Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.natrev From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 13:09:31 EST Message-ID: BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS Will Power WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative De- mocracy, by George F. Will (Free Press, 260 pp., $19.95) GEORGE WILL ends his new book by quoting from the letter dispatched to Sara Ballou on July 14, 1861, by her husband: ''Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Om- nipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the bat- tle field.'' Major Ballou, who one week later died at Bull Run, makes plain earlier in his letter that his devotion to his ''country'' was also a devotion to ''the Government.'' ''I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us . . . And I am willing -- perfectly willing -- to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.'' It is George Will's point that a country to be loved must also sustain lovely institutions, and that our own government has, by the public reck- oning, become emphatically unlovely. This is true for all the reasons that correctly animate anti-statist sentiment, reasons well understood by the Framers. They endeavored to protect the citizenry against omnipotent government by giving us a Bill of Rights, a separation of powers, and enu- merated duties of government. But with the growth of government power and the advent of the rhetorical Presidency things began to get out of hand, and today a measure of the institutional imbalance is the deifica- tion of the office of the President (why?), and a corresponding diminution in respect for Congress (for this, the reasons are plain). What torments the American people is that their respect for Congress diminishes even as, year after year, they return to the voting booths and send back to office the same people who have engendered this disrespect. ''Dignity is in the eye of the beholder, and few who behold Congress today consider it digni- fied. To some extent, Americans are judging Congress severely to avoid judging themselves at all. It may be that the nation today is faithfully portrayed in Congress the way Dorian Gray was portrayed in his portrait.'' We are all familiar with recorded examples of legislative corruption, but George Will has lined up a few mephitic samples that linger in the nos- trils of disgust. He introduces you first to the idea of bureaucratic explo- sion: ''When Lincoln founded it, the Department of Agriculture had one employee for every 227,000 farms. In 1900, it had one employee for every 1,694 farms. Today, it has one employee for every 16 farms.'' We are given examples of the frame of mind of the modern legislator. Representative Patricia Schroeder wants the Federal Government to pay for Midnight Basketball for the urban dispossessed. How so? ''She is just doing what people do in Congress and in other legislatures. They get up in the morn- ing, shower, shave or apply their make-up, commute to work, pop open their briefcases, pour a cup of coffee and start spending other people's money.'' Thus we have appropriations bills funding a study of the han- dling of manure ($37,000); a Stuttgart, Arkansas, fish farm ($542,000); a recycling facility in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania ($1 million); Houston's ''Better-Bus'' system ($15 million); a study of Afognak Island in Arkansas ($250,000); ''and thousands of other projects.'' Now even if every representative and senator were to serve only a single term there would be pork, but it is difficult to suppose it would extend to such lengths as are now accepted as routine. Senator Byrd of West Vir- ginia promised his constituents that he would import over a billion federal dollars into his state. As chairman of the Appropriations Committee he managed to do this in no time at all, by among other things the simple expedient of moving fifty-thousand-odd families resident in Virginia, Washington, and Maryland -- to West Virginia: this involved, among other things, moving almost the entire Central Intelligence Agency. Now one engages in such activity in order to please constituents who are expected to return you to office. This is the modern imperative in Con- gress, because for incumbent legislators, defeat ''means not just oblivion, but annihilation.'' There are several means of effecting re-election. The most spectacularly crooked is the gerrymander, and George Will gives us five wonderful pages which, without the captions, would strike the reader as Rorschach tests conducted in an asylum. In order to generate the nec- essary support for such districts it becomes necessary to lay out other dis- tricts that will elect minority-group representatives, but of course this is a disincentive to a truly integrated society, and we cannot hope to pull this off indefinitely, because ''in such a society, not even the cleverest computer program could gather blacks (or Hispanics, or any other group) into a district where they are a majority. Imagine . . . creating a district for twenty-year-olds, and you'll begin to understand the problem.'' Pork, the gerrymandered district, and of course the extravagant use of the congressional frank: ''The $10.5 million spent by members just in the last three weeks of 1991 equaled all the money raised in 1991 by all non- incumbent candidates for House seats.'' And, in 1990, 96.5 per cent of in- cumbents who sought re-election were re-elected; 178 congressmen had served for 12 years or more. One hundred years ago, the corresponding fig- ure was 23. We have come a long way from Article VIII of the Declaration of Rights in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which declared that citizens have a right to expect ''public officers to return to private life'' ''in order to prevent those, who are vested with authority, from becoming op- pressors.'' A long way from George Washington, who voluntarily stepped down from the Presidency after two terms, and Thomas Jefferson who left after his second term and never again laid eyes on Washington. IT IS Will's position not that all will go well if we have term limitation (he favors a maximum of two terms for a senator, six for a congressman), but that things will go much better because the frame of mind of the leg- islators will be more conducive to deliberation, which tends to diminish as careerism increases. ''Enacting term limits is an exercise of popular sover- eignty in order to make a small excision from the sweep of popular sover- eignty. It is a decision by the majority to limit, a little bit, pure majority rule.'' And then, ''if term limits are un-American because they limit popu- lar sovereignty, then so, too, is the First Amendment un-American.'' Rep- resentative Dennis Eckart, who decided last year not to run again for re- election, counted 45 trips during one year to his constituency in northeast- ern Ohio, for the purpose not of discussing public issues with his constit- uents, but of ensuring his re-election by being a fixture at picnics and din- ners and fair-openings. Representative Charles Vanik listed nine concerns that take precedence over a congressman's deliberation: ''The deliberative time is such time as is required to see how someone else voted,'' he says. But if there is to be deliberation, what is its purpose? Will here walks with great care (in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft he was less cautious). But he does so surefootedly, addressing a thesis central to his political philosophy, as much so as self-evidently it was to Major Ballou when he wrote to his incipient widow. The Framers cannot reason- ably be thought to have promulgated a Constitution devoid of values. Har- vey Mansfield ''correctly says that the Constitution has an explanatory power.'' For one thing we know from the Federalist Papers that it was the purpose of the three most articulate men who ever joined