History, it’s said, is written by the winners; but perhaps it’s truer to say it belongs to the least reticent. Dean Rusk, on becoming Secretary of State, vowed never to write his memoirs.
On West Germany’s ”Day of National Unity” this summer, a dapper, white-haired, German-born American stood in the Bundestag, facing the President, Prime Minister and other high officials of the West German Government, and spoke about German history.
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Three hours out of New York, I start awake to find myself floating over a grotesque landscape – the sickly, reddish-brown hills of Haiti, wave upon wave of blood-dark corrugations, thickly marbled with white sand.
“I don’t recognize myself as a satirist,” said Vladimir Voinovich. ”No, I’m just trying to depict reality.”
This is the first draft of Mark Danner’s first feature article about Haiti, written in 1987 for The New York Times Magazine.
It is likely the question was first asked as soon as it could be – that the hope of abolition followed shortly after the task of creation.
Wolfgang Leonhard would seem well qualified to deliver what he promises here — a ”new policy toward [the] USSR.”
In Haiti, as in many deeply troubled places, it was comforting to identify the national demons with one man, and to assume that his destruction would bring theirs.
An American’s distrust of welfare should come as no surprise. Public assistance threatens what is after all the central doctrine of capitalism: that the incentive to work is born of the burning desire to have, and then to have more.
The public schools of America long ago sank to a level of decrepitude guaranteeing them the sort of dogged scrutiny by blue ribbon commissions reserved for a “crisis” both intolerable and permanent.
The immortal power of gossip was already well understood in ancient Greece – “lt too,” said Hesiod, “is a kind of divinity” – but it required the particular talents of the present age to make money off it.
Last year Americans spent $30 billion on illegal drugs, while their government spent $1.5 billion trying to shut down their sources of supply.
When a mysterious contagion known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome began to kill large numbers of people a few years ago, various moral authorities took solace in the observation that its victims, most of whom were homosexuals or drug addicts, seemed well chosen for divine retribution.