth: wearing a wedding ring and a gray suit, and chatting with a fierce right-wing hero. Once a hippie journalist, O'Rourke has in...

Scenes from the '60s: one radical's story.
May 1, 1997... David Horowitz, who grew up in New York City as the son of two lifelong Communists, was a founding member of the New Left. During the 1960s he was a prominent editor of Ramparts, the leading radical journal. In his memoir Radical Son, just...

Tourist at the revolution. (1960s)
May 1, 1997... I was a 19-year-old clerk working the midnight shift at a local printing company in Chicago when the Democratic National Convention came to town the famous summer of 1968. On my "lunch break," around three or four in the morning, I would drive...

Right in the '60s.
May 1, 1997... THE OTHER ACTIVISTS In 1961, a book called Revolt on the Campus was published by a young writer named M. Stanton Evans. Judging from the title, one might assume this was an early take on the left-wing counterculture that burst forth...

Missing the boat? Was the '60s disdain for bigness, centralization, & conformity healthy until it went awry?
May 1, 1997... Power to the Politics I recently stood, like a tourist at the zoo, gawking at a bunch of has-been, wispy-haired hippies chanting slogans. Some younger folks mingled in the crowd, mimicking the aging flower children. My daughter simply moaned,...

Peace? Or defeat? What did the Vietnam war protesters want?
May 1, 1997... It is difficult to explain to my children that in my teens and early twenties the most frequently heard voices of my peers were trying to destroy the foundations of American society, so that it might be rebuilt according to their own narcissistic...

A ruined life: why there is no place in our future for the culture of the 1960s.
May 1, 1997... Currently there is a phenomenon called "rave parties" that essentially try to bring back the 1960s counterculture in fashion, drug use, and attitudes. I can't understand this, myself. From observing the life of my older brother Charlie (not his...

What did you do in the '60s?
May 1, 1997... What did America's leaders of the '90s do in the 1960s? Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was a cheerleader at the University of Mississippi. Republican Rep. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, a likely Senate candidate in 1998, was a major league pitcher...

'60s kids grown big. (Pres Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich)
May 1, 1997... The baby boomers have had quite a run on the national. political stage. One of their number recently took the presidential oath of office for the second time - under ethical clouds that threaten to turn into a full-fledged storm. Meanwhile,...

The New Left takes over American unions.
May 1, 1997... Tom Hayden, an old friend, is wandering around the circle, looking for my house in the Hollywood hills. The street is blocked by a Los Angeles city sanitation truck - a union sticker slapped on its side - performing its appointed rounds. A young...

The '60s rules in public schools. (includes related article on '60s multiculturalism)
May 1, 1997... Celebration, Florida, as readers of earlier issues of this magazine know, is a town being developed near Orlando by the Wait Disney Company. Because it has been carefully conceived to be a livable and practical community, with vast resources and...

The '60s wave washes over 1990's universities.
May 1, 1997... Today's colleges are wildlife refuges for '60s values and people If the '60s were your idea of a good time, the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco was the Copacabana. That was where, baby, the good times rolled. A few...

Marijuana & mea culpas.
May 1, 1997... There is a certain shameful joy that wells up in critics of the 1960s when they see baby-boomer parents struggling with rebellious adolescents of their own. Were the consequences of this generational strife not so momentous, one could with good...

What hath the Beatles wrought? Rock-&-Roll and the collapse of authority.
May 1, 1997... I'm a lover of early rock-and-roll music. I played guitar in the 1950s, have a juke box in my home today, and still enjoy the good stuff. At the same time, I'm a strong critic of current hyperviolent, hateful, exceedingly sexualized and vulgar...

The 'Fragile American Girl' myth.
May 1, 1997... Did you know that the United States Congress now categorizes American girls as "a historical under-served population"? In a recent education statute, girls are classified with African Americans, native Americans, the physically handicapped, and...

One shot stopping. (women's fight against crime)
May 1, 1997... Police officers know that there are often two stories about any incident: the one that happened and the one the public reads about. Recently, a woman in my city displayed courage and intelligence in a deadly encounter with an assailant. By all...

Fire. (family traditions)
May 1, 1997... The floor joists in the house where I grew up were native walnut. In 1970, we tore down that house, and I spent the summer with a crowbar pulling nails and stacking lumber. My father used those beautiful walnut boards, along with lumber we...

Dopeheads: the FDA cracks down on parents.
May 1, 1997... Like a growing number of women entrepreneurs, Sunny Cloud saw a social problem and set out to solve it - but she isn't winning any kudos from the feds. It all started when Sunny Cloud, a single mother of two teenage boys, caught the oldest one...

America's Hongkong. (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands)
May 1, 1997... THREATENED BY UNION AND CLINTONITE COLONIALISM The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is a chain of 14 tiny islands directly north of Guam in the western Pacific. The island of Saipan is home to 90 percent of the commonwealth's...

Barry Goldwater: new leftist?
May 1, 1997... "When the histories are written," Barry Goldwater told his friend and speechwriter Karl Hess in 1968, "I'll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy."...

The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society.
May 1, 1997... It is never easy to know what to make of sociologist Amitai Etzioni. He is the well-published advocate of a philosophy called communitarianism. At times he appears to be a quasi-libertarian; at other times he sounds like a mild social...

The Divorce Culture.
May 1, 1997... The last prominent official to take a clear and principled stand on the dissolution of the American family was Dan Quayle, who in 1992 criticized producers of the "Murphy Brown" television show for rose-coloring illegitimacy. The press response...

No Law Against Mercy: Jailed for Sheltering a Child from the State.
May 1, 1997... Barbara Lyn Lapp and her sister Rachel fit no criminal profile. They were born in the 1960s to parents who had left Amish society because, in their view, it placed tradition before Biblical principle. There was no television in their Mennonite...

PBS: Behind the Screen.
May 1, 1997... Like many other viewers, I have enjoyed Upstairs, Downstairs and Milton Friedman's Free to Choose on public television. My toddler grandchildren have been transfixed by Big Bird and Barney. But should these and other less worthy PBS offerings -...

Essays (1841, 1844).
May 1, 1997... Bartlett's Familiar Quotations cites Ralph Waldo Emerson about as often as Franklin, Jefferson, and Lincoln combined. Prophet and cheerleader for nineteenth-century America, the Sage of Concord is now little read. Yet the two volumes of his...

'60s kids: the way there were.
May 1, 1997... The Sixties generation was never as radical as it was portrayed. About as many young people called themselves conservatives as liberals in the 1960s and early 1970s. Six percent described themselves as radical. A majority of those under 30 voted...