THE RIGHT BOOKS

In The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s first novel, Philip Marlowe has to do with Carmen Sternwood, a nymphomaniac who shoots men dead while hissing through her teeth when they fail to succumb to her provocative trick of dropping her eyelids until “they almost cuddled her cheek,” and then raising them again, “like a theater curtain.” “That,” Marlowe remarks, “was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.” Somewhat similarly, Mikhail Gorbachev, a gangster who does not even have the excuse of, uncontrollable sexual passion, has been batting his lashes and doing aren’t-I-cute? routines for a year and a half, with the result that—what? Why, the women (and men) of the Western media roll over with all four paws in the air. What else would you expect them to do?

Gorbachev’s latest attempt at cuteness uses arms control (he’s for it!) as its ploy. Another uses “democratization.” A more long-standing one is fashioned around a moue suggestive of the sultry notion, “economic reform.” He’s for that, too. In a speech delivered in July 1986, the Soviet leader announced: “Neither the working class, nor the peasantry, nor the technical intelligentsia, nor the creative intelligentsia—nobody wants to live any longer in the old way, to put up with what has outlived its time and slows our development.” In the West, liberals and fellow-travelers go nuts: Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are being vindicated at last, their dreams realized. In the East, nobody says much. They’re hard-boiled as a Depression-era Los Angeles shamus back there. So is Gertrude Schroeder, author of The System versus Progress (The Center for Research into Communist Economies, c/o 2 Lord North Street, London SW1P 3IB, England; £3.50 [$5.60]), number two in the State of Communist Economies series. (The CRCE, which considers itself an international institution, has preserved the American spellings and style of the author, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.)

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About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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In The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s first novel, Philip Marlowe has to do with Carmen Sternwood, a nymphomaniac who shoots men dead while hissing through her teeth when they fail to succumb to her provocative trick of dropping her eyelids until “they almost cuddled her cheek,” and then raising them again, “like a theater curtain.” “That,” Marlowe remarks, “was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.” Somewhat similarly, Mikhail Gorbachev, a gangster who does not even have the excuse of, uncontrollable sexual passion, has been batting his lashes and doing aren’t-I-cute? routines for a year and a half, with the result that—what? Why, the women (and men) of the Western media roll over with all four paws in the air. What else would you expect them to do?

Gorbachev’s latest attempt at cuteness uses arms control (he’s for it!) as its ploy. Another uses “democratization.” A more long-standing one is fashioned around a moue suggestive of the sultry notion, “economic reform.” He’s for that, too. In a speech delivered in July 1986, the Soviet leader announced: “Neither the working class, nor the peasantry, nor the technical intelligentsia, nor the creative intelligentsia—nobody wants to live any longer in the old way, to put up with what has outlived its time and slows our development.” In the West, liberals and fellow-travelers go nuts: Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are being vindicated at last, their dreams realized. In the East, nobody says much. They’re hard-boiled as a Depression-era Los Angeles shamus back there. So is Gertrude Schroeder, author of The System versus Progress (The Center for Research into Communist Economies, c/o 2 Lord North Street, London SW1P 3IB, England; £3.50 [$5.60]), number two in the State of Communist Economies series. (The CRCE, which considers itself an international institution, has preserved the American spellings and style of the author, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.)