together to en- dorse a modus operandi for government to promote virtue, for the reason that in the absence of a virtuous citizenry, self-government fails. Four score seven years after the Founders gave us the Declaration of Independ- ence, Abraham Lincoln was wondering out loud ''whether'' government of, by, and for the people would endure; and he would tell his young secretary John Hay on the day after the Gettysburg Address that his intentions were not rhetorical but simply inquisitive. If self-government worked, it must be because the people who elect representatives will do so to further the commonweal. For a long time it became accepted, even among many conservatives, that the sum total of the citizen's votes for his own self-in- terest transmuted into a beneficent General Will. It is not so, and if you doubt this, look around you. The Framers were not plebiscitarians, far from it. ''When occasions pre- sent themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations,'' the Federalist tell us, ''it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to with- stand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.'' Yes, the Founders were aware that a multiplicity of interests, like the separation of powers, was a guard against hegemonic power by a single faction; but it was never postulated that exclusive self-concern would by democratic alchemy create a just and a free society. ''The Founders -- and Madison was the subtlest of them -- had more complicated aims than the mere avoidance of oppression. They also wanted a government with an 'aptitude and tendency' to behave more responsibly,'' is how George Will puts it. Now: Since the Constitution does not instruct Congress on how to use its power, it has got to depend on Congress to be amenable to reforms whose time has manifestly come. If it is demonstrable that our government is not working, then something needs to be done about it. And it is exactly at that point that we have arrived: our government is not working. And Americans are widely and gravely disillusioned with their failed government. Americans want to assume that their children can walk down safe streets to efficient schools. They can not assume that. A second reason govern- ment now seems impotent is its fiscal condition. Without entering the hot debate about the assignment of blame, the indisputable fact is that the government is out of money. Which is to say, it is ''out of money'' in the Washington way: Its supply of money is limited by its willingness and ability to borrow. A third reason for the government's perceived paralysis is intellectual. Many of America's most serious problems, such as the soar- ing cost and maldistribution of health care and the social regression of the urban underclass, are intractable simply because we do not understand them and do not know what to do next. It is this disillusion with government that has created a chiliastic faith in the Presidency. Not ever, really, in the President: because no President can hope to be successful enough to satisfy the faith increasingly invested in him. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, and going on to richer and gaudier rhetorical effervescences, through Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the voters were encouraged to think delirious thoughts, and to think of the President as the entity ''in power.'' With the anthropomor- phization of the Presidency, made possible by radio and television, came a redistribution of political power. The idea that the government's author- ity should be limited to enumerated functions pretty well disappeared after Eisenhower. (Nobody, in my hearing -- outside the offices of NA- TIONAL REVIEW -- has asked: ''What business is it of Congress to ex- pedite the care of children while their mothers go off to work?'') What hap- pened was the accumulation of rhetorical reach in the Presidency, and ef- fective power in the courts. This last development suited the intellectual elite. For one thing, it gave us a methodology that seemed to accommodate epistemological misgivings about the notion that when people vote only their self-interests, the land will brighten. George Will quotes Professor Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School, who in her book on the Impoverishment of Political Discourse makes the point that as the nation becomes more and more litigious (70 per cent of the world's lawyers are American, as Vice President Quayle reminded us), we look to extremist advocacy as a means of midwifing truths. ''Courtroom law talk,'' Professor Glendon notes, ''proceeds from a premise inimical to civil discourse: that two theses pushed to extremes will enable a third party to determine the truth.'' And the institutions before which such uncivil discourse is trans- acted are of course the courts. The increase in their power, says Professor Glendon, ''reinforces the vanity of that class. Their common attitude that the educated are better equipped to govern than the masses finds its in- stitutional expression in a disdain for ordinary politics and the legislative process and a preference for extending the authority of the courts, the branch of government to which they have the easiest access.'' Term limitation is a ''surgical'' strike, designed to reorient the people we send to Congress; so that, as was for many generations the case, they will yield to a disposition to deliberate, in the knowledge that they will in due, finite time, return to their principal career; and that in the meantime, they can accept the burdens of stewardship, which include denying popu- lar impulses. It is a movement, term limitation, that needs to be encour- aged at three levels. At the level of state legislators, whose terms have now been limited in several states; by action aimed at congressmen and senators, even though there is the possibility that such action will be struck down by Congress, sustained by the Court; and finally by pressure for a constitutional amendment. Mr. Will reminds those who are discour- aged by the length of the process that the typical constitutional amend- ment is ratified in one year and eight months. RESTORATION is singular in several respects. George Will presents it not merely as an act of civiccelebration, but as an opening gun in a cam- paign he intends to engage in a outrance. (I contrast my own little book, Gratitude, in which I made the case for one year's voluntary service for every young American without, however, any intention of rounding up light brigades to charge up the steep legislative hills of apathy and resistance to storm the enemy: I intended, I have to admit, nothing much more than a civic tone poem.) I predict that on behalf of this cause he will, having served as its primary strategist, undertake to advance it as a foot soldier. He has the special qualities necessary to engage sensitive public opin- ion. A few things need to be said about George Will, and the first of these is that he is the most under-celebrated benefactor of the conservative movement in my lifetime. He is for one thing a surpassingly brilliant po- lemicist, and the sheer artistry of his work should command attention and respect from everyone in general agreement with the lay of his mind; and should do so even among those who deplore the uses to which he puts his talents. No one writing regularly was sharper than he on the Communist question, beginning (I proudly recall) when he took on the job of Wash- ington editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, from which post he was drawn to become very quickly the most prominent columnist in America, picking up along the way a full page every fortnight in Newsweek, and the chair of Distinguished Conservative Thought on the David Brinkley Sunday program. He has never practiced, with any consistency, the art of ingratiation, and that has cost him the support of many conservatives, who punish him or