Straight up, let’s trade Bill Clinton for Mary Robinson.
February’s Town & Country, a monthly look at doings of Muffys, Buffys and Duffys which has been very puffy of late, makes a rare political foray with a strong profile of Robinson, the iconoclastic president of Ireland.
Richard Conniff, a stellar free-lance writer, notes that a certain form of glasnost has taken hold in the distinctly Catholic land, including easing of laws involving abortion, and the change can be traced to the Nov. 9, 1990, election of Robinson.
Her job is largely ceremonial, but Conniff presents a convincing argument that, while “lacking conventional political clout, she has made herself a moral force.” A typical example: being the first head of state to embrace famine victims in Somalia and confronting TV viewers with compassion, tears and outrage.
Trained as a lawyer, Robinson, 48, exhibits a “spirit of antiauthoritarianism” rare for any nation’s leader but mixes it with deep concern for the family, the conventional symbol of authority.
Ireland is notorious for its hatreds. But Conniff makes a case that, just possibly, those will be lessened by a woman whose presence encourages all that is decent.
Quickly: Feb. 8 Time belatedly discovers the youth-oriented, high-tech culture of cyberpunk, while Feb. 8 Newsweek has the year’s ugliest cover for a ho-hum tale on call-in TV and radio shows. But Time is worth picking up for excerpts of former Secretary of State George Shultz’s memoirs, giving new evidence that George Bush may have lied about his knowledge of the Iran-contra mess. . . . Winter Wilson Quarterly has a fine historical overview of our often bumbling approach to roads, bridges, sewage treatment plants and other essentials from Bruce Seely, a professor at Michigan Technological University. He cites “financial constraints, waning public support, the loss of faith in experts” and old-fashioned political squabbling as causes of the infrastructure’s decline, and calls for a much more centralized mix of private and public sector help, which was prevalent long ago ($7, 901 D St. SW, Suite 704, Washington, D.C., 20024). . . . Feb. 8 New Yorker has a good look at Peru’s Marxist revolutionaries, the Shining Path, noting the group’s difficulties in maintaining rigid internal discipline the bigger it becomes. There’s also a piece, similar to one done recently by Outside, on a 24-year-old Virginia kid who headed off into the Alaskan woods and kept an increasingly dire journal of a trek that ended when he died of starvation. . . . Vegetarians, beware: January’s Drovers Journal, whose motto is “The Business of Beef Is Our Business,” reports the industry’s joy with Pizza Hut introducing a “steak lover’s pizza” because it features a cut of meat whose sales have been weak. The Beef Industry Council will help with promotion, including a direct mailing based on renting Sports Illustrated’s subscription list (to lure “new traditionalist” males). . . . February Gentlemen’s Quarterly chronicles the influence and diminished editorial vitality of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, but its best piece is Joseph Nocera’s disclosure of how Congress is wasting your money by unjustifiably slipping through a fat defense appropriation to George Steinbrenner’s faltering firm, American Ship Building. . . . February Chicago is again snoozy except for Penelope Mesic’s profile of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a University of Chicago professor doing fascinating work on creativity, and Joel Kaplan’s status report on the late Harold Washington’s onetime mayoral aides. It’s also notable for a switcheroo in rating Wheeling’s grand Le Francais. Having created a minor storm by bad-rapping it in the November issue (a fact even noted by Newsweek), it now offers praise and a higher rating. Curiously, the critics who re-reviewed it are two of the three who whined in November about poor service, oversalting and, get this, waiters overheard telling the same jokes table to table! Missing is critic “Mehitabel,” believed to be the magazine’s dining editor, Carla Kelson, whose husband, Allen, is a restaurant consultant who does some restaurant-related writing for the monthly. One is left wondering if Le Francais has done an about-face (hiring Jay Leno to help the waiters?), or if the missing critic had done most of the earlier bashing, or if the monthly was initially correct but can’t take the heat. . . . If you have interest in the sexual cravings of rocker Chuck Berry, February Spy leaves zilch to the imagination in “Johnny B. Sick.”
