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from: Christopher Caldwell

Aristotle Takes on Sally Quinn!

Posted Monday, Nov. 16, 1998, at 6:33 PM ET

I must be a New York chauvinist myself. First, you're right that the Apple-Quinn line is repugnant. For a democracy, we've dangerously overvalued insider status. It reminds me of William F. Buckley Jr's remark that he'd rather be ruled by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. I'm not sure I'd say the same of the Brentwood (or wherever Sharon Stone lives) phone book. But if you were Aristotle, you could draw up a hierarchy of desirable types of government that ran something like--

1. Boston phone book

2. Harvard faculty

3. Brentwood phone book

4. Washington establishment

--without doing too much violence to Middle American sentiment.

Second, I share your admiration for Douglas Frantz, but both of us would have a hard time making the case for his non-gotcha! credentials in any crowd of liberal Washingtonians. It was Frantz (along with William Rempel) who in 1994 came out with that stunning, almost airtight Los Angeles Times piece on Governor Clinton's use of Arkansas state troopers to procure women, the same week David Brock came out with his now-better-known investigation in the American Spectator. That Rempel and Frantz had more documentation than Brock--phone bills, entry logs, etc.--only made their offense worse in the eyes of the Clintonites. "True journalistic hero" was not a phrase that sprang unbidden from their lips.

Finally, how delightful that the NYPL reading room is open again. Once this health McCarthyism has run its course and they start allowing smoking there again, I may even frequent the place myself.

On Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture: Another surprising omission from the obits was his 1964 bon (bon if you like that sort of thing) mot that the only position for women in SNCC was "prone." This little sally is about the only thing most people know about Carmichael. I remember discussing it with an irascible literary scholar who pointed out that "prone," strictly speaking, means face down on the ground. Surely, Kenneth said, what Carmichael had meant was "supine."

But now we'll never know for sure.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415
from: Christopher Caldwell

Aristotle Takes on Sally Quinn!

Posted Monday, Nov. 16, 1998, at 6:33 PM ET
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Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. Judith Shulevitz is the New York editor of Slate.
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