seek to do so by displaying an extraordinary insensibility to the relent- less firepower that he discharges week after week in pursuit of conserva- tive analysis and goals. He offended several well-connected conservative figures by expressing an early and articulate dislike for Spiro Agnew, as though he had looked Agnew in the eyes and seen there a crooked man. There are still those who believe that Will was anti-Agnew for capricious reasons, and that it was sheer luck that Agnew turned out to be a crook. And then there is a little of the bully in George. His disdain for President Bush borders on the pathological (in this book, Bush is a ''stammering ci- pher''). One has the feeling, every now and again, that at a certain point, with respect to certain people, bloodlust takes over. And then he is thought by some to edge over across the threshold of balance, toward ser- vility in matters that pertain to Israel. Once or twice every year he cites the need for higher taxation without paying serious attention to the exten- sive literature of the supply-siders, who say why there is a need to qualify any endorsement of higher taxation if revenue-raising is its only motive. He has named the Constitution of Liberty by Hayek as the most impor- tant book extant on political economy, without however coming to terms with Hayek's denunciation of the progressive feature of the income tax as the weakest reed in self-government, perhaps even fatal to it. And of course there are conservatives who are suspicious of his enthusi- asm for government as an instrument for the stimulation of decent in- stincts. He is well aware of this and of the reasons for it. Many Americans reflexively flinch from the idea of government nurturing virtue . . . Americans have a bluff, common-sense belief that a government that has a hard enough time delivering the mail and patching potholes cannot be expected to bring off anything as subtle and complex as moral improvement. Besides, even if government could do it, government should not do it, because soulcraft is incompatible with freedom. All very well, but Will holds, along with classical liberalism, that man is a political animal and that the atomistic individualism of ''scorched-earth'' conservatives simply does not work, and that in the meantime there is, manifestly, work to be done by participation ''in the governance of a polity that nurtures what it presupposes, a modicum of public virtue. This virtue is a tendency to prefer the public good to personal interests; it is readiness to define the public good as more than an aggregation of private inter- ests.'' If that isn't hard and resonant conservative thought, count me out as a dues-paying member of the fraternity. George Will especially annoys some conservatives by his total indiffer- ence to the regard in which they hold him. This is, depending on how you view it, a splendid example of above-the-crowd individualism, or else it is, paradoxically, an example of the kind of self-isolationism George Will de- plores in conservative libertarians. But notwithstanding that he does not solicit it, I proffer here a salute to a consummate stylist and a profoundly informed doctor of civil order. ***************************************************************** Dangerous Curves PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS Changing Fortunes: The Shaping of the International Monetary Order, by Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten (Random House, 352 pp., $25) Mr. Roberts, who was assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic pol- icy in 1981-82, currently holds the William E. Simon chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. IN Changing Fortunes, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten of the Japanese Ministry of Finance tell a fascinating story about how policy-makers are always behind the curve. It is not sur- prising that markets know more than people who spend their lives inter- vening in them and trying to fine-tune them, but it is surprising to hear two prominent policy-makers admit that they spent their public lives con- stantly surprised by developments and by the consequences of their actions. Those who believe in government will take little comfort from this book, which grew out of a series of informal lectures at Princeton in 1991. We probably owe the revelations here to the informality of the lectures: in public speaking, it helps a prominent person to be self-deprecating. If Changing Fortunes had been conceived as a book, it probably would have struck the authors as too revealing of the foibles of policy-making. Few want to admit they spent their lives doing things that did not succeed. Volcker recalls that he began his professional career behind the curve. As a young employee of Chase Manhattan Bank, he was summoned early in 1958 to the office of George Champion, the bank's president. Champion, obviously ahead of the curve, was worried that the U.S. was becoming less competitive and that it could affect the dollar. This was the heyday of the ''dollar shortage,'' and economists assumed that the U.S. would forever maintain a strong trade position. Volcker reports that he gave Champion a dose of this conventional wisdom -- and within a few months of his an- swer our balance of payments turned adverse and we lost gold reserves. Volcker says he learned the lesson that ''practical men dealing in markets sometimes are far quicker to sense a change in trend than economists im- mersed in past data.'' Volcker re-learned this lesson many times throughout his public career as a policy-maker. As a deputy undersecretary of the Treasury, he watched the Interest Equalization Tax create the Eurodollar market, which certainly was not the intention. Toyoo Gyohten, from his perspec- tive, reports that the tax helped to bring down the Bretton Woods fixed- exchange-rate system by causing the rapid expansion of Eurodollars and the volatile movement of capital. The Bretton Woods system broke down on Volcker's watch as undersec- retary of the Treasury. The first part of the book is about the confused efforts first to maintain parity, then to negotiate dollar devaluation, and finally to suspend the convertibility of dollars for gold. At the time it was all seen as a huge crisis, but in the end it came to nothing. Volcker reports that ''the world didn't come apart'' with floating exchange rates: ''Neither the world economy nor its trading system seemed so sensitive to monetary disturbances as had been feared by those of us raised in the Bretton Woods system and dedicated to protect it.'' Nevertheless, Volcker misses Bretton Woods as a symbol of international economic cooperation. Volcker and Gyohten have remained behind one particular policy curve all their lives: they have always expected currency depreciation or appre- ciation to cure trade deficits or surpluses. Yet not the exchange-rate rea- lignments of the last days of Bretton Woods, nor the Carter Administra- tion's dollar-bashing policy, nor the dollar depreciation of the Plaza Accord in 1985 has cured the U.S. trade deficit. And the continual appreciation of the Japanese yen over a couple of decades has failed to deprive that country of its trade surplus. Indeed, Japan long resisted the appreciation of the yen, because the country's policymakers believed a strong currency would deprive Japan of its strong trade position, which it had laboriously worked to achieve. Gyohten reports that it was only in 1988 that Japan realized that a strong currency was a greater benefit than a disadvantage. It meant lower en- ergy costs, lower import prices, more consumer satisfaction, better invest- ment opportunities abroad, and a stronger incentive for businesses to con- trol costs. The U.S. Treasury has yet to learn this lesson. The latter part of the book deals with the disinflation and strong-dollar ''crisis'' of the Reagan years. Here Volcker, echoed by