Lewis H. Lapham

In February 1968, Lapham was the only journalist allowed inside the Ganges River compound where The Beatles, Mia Farrow, Donovan, and other icons of the 1960s gathered to meditate at the feet of of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In intimate prose, Lapham chronicles one of the pivotal moments of pop culture. It was the ultimate 1960s scene: the ashram in Rishikesh, India, where the Beatles, Donovan, Mia Farrow, a stray Beach Boy, and other 1960s icons gathered along the shores of the Ganges-amidst paisley and incense and flowers and guitars-to meditate at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

"Dissent is democracy. Democracy is in trouble. Never before, Lewis Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties, and by an ever more concentrated and profit-driven media in which the safe and the salable sweep all comfortable truths from view." "In the midst of the "war on terror" - which makes the hunt for Communists in the 1950s look, in its clarity of aim and purpose, like the Normandy landings on D-Day - we face a crisis a democracy as serious as any in our history. The Bush administration makes no secret of its contempt for a cowed and largely silenced electorate, and without bothering to conceal its purpose the government coordinates "not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy but the protection of the American plutocracy from the American democracy."" "Gag Rule is a call to action in defense of one of our most important liberties, the right to raise our voices in dissent and have those voices heard."--BOOK JACKET.

"Nothing will be the same after September 11th. This is the wisdom, offered and widely received since the announcement of the war on terrorism: a permanent war declared on both an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. But in Theater of War, Lewis Lapham shows with customary intelligence and wit that the recent imperial behavior of the United States government is perfectly consistent with the practice of past administrations.". "Finding skeptics in the battle against evil has been a rare achievement. For example, as Lapham points out: "Ted Koppel struck the preferred note of caution on November 2 when introducing the Nightline audience to critics of the American bombing of Afghanistan: 'Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight. You don't have to listen.'" Unpopular opinions seldom make an appearance on the network news, and during the months since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the voices of dissent have been few and far between. Lewis Lapham is an exception. Almost alone among mainstream political commentators, he has had the courage to question the motive and feasibility, as well as the imperial pretension, of the Bush administration's infinite crusade against the world's evildoers."--BOOK JACKET.

"In Hotel America, Lewis Lapham draws a portrait of a society at a loss to know what to think or make of itself at the end of a century once defined as America's own. His observations speak to the moral and intellectual confusions visited upon the American ruling elites - in the media and the universities as well as in business and government - during the years 1989-1995. The spectacle is both comic and sad, a march of folly that calls forth Lapham's unique range of talents as an essayist - clarity of mind, acerbic wit, a thorough knowledge of American history (both ancient and modern), a sense of the absurd, a gift for the apt word and memorable phrase. Drawn across a broad canvas of incidental and scene. Lapham's sketches take as their occasions events as different from one another as the wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf, the apotheosis of Richard Nixon and the transfiguration of O. J. Simpson, the grim inspections of the American soul conducted by the agents of both the pious left (no smoking cigarettes, no dirty water in the swimming pools, condoms in the schools) and the zealous right (no serial murders in the movies, no lesbians in the army, prayer in the schools), the media's use of history as wallpaper and elevator music, the dwindling significance of President Clinton (vanishing as mysteriously as the Cheshire cat) and the bombastic arrival of Newt Gingrich ("a man for all grievances"), the practice of swindling the stockholders and the art of changing gossip into news."--BOOK JACKET.

For the better part of twenty years Lewis H. Lapham has sketched the American social and political landscape with a fine sense of history and a sharp and caustic wit. In The Wish for Kings, his most provocative book to date, Lapham obliges us to take a long hard look at what has become of our hallowed democratic tradition. Although we like to believe that we live by Lincoln's famous words - "government of the people, by the people, for the people"--We have become accustomed to a government by and for the friends of privilege. The promise of democracy is synonymous with the idea of the citizen, but to people who have grown tired of self-government the belief in kings and queens and fairy tales replaces the will to engage in the rude and often uncomfortable arts of politics. Lapham notes the effects of our distaste for objection and dissent - an apathetic public debate, 90 percent of the wealth in the hands of 5 percent of the population, the media and the universities united in their defense of oligarchy - and discusses at length the ways in which a courtier spirit (the obverse of the democratic spirit) subverts and weakens the hopes of a free republic. It is a discussion that has particular relevance to the present moment. If the wish for kings is as old as Babylon and as modern as the worship of Hollywood celebrity, our 1992 presidential election translated the wish into nineteen million votes for H. Ross Perot. Frightened by the weakness in the economy and dissatisfied with the wisdom in office in Washington, a sizable percentage of the electorate embraced in the figure of a Texas millionaire what it imagined to be the comforts of autocracy. The question remains as to whether the enthusiasm for Perot was merely an angry protest against a government that had arrogantly distanced itself from the American people, or whether it expressed a more general longing for a magical figure capable of quieting all our fears and answering all our prayers. The question is an urgent one, and it defines the task of the Clinton administration. Unless President Clinton can sustain the public faith in the practice as well as the theory of Democracy, it is possible that the idea of democratic self-government will come to be seen as a once noble experiment no longer adequate to the specifications of the twenty-first century. The several facets of this question come into brilliant focus in this important book by one of our most incisive social critics. No one who cares about the future of our nation should miss reading The Wish for Kings.

A collection of essays and sketches which illuminate the political and cultural spectacle of the Reagan and post-Reagan years and interpret American manners and morals in our time. Grouped under the headings: Arts and letters ; politics and economics ; states and governments.

A GOLDEN GIRL . . . . Melissa Abbott, head of the junior class, co-captain of the cheering squad, has it made - or so it appears to the rest of Forest Hill High. Pretty, smart and popular, she has a car of her own to drive, a closetful of pretty clothes and Tank Robertson, superjock and glamour boy, crazy about her. She's got to be the happiest girl in the world, right? Wrong! But she's going to do something about it. There are times when being Fortune's Child just doesn't do the job. [text from book jacket]

"America's leading essayist on the frantic retreat of democracy, in the fire and smoke of the war on terror. In twenty-five years of imperial adventure, America has laid waste to its principles of democracy. The self-glorifying march of folly steps off at the end of the Cold War, in an era when delusions of omnipotence allowed the market to climb to virtual heights, while society was divided between the selfish and frightened rich and the increasingly debt-ridden and angry poor. The new millennium saw the democratic election of an American president nullified by the Supreme Court, and the pretender launching a wasteful, vainglorious and never-ending war on terror, doomed to end in defeat and the loss of America's prestige abroad. All this culminates in the sunset swamp of the 2016 election--a farce dominated by Donald Trump, a self-glorifying photo-op bursting star-spangled bombast in air. This spectacle would be familiar to Aristotle, whose portrayal of the "prosperous fool" describes a class of people who "consider themselves worthy to hold public office, for they already have the things that give them a claim to office.""--

Includes essays and literary works by Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Clarence Darrow, John Kenneth Galbraith, and H. L. Mencken as well as an essay by Henry L. Stimson (P.A. 1883) on the decision to use the atomic bomb. Contains primary source material.