With News as in Life, It’s Relative

In its February issue, World Press Review once again proves the theory of news relativity. As it has for the last six years, the magazine asked the U.S. news agencies Associated Press and United Press International, and foreign agencies specializing in Third World coverage, to list the most important news events of 1988.

As might be expected, the U.S. presidential election was at the top of the Norte Americano news charts, while it came in third in Costa Rica, fourth in Luxembourg, eighth with both London’s Gemini News Service and Newswatch, of Lagos, Nigeria, and failed to make other lists at all.

Virtually all the agencies here and abroad thought the end of the Iran/Iraq war was important. Likewise the Armenian earthquake and Gorbachev’s peace initiatives.

But none of the foreign news organizations worked up a shred of editorial angst about our Midwestern drought (No. 3 with both AP and UPI), the return of the U.S. space shuttle, Hurricane Gilbert, the fires in our national parks or Jim and Tammy Bakker’s PTL problems.

On the other hand, if our news agencies had been more impressed with the events deemed most newsworthy by foreign agencies, perhaps we would have less trouble recalling the details of the disputed Mexican elections, the uprising in Burma, the Western Sahara accord, the toxic waste scandal in Africa, the rise of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, or the Olympics in Korea (was that last summer?)

A View Too Far

At the other end of the perspective problem, an article, in the winter issue of Public Interest argues that things fall apart locally when people focus their attention on issues and events too far from home.

“Slouching Towards Berkeley: Socialism in One City,” presents a neo-conservative view of the town that some folks see as a symbol of progressive local government.

Writers David Horowitz and Peter Collier, whom the leftist press has reviled as apostates for abandoning their roots in Ramparts radicalism, paint an amusing (and largely convincing) portrait of a city whose farsighted delusions of political grandeur have led to near disaster in the here and now.

For the radical elite that rose to power in the ‘60s and ‘70s and now controls Berkeley politics, the university town on San Francisco’s East Bay is a “beacon” for other cities with a vision, including Santa Monica. But the writers argue that many residents--even those who remain true to their ‘60s ideals--”seem not to want to live inside a metaphor” anymore.

Berkeley has become what Walter Lippmann termed a “psuedo-environment--a place governed by a fictionalized version of reality,” the authors contend. Driven by the unofficial slogan, “Think Globally, Act Locally,” the Berkeley City Council has established sister city programs with towns in Nicaragua, El Salvador and with a black township in South Africa. But potholes go unpaved and a growing homeless population spends nightmarish nights in the increasingly dangerous People’s Park, they write.

The real “Berserkeley,” as the authors see it, is a place where blacks move out in disgust over their white brothers’ and sisters’ effete posturing, and young white bourgeoisie use the money saved on rent control to feed cash registers in the red-hot “gourmet ghetto” that has flourished since Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse opened.

Anyone who has been to Berkeley (or Santa Monica, for that matter) will appreciate some of the jabs Horowitz and Collier land on the lunacies that crop up around any political agenda. Other times, though, their sneers seem misguided. The Berkeley schools may be in a shambles--most urban schools are--but what’s so silly about using “Little Red Riding Hood” to teach kids ways to avoid violence?

“The contest between those who want Berkeley to remain a psuedo-environment and those who want to turn back toward reality is a fierce one,” they write. They don’t say whether the reality some critics hope to return to is the one in which school lunch programs list catsup as a vegetable.

Tips on Interacting

Readers with a taste for separate realities may want to take a peak at the February Cosmopolitan, a unique realm where the fact that the percentage of women in the workforce jumped from 34% to 51% in the last 20 years means “more opportunities for interaction of all kinds” (read sex ).

With that in mind the trembling fingers of professional women across America will doubtless turn immediately to the Special Bonus Section on “How to Attract Men Like Crazy,” where they will touch upon tips such as:

* “Spill a glass of wine (water whatever) down the front of your dress while talking to him. Ask for his handkerchief to mop it up.”

or

* “If you have good legs, wear a very tight short skirt and very high heels. Bend over with your back to a man (to pick something up or look in file drawer, etc.).”

Given Cosmos’ long history of printing such wisdom, it’s no wonder that this month the Folio Educational Trust asked Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown to join Henry Luce of Time magazine, Harold Ross, co-founder of the New Yorker, and other magazine luminaries in its Hall of Fame.

Irrational Affairs

The Feb. 9 issue of Rolling Stone features Irrational Affairs editor P. J. O’Rourke’s report from Northern Ireland.

O’Rourke’s reportage makes Ireland sound almost as dangerous and senselessly violent as Los Angeles. What’s really interesting, though, is that O’Rourke, who some critics have accused of a sort of xenophobic ethnocentricity, if not racism, confronts in the Irish-- his own kind. And he finds them at least as stupid as he found the Korean rioters, Philippine guerrillas, Russkis, Poles and Afrikaners he has made fun of in the past.

As he portrays them, the Catholics, with their “socialist cant,” seem most disturbed about such matters as the fact that “Englishmen own exclusive fly-fishing rights on Irish trout streams.” The Protestants, who tend to spout “capitalist bumf,” “are very frightened of popery, which might seep into their houses through the cracks beneath the doors and suddenly quadruple their number of dirty, unemployable children.”

The Irish he interviewed on either side “didn’t disagree about anything you’d kill anybody over unless you really wanted to,” he concludes. “And if you’re Irish you do.”

As for agreement, “Agreement is something the Irish can always overcome.”