Gyohten, is much less gracious, and he shows a surprising lack of understanding of the events surrounding him while he was chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker never explains why inflation collapsed despite ''loose fiscal policy,'' inflationary budget deficits, and over-consumption. His Keynesian misin- terpretation of Reaganomics leaves the disinflation of the 1980s a mys- tery. Perhaps it was a surprise that he still hasn't figured out. He cer- tainly does not understand the contribution made by Treasury Undersec- retary Beryl Sprinkel, who insisted that the Fed not intervene in currency markets to prevent the dollar's rise. Volcker seems to think that ''true-blue Reaganauts,'' who lacked the in- sider pedigree of ''old Washington hands,'' wanted a strong dollar as a sign of pride after a decade of a sinking exchange rate. Still miffed, he devotes several pages to lecturing Sprinkel on the Fed's authority to intervene. He is also annoyed by ''insensitivity'' toward foreign concern over the dollar's rise. French President Mitterrand, for example, wanted support for the franc to protect his socialist policies, but this was impossible because of the Treasury's hands-off policy toward the dollar. Volcker does not appreciate that Don Regan's Treasury, by opposing currency intervention, was supporting disinflation and making Volcker a hero. To hold down the dollar, Volcker would have had to flood currency markets with dollars. This would have been inflationary unless he steril- ized the intervention by mopping up dollars at home. But, of course, if he sterilized the operation, it would have had no impact on the exchange rate. Sprinkel did not trust the Fed to hold the line on disinflation and did not want to open a door for the Fed to pump out dollars. Perhaps if Volcker had talked to Sprinkel as much as he did to foreign policy-makers, he would have gained an understanding of the Reagan Administration's policy. The most astonishing feature of Changing Fortunes is that neither au- thor connects tight monetary policy with high interest rates, or the sud- den and unexpected collapse of inflation with budget deficits. Monetary policy simply disappears as both authors attribute high interest rates to budget deficits, despite the fact that the former preceded the latter. The authors report that the strong dollar was the result of the inflow of foreign money attracted by high interest rates to finance our budget and trade deficits. Yet the balance-of-payments statistics show no increase in foreign capital inflows during Reagan's first term. It never dawns on Volcker or Gyohten that the strong dollar was due to the higher after-tax rate of return on investment in the U.S. that re- sulted from the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act. Instead of exporting capital, Americans kept it at home, thus reducing the supply of dollars in exchange markets. When the dollar fell during Reagan's second term, for- eign money poured in -- the exact opposite of what policy-makers ex- pected. Gyohten reports that most of the participants at the Plaza meet- ing in 1985 thought the budget deficit would keep the dollar strong de- spite intervention against it and were caught off guard by the dollar's ex- traordinary fall. Thus the book ends as it began, with the world's policy-makers still be- hind the curve. Interestingly, neither author says a word about the contin- uing crash of Japanese stock and real-estate values or the decapitalization of Japanese banks. It remains to be seen whether fortunes have changed or whether the U.S. will again have to scrape Japan off the pavement. ***************************************************************** Almost ad Nauseam ABIGAIL THERNSTROM Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, by Derrick Bell (Basic, 240 pp., $20) Mrs. Thernstrom is the author of Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights. ONLY the lunatic fringe buys racist tracts written by whites, but black racism sells. Or so it would seem, given the growing infatuation with Mal- colm X, the success of virulently anti-white rappers, and the extraordinar- ily warm reception already given to Derrick Bell's new book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Bell's basic thesis is that almost all whites are born evil (he allows a few exceptions). And almost all blacks (not the likes of Thomas Sowell) are born good. Only an irredeemably depraved race could ever have owned slaves; the once-enslaved, however, have been perma- nently morally elevated by their subordinate status. Thus Bell -- who last made headlines by staging a one-man teaching strike at Harvard Law, from which he has now resigned -- asks us to fathom (in the words of an Afrocentric scholar) ''the mentality of a people that could continue for over three hundred years to kidnap an estimated 50 million youth and young adults from Africa. . . .'' (Forget the factual distortions -- they're unimportant to Bell.) Slavery, he goes on, is ''an ex- ample of what white America has done [and thus] a constant reminder of what white America might do.'' It is, in short, in the blood. Blacks, on the other hand, are a communal, cooperative people, with ''warm, rich voices,'' a ''tenacity for life,'' and a remarkable ability to expe- rience freedom even under the most oppressive conditions. They are born virtuous; melanin is destiny. It's an ugly message, which Bell presents in a series of allegorical tales and fables. City University of New York professor Leonard Jeffries rings at least some bells of alarm with his hate-mongering talk of ''ice people'' and ''sun people.'' But Derrick Bell tells seductive stories in an almost playful tone which masks their menacing content. In one story he chats with a black chauffeur who is driving him to a college lecture. They agree on much -- black hands clasped across class lines. For instance, they both know that ''from the Emancipation Proclamation on, the Man been hand- ing us a bunch of bogus freedom checks he never intends to honor.'' And that the law ''works for the Man most of the time, and only works for us [blacks] in the short run as a way of working for him in the long run.'' Another tale involves ''White Citizens for Black Survival,'' a group that aims to build a national network of secret shelters to house and feed black people ''in the event of a black holocaust or some other all-out attack on America's historic scapegoats.'' It's a possibility that Bell takes very seriously. ''Such an attack,'' he suggests, is ''not only possible, but probable.'' A ''holocaust'' or its equivalent is a favorite theme of Bell's. In some ver- sions of the fantasy, as in ''A Law Professor's Protest,'' only a relatively small number of blacks is liquidated -- in that case all 196 black profes- sors and administrators at Harvard University. In ''The Space Traders,'' however, every American black is turned over to an armada from outer space that brings riches in return. The trade is the culmination of a long tradition of sacrificing black rights to further white interests; black out- rage has ''as usual'' no credibility. Whites only want to hear their own rac- ist views -- ''almost ad nauseam,'' preferably from black toadies. The stories have a common message: ''the permanence of racism.'' Louis Farrakhan has it right, Bell believes. ''Smart and superarticulate,'' he writes, ''Minister Farrakhan is perhaps the best living example of a black man ready, willing, and able to 'tell it like it is.''' Inner-city blacks ''need to hear their rage articulated.'' Oppression is a constant, progress an illusion. ''For over three centu- ries,'' Bell writes, ''this country has promised democracy and delivered dis- crimination and delusions.'' Ground is sometimes gained but always lost. In fact, he maintains, black suffering has actually increased in the last forty years, and even today, blacks live in constant