THE WEEK

□ A psychiatrist friend of ours thinks Jim Wright is suffering from a rare disorder: “delusions of megalomania.” We asked him to explain. “Well,” he said, “in the first place, he thinks he’s George Shultz. That’s not so bad. What’s really serious is that he thinks being Shultz is an improvement.”

□ Stop the presses! The New York Times has referred to Mikhail Gorbachev as a “dictator”—as opposed to the usual benign euphemism, “Soviet leader.” What does it portend? A genuine thaw at the Times’! An internal shake-up or power struggle? An abandonment of seventy years of dogma? Or a mere verbal gimmick to make us lower our guard? Can the reformers prevail over the hard-line liberals? We welcome this new signal with cautious optimism.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

□ A psychiatrist friend of ours thinks Jim Wright is suffering from a rare disorder: “delusions of megalomania.” We asked him to explain. “Well,” he said, “in the first place, he thinks he’s George Shultz. That’s not so bad. What’s really serious is that he thinks being Shultz is an improvement.”

□ Stop the presses! The New York Times has referred to Mikhail Gorbachev as a “dictator”—as opposed to the usual benign euphemism, “Soviet leader.” What does it portend? A genuine thaw at the Times’! An internal shake-up or power struggle? An abandonment of seventy years of dogma? Or a mere verbal gimmick to make us lower our guard? Can the reformers prevail over the hard-line liberals? We welcome this new signal with cautious optimism.