An Inclusive Litany

5/31/99

Rodney King has been arrested yet again, this time for spousal battery, child abuse, and vandalism.

In a New Yorker article that was long enough to tell the story of wheat, John Lahr focused on legendary director Ingmar Bergman's "lifelong struggle to fend off the ghosts of his past,"—his ability to take "dark feelings" and "call them out into the open" in the richly autobiographical films for which he is renowned. Lahr examined Bergman's somewhat eccentric personality, his often chilly family relations, and his womanizing.

Yet nowhere did Lahr mention another ghost from the past that Bergman recounted in his 1994 autobiography: that along with many among his family and friends, and until his mid-thirties, Bergman was a fervent Nazi sympathizer. Visiting Germany before the war, he admitted participating enthusiastically in Nazi rallies. After the war ended, he came to believe, "like so many others" in neutral Sweden, that the Holocaust was an Allied propaganda device. Even well into the 1950s, Bergman entertained the idea that Hitler and Churchill were at least morally equivalent. Somehow, all that did not rate.

[Ed.: How Woody Allen manages to idolize the guy deserves its own probing psychological inquiry.]

The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights circulated draft guidelines penalizing universities that use SAT scores, on which blacks and Hispanics do not score as well, as a leading criterion when making admissions decisions. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which broke the story, "the guidelines would establish a high burden of proof for institutions to show that [SAT-weighted] policies do not violate anti-bias laws." Panicked administrators were initially told they had only four working days to comply with the new requirements.