Word: birthdays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This issue is our contribution to the very special Fourth of July the nation will celebrate next month, a birthday present to the Statue of Liberty as she turns 100. Like most stimulating journalism, it will, the editors expect and indeed hope, spark some spirited disagreements about our choices and our omissions. For example, in Books we talk about that distinctive American contribution to detective fiction, the hard-boiled hero. Some will rightly miss a piece about the remarkable and varied voices of women writers in America. So do we, but another time...
Americans in their celebratory moods sometimes behave as if they had invented freedom. They have at least given freedom a splendid home. The text of the great Fourth of July birthday party will not dwell on the ugly side of American freedom (the founders reserving freedom pretty much for white male property owners and countenancing the enslavement of blacks, for example). Nor will the star-burst rhetoric discuss the heartlessness of much American freedom, the bleak lives of those who cannot compete. Freedom has a lot of Charles Darwin's logic prowling around in it, hungry for the weaker animals...
...each government agency, from the Census Bureau to the IRS, maintained its own computer listings. Now, more and more, these computers are sharing records. To nab draft dodgers, the Selective Service has fed its machines a restaurant chain's 10-year-old computer list of boys eligible for free birthday sundaes. To ferret out welfare cheats, social service agencies compare their rolls with lists of federal employees. And the Reagan Administration is prodding state governments to begin linking the computers that hold state unemployment insurance records, social security wage data and certain IRS returns...
...wife of exiled Soviet Dissident Andrei Sakharov spent her 63rd birthday surrounded by three grandchildren at Disney World in Florida, mesmerized by the fantasies conjured up in the Magic Kingdom. For the past six months, Yelena Bonner has been nurtured by her family and awed by the wonders of the U.S. She has soaked up sun in the Virgin Islands, seen Cats on Broadway and stayed up all night with her 85-year-old mother Ruth, leafing through the pages of an old family photo album. Nonetheless, says Alexei Semyonov, a son from her previous marriage, "she never really could...
...York City last month, Bonner had a highly publicized reunion with Anatoli Shcharansky, the Soviet dissident who was released from prison earlier this year. Then, addressing members of Congress on May 21, Sakharov's 65th birthday, she warned, "In Gorky, anything can happen, and the world will never learn the truth about us." On each occasion, Semyonov insists, Bonner's public appearances were arranged for her by others. She was denied an audience with President Reagan, possibly because the Administration did not want to insult Gorbachev. Instead, National Security Adviser John Poindexter received her for a 30-min. closed-door...