Moving briskly into the twentieth century, Peru has made Quechua an official language, requiring that it be taught in all schools beginning in first grade. If you want our opinion, it sounds like a waste of paper and Inca.
At the level of state government, at least, some of last fall’s Democratic landslides are turning out to be something less than the disasters they then seemed. Many of the new governors exemplify a trend that Newsweek calls “say-nay politics”: like California’s Jerry Brown and New York’s Hugh Carey, they are acting, for the moment at least, like men of liberal vision alloyed with conservative practicality. “Action has been the catchword,” Brown says. “But people feel that things are being done to them, not for them. Sometimes non-action is better. Sometimes we need fewer programs, less planning, more space to live our lives.” Already the result has been disappointment for some of Brown’s partisans, who expected his administration to be the vehicle of their aggrandizement. “Jerry has screwed his friends worse than I ever screwed my enemies,” grumbles one. And that’s the kind of grumbling we like to hear.
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