danger that ''an unex- pected coincidence of events'' will persuade whites to murder them all. The Constitution has been changed, civil-rights statutes have been passed, and sometimes blacks have gained a small measure of relief if pro- tection served some interest of importance to whites. But ''at best, the law -- by protecting blacks from blatant racist practices and policies, but ra- tionalizing all manner of situations that relegate blacks to a subordinate status -- regularizes racism.'' In fact, racism is the glue that holds American society together. ''Amer- icans achieve a measure of social stability through their unspoken pact to keep blacks at the bottom.'' The ''unspoken pact'' is not one that blacks can break. And indeed, whites strip blacks of every resource -- even their cul- ture. ''Not only do whites insist on better jobs, higher incomes, better schools and neighborhoods, better everything''; they also usurp black music, dance, language, and dress. What, then, is the point of the protest to which Bell has devoted so much energy? ''There is satisfaction in the struggle itself.'' Hassling whites brings psychic gratification. It's what Bell lives for. Storytelling not only makes palatable what otherwise might seem unac- ceptable. It relieves Bell of the necessity of making logical arguments sus- tained by evidence. Unsubstantiated -- and indeed indefensible -- asser- tions litter the book. Job discrimination is said to be worse now than it was when employers posted signs saying: ''NO NIGRAS NEED APPLY.'' Good restaurants don't use black waiters. Universities mainly appoint blacks ''who reject or minimize their blackness . . .''; moreover, there is a ''ceiling on the number of blacks who will be hired in a given department -- regardless of their qualifications.'' Civil-rights legislation is ''weakly worded and poorly enforced.'' The problems of the black underclass (who live in ''South African homelands'') are entirely the making of whites. ''White mendacity, white deceit, white chicanery'' drive blacks to ''self-re- jection'' and thus to ''drug-related crime, teen-aged parenthood, and dis- rupted and disrupting family life.'' The fantasy world that Bell has constructed is simply eerie. In theory, he is using allegory to reveal the truth about the country in which we live. In fact, reality eludes him. He seems lost in a world of his own making -- one in which paranoid delusions obscure the most obvious facts. His own psyche, however, is a mystery we need not explore. His extraordinary fol- lowing poses the more interesting problem. Bell tells whites that they are the scum of the earth, while describing blacks as morally superior yet seri- ously and permanently incapacitated. In different ways, then, his black and white devotees seem gluttons for punishment. How come? Our future as one nation indivisible may rest on the answer. ***************************************************************** Hot For Teacher RICHARD BROKHISER Sex, Art, and American Culture, by Camille Paglia (Vintage, 337 pp., $13) Mr. Brookhiser is an NR senior editor, and a columnist for the New York Observer. IT IS POSSIBLE that some of the people who, two years ago, read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, an eccentric seven-hundred-page survey of Western art from the Stone Age to the Yellow Decade, were so taken with its discussions of Goethe's ''Venetian Epigrams'' and the paintings of Sir Edward Burne-Jones that they are now thinking of buying Sex, Art, and American Culture hoping for more of the same. More likely, Miss Paglia's first readers want Madonna, pornography, date rape, and roller-derby bouts with feminists and deconstructionist literary theorists. For Goethe, go elsewhere. All the other stuff is here. ''[Madonna] sensed the buried pagan religiosity in disco.'' ''I accept Map- plethorpe as a pornographer, but for me Donatello, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio were also pornographers.'' ''You go back to the Kennedy com- pound late at night and you're surprised at what happens? [Willie Smith's accuser is] the one who should be charged -- with ignorance. Because everyone knows that Kennedy is spelled S-E-X.'' ''American GIs (including my uncles) got shot up rescuing France when she was lying flat on her face under the Nazi boot. Hence it is revolting to see pampered American academics down on their knees kissing French bums.'' Camille Paglia, you'll notice, is not Lionel Trilling. More to the point, she is not the sort of jargon-afflicted post-Marx, post-Heidegger academic exhibited by Roger Kimball. She says everything with a lead-writer's punch. There is a theory that stalks through Miss Paglia's pages, though. An atheist, she sees nature -- chaotic, wasteful, and irrational -- as the fun- damental reality. Human institutions and activities are efforts to impose a margin of order, and men, who feel most threatened by the welter, do most of the imposing. (One of the punchiest sentences of Sexual Personae was: ''If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.'' Miss Paglia liked it so well, she repeats it here.) It is possible, she believes, and sometimes desirable, to construct human artifacts which, in their brittle brilliance, go totally against nature's grain. But our most enduring works are those which acknowledge the dark forces they seek to channel. Hence her preferred religion is paganism (she believes in astrology). Failing that, Roman Catholicism, so long as it is Italianate and content-free. Politically, she is an instinctual libertarian, in favor of both prostitu- tion and capitalism, though this doesn't stop her from recommending fed- eral grants for rock musicians. Art in the West, she thinks, tames the dark forces by crystallizing around sexually charged male and female ar- chetypes. Everything else, presumably, is decoration or journalism. In the twentieth century, popular art, mainly Hollywood and rock, has done the job better than high art. As with anyone who tries to explain everything, there are gaps, caused by the inevitable holes in an individual's knowledge or taste. The gap most obvious to me is Miss Paglia's tin ear. Music exists for her only as soundtrack for spectacle, whether for a rock video or a death scene at La Scala. This partly explains Miss Paglia's worship of Madonna. Whatever her other assets, Madonna sings like Alvin the Chipmunk's sister. Miss Paglia also falls into patterns of error. She talks about society, without having a feel for it, or for the units on which it rests: about the only family she ever discusses is the Paglia family. Social novels, ending in marriage, are so many closed books to her (she does better with Shake- spearean comedies). This limitation showed mostly clearly in her treat- ment of Wuthering Heights in Sexual Personae. I recently read Wuther- ing Heights for the first time since ninth grade. It is as shocking as Miss Paglia says it is, far more so than anything by Bret Easton Ellis. She dis- misses the second half, though, after Cathy dies, as so much noodling. What it is instead is an examination of the effects a lifelong program of revenge like Heathcliff's would have on its victims, and on the revenger. Miss Paglia is only interested in demon lovers. Her most annoying trait is the nihilist's effort to have everything all ways. What else could we expect from someone who sees all human efforts as arbitrary dikes against destruction? In one sentence, we get Dionysus, whores, drag queens. In the next, we get Catholicism, the canon, scholar- ship. ''The institutional religions, Catholic and Protestant,'' writes Miss Paglia in a typical passage explaining why she opposes the ordination of homosexuals, though she is ''of wavering sexual orientation'' herself, ''carry with them the majesty of history. Their theology is impressive and coherent. Efforts to revise or dilute that theology for present convenience seem