Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Vision Thing, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

In "The Vision Thing," Shaun O'Connell reviews a number of books whose subject matter is not merely the presidential election of 1988, but the impact of image politics in the age of the thirty-second sound bite. He quotes Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: "Just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work of [pseudotherapy], image politics empties itself of authentic political sustenance for the same reason."

The works discussed in this article include: All by Myself: The Unmaking of a Presidential Campaign, by Christine M. Black …

The Rise Of Urban Texas, Char Miller, David R. Johnson

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Texas contains three of the nation's ten largest cities, but their existence has not yet affected the hold that the state's rural heritage has on Texas' imagination--or so Texans' attachment to two nineteenth-century cultural landmarks, the Alamo and the Chisholm Trail, would suggest. As the shrine of Texas liberty, the Alamo continually generates elegies to the manly courage and bravery of the fallen heroes of 1836.