The Week

■ department OF anti-climax: From a Chinese Communist editorial warning workers that things will get rough if they don’t buckle down to the tasks at hand: “Toward those grassroots units with discipline lax, unity sapped, and anarchism rampant, what’s so bad about setting strict requirements?”

■ “The way I use the term,” explains Andy Young, sounding a bit like Humpty Dumpty, “racism applies to almost everybody.” We were starting to suspect as much after he had designated as racists Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Abraham Lincoln (“especially Abraham Lincoln”), the Russians, the Swedes, the English, and the entire borough of Queens. He further explained that racism, the way he uses the term, is synonymous with “ethnocentrism” and “insensitivity to cultural differences.” The semantic promiscuity was getting scandalous, so Jimmy Carter called Young in for a little confab, at which, Young reports triumphantly, Carter “didn’t tell me to shut up.” As students of nuance, we’d put it a little differently: Carter didn’t tell him to shut up.

Featured Tags

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

William F. Buckley Jr.

■ department OF anti-climax: From a Chinese Communist editorial warning workers that things will get rough if they don’t buckle down to the tasks at hand: “Toward those grassroots units with discipline lax, unity sapped, and anarchism rampant, what’s so bad about setting strict requirements?”

■ “The way I use the term,” explains Andy Young, sounding a bit like Humpty Dumpty, “racism applies to almost everybody.” We were starting to suspect as much after he had designated as racists Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Abraham Lincoln (“especially Abraham Lincoln”), the Russians, the Swedes, the English, and the entire borough of Queens. He further explained that racism, the way he uses the term, is synonymous with “ethnocentrism” and “insensitivity to cultural differences.” The semantic promiscuity was getting scandalous, so Jimmy Carter called Young in for a little confab, at which, Young reports triumphantly, Carter “didn’t tell me to shut up.” As students of nuance, we’d put it a little differently: Carter didn’t tell him to shut up.