to me misguided.'' But the relevant criterion for a religion, and for many other institutions as well, is not impressiveness but truth. If Chris- tianity isn't true, then its temples should be turned into museums or parking lots. If it is, then a lot of what Miss Paglia thinks is -- false. One piece of advice. Miss Paglia attributes her non-stop full-blast style to her ethnicity: don't blame the decibels on me, I'm Italian. But, as Luigi Barzini knew, the best Italian gestures are economical. ''Sicilians, for in- stance, are known to convey a vast range of grave and sometimes mortal messages practically without stirring a muscle of their faces or moving their hands.'' If Miss Paglia doesn't learn to insert some Sicilian moments, for variety's sake, her readers may tuck her next book in with the fishes. ***************************************************************** FILM Return of the Native JOHN SIMON Mr. Simon, NR's film critic, is also theater critic for New York magazine. AS A BOY, I read a few of James Fenimore Cooper's novels in some Cen- tral or East European language. Whichever it was, the translation must have improved on the original. After reading Mark Twain's devastating essay on Cooper many years later -- perhaps the greatest piece of Ameri- can criticism -- I have no further desire to reconnoiter that worthy's fic- tion. The essay conclusively demonstrated that the retired Navy man had no idea what he was talking about even when he was writing about boats, and that his language was wooden enough to carve cigar-store Native Americans out of. So I have no doubt that the dreadful movie The Last of the Mohicans does Cooper full justice. Written by its director, Michael Mann, in cahoots with Christopher Crowe, the film is based in good part on the 1936 movie version, starring Randolph Scott and Binnie Barnes, and itself a pretty dubious commodity. Mann, whose name will remain inextricably linked with TV's Miami Vice, allegedly spent three years researching the novel's historical background, time he could have spent more profitably watching some good foreign movies. As you recall, this is a tale set against the background of the French and Indian Wars. In the movie version, the two lovely sisters Cora and Alice Munro must travel to the wilderness outpost Fort William Henry, which their British officer father is defending against the French and their Indian allies, led by the bloodthirsty Huron brave Magua. The Munro girls are escorted by Major Duncan Heyward, to whom Cora is re- luctantly near-engaged, and the expedition is guided by pro-British Mohi- cans: Chief Chingachgook, his son Uncas, and Nathaniel, the white or- phan he adopted and turned into another beloved son, Hawkeye, the ideal frontiersman. They make it with some difficulty, and after the fall of the Fort must escape amid even greater dangers. There are dissensions among the Brit- ish army, the Colonials, the Indians, and not least the Munro family. Thus Colonel Munro has stupidly jailed Hawkeye and intends to hang him; whereas Cora has become his mistress and intends to marry him. Alice and Uncas have likewise fallen in love, but . . . but do you really want me to rehearse the whole silly tale? The salient features of the movie are almost total confusion about the historical background, and Mann's abject inability to tell a story. There are plot developments and new characters popping up that remain as in- scrutable as a Chinese laundry ticket, and Mann seems blissfully ignorant of cinematic syntax, so that scenes hook into one another in ways that cannot be parsed, let alone understood. If this were prose, it would be all sentence fragments, dangling modifiers, and incorrect antecedents. Every sequence exists only for its own lurid effect, and where there ought to be continuity, there is rampant amnesia. The forest ambushes and fighting are real enough in their randomness, confusion, and bestiality, but the viewer should at least intermittently know who is doing what unto whom. As Hawkeye, Daniel Day-Lewis is mostly on the run. Running through forests primeval, up steep hills, along precarious ledges, seemingly in sev- eral directions simultaneously, he often shoots out of two rifles, one in each hand, and never misses. Not since Chariots of Fire has there been so much running in one movie, but there at least it was apportioned among several characters, and we knew where they were running and why. Here we seem to get scenes from some seven-day cross-country race chopped up into small fragments and reassembled at random. Needless to say, an audience nurtured on car chases, demolition derbies, and MTV found nothing worrisome about this, indeed lapped it up like mother's milk, however curdled and bloodcurdling. And nonsensical. Day-Lewis is especially apt as a runner, having sharp features that make for good aerodynamics, and long black tresses (real or not, what matter?) magnificently aflutter around him on the headwind generated by his cleaving cranium. He looks like some sort of human helicopter. In be- tween footraces, he gets to do some minimal acting, which includes gal- lant defiance of tyranny and gallant courting and virile romancing of Madeleine Stowe's almost equally ship's-figurehead-like Cora, who, for a genteel young British lady, has quite a way with a shotgun. Stephen Wad- dington, as Duncan, the unsuccessful rival for Cora's love, has one of those unfortunate English faces suggestive of a half-born calf; Uncas and Alice, the secondary lovers, barely register at all. Correction, Alice (Jodhi May) does, when, about to be ravished by Magua, she is kept by the director for an unconscionable time atop a high cliff before being allowed to hurtle, her virginity unsullied, into the abyss. Mann manages to give the word ''cliffhanger'' an even worse name. As Colonel Munro, Maurice Roeves rants when he doesn't roar, and car- ries on in general (or colonel) like a hyperthyroid wolverine. The good fa- ther figure, Chingachgook, played by the celebrated Indian activist Rus- sell Means, fades into the background, having little to do and even less talent to do it with. Another authentic Indian, the Cherokee Wes Studi, plays the malign Magua with appropriate ferocity, but never letting us forget that the white man drove him to it. The film was shot in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, as photo- genic as Dolly Parton's knockers, and Dante Spinotti's camera has caught them, now enveloped in teasingly veiling morning mists, now bursting forth in sun-kissed orange voluptuousness. A pair of extremely non-native Americans, the production designer Wolf Kroeger and the costume de- signer Elsa Zamparelli, have knocked themselves out to recreate every na- tive or colonial artifact with demented accuracy. And a brace of composers have put together a score that combines bizarre autochthonous strains with enlightened Western (or West Coast) movie music. They are Trevor Jones, who gave us the soundtrack of Arachnophobia, and Randy Edelman, the composer of Beethoven (the big, floppy dog, not the tunesmith of Fidelio). Yet what avails all this expertise if so much of the writing, acting, and directing is an unadulterated mess? Speaking of messes -- and of Indians -- we have now the long-awaited (though not by me) 1492: Conquest of Paradise, the Ridley Scott version of the Columbus story. A lesser Columbus movie came and went in the time it took to say Admiral of the Ocean Seas; though worthless, it was at least unintentionally funny, notably whenever Marlon Brando, as Torquemada, bestrode the screen. Here, however, we have the allegedly genuine article, showing us in two and a half slow-moving hours how Co- lumbus's noble vision -- well, relatively noble vision -- was exploited and perverted by unconscionable scoundrels. Actually, the conquest is not so much Columbus's as that of the color orange, in which Ridley Scott and his cinematographer, Adrian Biddle, swathe much of the old and most of the new world, turning it all into a Tangerine Dream. There is no point in discussing this film as a film: it is, except for some fine views of the insides of Spanish cathedrals and palaces, what the French call nul. But something should be said about the casting. This is a truly gross reversion to the old (pre-Columbian?) Hollywood, even if it is an independent production. In those hoary, uncaring days a Polish ac- cent would do for German, German for French, and Hungarian for just about anything. But at least those heterogeneous foreign accents were meant to indicate foreignness. Here everyone, except the Indians, is sup- posed to be Spanish and talk alike. Instead, we get French Spaniards, British Spaniards, Yanqui Spaniards, and even some Spanish Spaniards throwing a spanner in the works. For box-office reasons, Scott wanted to make his film in English, yet forcing someone like Gerard Depardieu, the Columbus, to deliver endless dialogue in a language he has a very slow learner's problems with is cruel and unusual punishment. For us too, by the way. Because of Depardieu, we must retranslate in the mind whatever the ear hears, thus doubling the psychological time of this already lumbering movie, and exposing us to the risk of missing the next line of dialogue altogether. As written by the aptly named Roselyne Bosch, that next line is not likely to be much, but, even so, we don't relish the feeling of being left out. The film's score is by Vangelis, a Greek no-talent, who is, of course, the ideal composer for a Spanish and Italian historical subject. It was Vangelis who wrote the inappropriate and unendurable score for Chariots of Fire, a cacophony the public adored. Here Vangelis repeats the same synthesized caterwaulings, but with (let's hope) diminishing returns. There was, for me, one moment of interest in the movie. After the con- quistadors disembark in the new-found paradise, Scott gives us an exotic coral snake here, a resplendent bird of paradise there. Then, in the lower left corner of the frame, there is an even stranger animal. A tapir? A pan- golin? A nandu? None of the above; it is, caught at an odd, unflattering angle, the face of Gerard Depardieu. But old worlds, too, are being rediscovered. Take Hero, wherein the pro- ducer, Laura Ziskin, a USC film-school graduate, supplied the idea to Alvin Sargent, a true and tested screenplay wizard, then had it further polished by David Webb Peoples, a new screenplay wizard, author of, among not many others, the script for Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. Hero is another movie that need not detain us long, except to note how the old Frank Capra or Preston Sturges movies, taught in film schools, can be recycled in slightly refurbished form by the likes of Miss Ziskin and her cohort for Nineties use. Here we have a glitzy British (but Hollywood- oriented) director, Stephen Frears, a slick British composer, George Fen- ton, the British cinematographer Oliver Stapleton, and the British film editor Mick Audsley teaming up to bestow on us an archetypally American Capra or Sturges movie. But there is a difference. A Capra film (Sturges is a more complex case), although starting from a preposterous premise, belabored its simple point with a dogged, naive faith in its story, its people. All right, we know now that Capra and his writers were not the sweet, humane simpletons they pretended to be, but they believed in what they were doing, could fool themselves into falling for their own legerdemain. But the Ziskin gang fabricates a story full of complicated reversals, double bottoms, and tricksy non-sequiturs until the whole thing, instead of merely proceeding from a basic fantasy, is awash in grandiose absurdity. All the same, one may enjoy Dustin Hoffman and Andy Garcia going through their tricks, and Geena Davis trying to huff her way into being Jean Arthur. Aside from everything else, she is, unnervingly, too tall for Garcia. But then, this is a tall tale. ***************************************************************** DELECTATIONS Room at the Inn TAKI Mr. Taki Theodorzcopulos, who writes the ''High Life'' column for The Spectator in London, is the author of Nothing to Declare (Atlantic Monthly Press). HOTELS HAVE always played a great part in my life. My earliest mem- ory of one is when I was taken by my parents to the Grande Bretagne in 1945, at the time the grandest hotel in Athens. When the Germans occu- pied Greece in 1941, they billeted their high command in the GB, leaving Athenian high lifers to fend for themselves. After the liberation, Churchill stayed there, the Greek government having concluded it was the least likely place for Winnie to stop a Communist bullet. Although the hotel had taken its share of pounding in four years of war, I'll never forget its grand chandeliers, its imposing salons, the liveried waiters. And the food. It tasted like the proverbial manna from you know where, especially as I hadn't tasted butter or a sweet in four long years. Dining at the GB became a lifelong habit, until, one day, my father de- cided to construct his own hotel, the Caravel. The price being right, I for- got all about the GB, but not my first visit. But let me take a moment to say a few words about owning a hotel. It is like having a very big house in the middle of the city with five hundred servants. The only difference being that perfect strangers roam the public rooms. C'est tout. Of course, the intruders pay for the privilege, which makes it easier to bear. What is very hard to explain is how easy life becomes when one has five hun- dred people attending to one's needs. Mind you, the Caravel is losing a fortune, which in real terms means that I do have a staff of five hundred, but that's an altogether different matter. There is something magic and mysterious about hotels. People go mad in them, fall in love, even kill each other. Olga, the beautiful spy, may or may no longer arrive in a haze of seductive musk. Romance is as much a part of a hotel as paying the bill. In these bad economic times the lure of luxury intensifies, just as it did back in the Twenties in New York and late Thirties in Berlin. When I gave a ball for my 350 closest friends to celebrate the collapse of Communism back in 1990, I of course chose the London Savoy, the favorite dining place for English upper-class traitors such as Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Needless to say, hotels have played their part in literature, the Grand in Vicky Baum's case, and Gausse's Hotel -- in reality the Hotel du Cap -- in Tender Is the Night. Hemingway's novels were redolent with them, and, if memory serves, Holden Caulfield, too, visited the Plaza. Oscar Wilde died in one, as did Vladimir Nabokov -- the latter's place of demise being of far, far better standing. Sometimes hotels even turn into coun- tries, as happened in the case of Claridge's in London, when the British government made it Yugoslav territory for a day in order for the Crown Prince of that miserable nation, whose mother was in the process of giving birth, to be able to say he was a native-born Yugoslav. In the summer of 1946 many prominent Athenian families moved en mass to the hotel Semiramis, in Kifissia, a northern suburb of the capital. Their summer houses had been destroyed in the war but the Semiramis was a better than average substitute. It was the happiest summer of my life. I made a lifelong friendship with Alec and Leonida Goulandris, found a large diamond left in the lavatory by the mistress of General Pangalos (ex-dictator), which my father made me give back, and met Tyrone Power. When that wonderful-looking actor arrived in Athens to publicize The Razor's Edge, the owner of the Semiramis asked me to present him with the de rigueur flowers, since I was the youngest customer. Twelve years later I was in hot pursuit of his ex-wife, Linda Christian, and one night we went to see Tyrone in his one-man Broadway play, John Brown's Body. Afterward backstage, when I was introduced to the great man, I told him that, although he surely didn't remember, I had once met him in Athens. ''Of course,'' he said, ''you're the little boy with the flowers at the hotel.'' The Semiramis is still going strong, and although Kifissia and Athens itself have become hellholes, I still go to the hotel's terrace for a cooling drink after a scorching day by the swimming pool. In 1948, at age 11, I moved my base of operations to New York's Plaza Hotel. This was long before Donald Trump had even heard of the place. For me it meant freedom, as my extremely strict mother could not control my movements. I especially recall things as inviting people my age to din- ner and picking up the bill, unheard of for an 11-year-old. Once I was dispatched to boarding school my parents moved to the Sherry Netherland Hotel, just across the square from the Plaza. The Sherry was more understated, with more than half of it being residential, i.e., occupied by people who had bought their apartments and lived there full time. For the next twenty years the Sherry was for me a place that not only provided funds in a pinch, but also gave me social cachet with the preppie crowd. During the Fifties the Sherry bar -- where Cipriani's was later located, until the celebrated breakup -- was the hottest place in town, and the Carnival Room -- where Doubles is at present -- was among the most popular nightclubs. I could sign my father's name in both places. Need I say more? All good things come to an end, and by the time my dad sold the apart- ment to the awful Armand Hammer in 1968, I had discovered the world of great European hotels such as the Palace in Gstaad, the Plaza-Athenee in Paris, and the Hotel du Cap in Antibes. In this country the early Six- ties was when Mario Savio and other such opportunists pretended to dis- cover free speech at Berkeley, but it was the golden period of Europe. The nostalgic flavor of elegance had returned to all the grand hotels with the Continent's reconstruction, as had their old clients, who had lain doggo while France and Italy flirted with Communism. All three months of winter were spent in the Palace in Gstaad, where a single room without bath cost . . . three dollars a night. Then it was the Plaza-Athenee in the spring in Paris, followed by the Hotel du Cap. On one weekend in August back in 1959 I remember knowing every person registered in the hotel. It was one long, unending party. No more, but I still get that feeling of anticipation and excitement whenever I check into a European hotel. I say European because Ameri- can hotels have long ceased to provide good service. Which are my favorite hotels? Easy. All the five-star hotels of Switzerland, France, Italy, and Britain. And the Ritz in Madrid. Oh yes, I almost forgot, and the Caravel in Athens. We do not deserve five stars, as the place is falling apart, but we are conveniently located across from the hospital for venereal diseases. With the kind of customers we're getting nowadays, it is a definite conven- ience and worth a star or two. ***************************************************************** Sound & Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of Ameri- can Politics, by Eric Alterman (Harper-Collins, 352 pp., $23) 'POWER Washington does not generally read books,'' writes Eric Alter- man. He should be glad that it at least buys them, since his diatribe against the pundit class (and bid to join it?) is among the best-selling books in the nation's capital. Too many pundits are afflicted, Alterman ob- serves, by ''laziness, self-satisfaction, and plain old burnout.'' Alterman does not merely review the work of the ''punditocracy,'' a clumsy neolo- gism he employs throughout, but contends, as his subtitle does not fully disclose, that mostly right-wing or -leaning pundits are to blame for ''our national decline.'' Pundits don't have as much influence as Alterman thinks, however, and it's a good thing: Alterman for the most part ignores the (left-leaning) news side of the news business -- his on-target analysis of the press's love affair with Bill Clinton being a notable exception. Alter- man says the American people (meaning Eric Alterman) desire a ''progres- sive domestic revitalization program,'' but he also says that ''we have lost the language we need to discuss the reconstruction of our political cul- ture.'' Here the anti-pundit pundit, whose understanding of the private sector is very modest indeed, is philosophically confused: How can a per- son know he desires something when he has no words to discuss that desire? -- TERRY EASTLAND After the War Was Over: Hanoi and Saigon, by Neil Sheehan (Random House, 131 pp., $17) AFTER publishing A Bright Shining Lie, former New York Times corre- spondent Neil Sheehan returned to Vietnam to see for himself what that country is like now. After the War Was Over chronicles that trip but more clearly demonstrates that, in Sheehan's mind, the war continues to be waged as actively as ever. He proves his own observation that ''memories create expectations.'' Sheehan notes with surprise that the Vietnamese don't really blame the war or outside powers for their present misfortunes. Nor do they hate Americans. An old farmer, who fought in the South and endured napalm, smiles and tells him, ''Americans are good.'' ''I encoun- tered this lack of animosity everywhere we went in the North and kept asking for an explanation,'' he writes. He looks for the reason in Vietnam's wars with China. But the Vietnamese came away from that warfare with an abiding hatred of the Chinese. Why then don't the Vietnamese hate Americans as well? It seems that Sheehan's expectations prevent him from seeing the answer revealed, for example, in a remark by Nguyen Van Linh: ''The correct way would have been to help the peasants in the South to cultivate their own land as farmers do in the United States.'' Perhaps the Vietnamese, like many other peoples with first-hand experience of Communism, actually see in the American system a source not of threat but of hope. -- DANIELLE ALLEN Bisexuality in the Ancient World, by Eva Cantarella, translated by Cor- mac O Cuilleanain (Yale, 284 pp., $27.50) IN JUSTIFYING their behavior, homosexuals ask us to recall that sod- omy was widespread among that most civilized people, the Greeks. How- ever Greek homosexuality bears little resemblance to the contemporary version. As Eva Cantarella shows, it seems in fact to have been a kind of programmed bisexuality -- pederasty as an adjunct to heterosexual, but unromantic, marriage. Our modern distinctions were quite meaningless to the Greeks. As with many cultures that sequester their women and girls, the only differentiation that mattered to them was in sexual roles, which seem never to have been interchangeable within a relationship: boys and women were passive, while grown men were expected to be active with both. Opprobrium attached to those young men who refused to relinquish their passivity once they left their teens, and to those men who neglected the education they owed to the youths in exchange for sexual favors. Though the Greeks considered homosexual relationships an enriching ex- perience, and thus confined them to the free-born, legal regulations and social pressures ensured as far as possible that the institution not degen- erate into an occasion for promiscuity and sheer license. It should be pointed out that the evidence for Professor Cantarella's observations is thin. Given that it consists mainly of poetic references and inferences drawn from legal rhetoric, just how pervasive homosexuality was in the ancient world, outside the class of poets, must remain unclear. -- MARK MILLER This article is copyright 1992 National Review. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM