Orthodoxy

Who's Who in America" lists 18 O'Malleys, none of them from Baltimore. Eight are in law, five in science or medicine. Surely the editors will want to include the first to be named Martin, the first to be in mayoring.History, to be sure, has its O'Malleys. Tops, perhaps, would be Grace O'Malley, the pirate. In the 1500s, she "plundered British merchant ships off the stormy Connemara coast," her husband helping; later she met Queen Elizabeth I "as equals." The church has its O'Malleys: Father O'Malley in the films "Going My Way" and "The Bells of St. Mary's.

NORTH COUNTY High School's Parent- Booster Club has picked a catchy name to attract you to an annual event. The Beary Best Christmas Craft Show is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the school, 10 E. First Ave. in Ferndale.Michele Keeler, chairwoman, said 70 craft dealers will have many unusual items for sale. They will include personalized mailboxes, butterfly houses, filled baskets, cat and dog beds and personalized children's books with your child's name inserted throughout the story.

LISTEN carefully to the keening in Republican ranks after this year's election, and you can hear a distinct echo of the Democratic lament during the party's darkest days of the 1980s.After the massacre of 1984, when President Reagan won 49 states in a record-setting re-election, Democrats still controlled 34 governorships, three more than Republicans do now. As they picked through the wreckage, smart Democratic governors such Arizona's Bruce Babbitt (now the Interior secretary) all asked themselves the same question: Why are my party's national leaders sinking like lead in the same states where we're golden?

MOSCOW -- When Pastor Vladimir Dyamko had his microphone snatched out of his hand and was forced off an auditorium stage by a Russian Orthodox priest last month, he knew his Seventh-day Adventist Church's lease was up.Officials in the small town of Gagarin in western Russia canceled the church's lease on the auditorium and told Dyamko he couldn't preach on public property until he got "permission" from the Russian Orthodox Church.Even six years after Russia's new constitution called for freedom of religion, many of Russia's far-flung provincial authorities haven't gotten the word yet.And they won't, if the Communist-dominated Russian Parliament has its way.A new federal law that is expected to pass the State Duma, lower house of Parliament, today would severely restrict the activities of "nontraditional" churches.

"Straight, No Chaser," by Leslie Gourse. Illustrated. Schirmer Books. 368 pages. $30.Jazz musicians, almost alone among performing artists, have had consistently bad luck with their biographers. Where those ,, who chronicle the lives of conductors and ballerinas, pointillists and prima donnas, bring often telling hands-on experience to the task, jazz artists seem ever at the mercy of what they themselves call "the civilians."This is lamentably true of "Straight, No Chaser," a new biography Thelonious Monk.

PAT BUCHANAN'S smashing victory over Phil Gramm in Louisiana exposes deep ideological differences between social conservatives and economic conservatives in the Republican Party.As he heads for next week's all-candidate Iowa contest, Mr. Buchanan touts himself not only as a "conservative of the heart" but the "Huey Long of the Nineties." He is a populist, protectionist, isolationist, ultra-nationalist and an enthusiastic baiter of big business -- in other words the antithesis of Republican orthodoxy.

HAVANA, Cuba -- Warning of what it described as a campaign by the United States to "deceive, confuse and dismantle" the Cuban revolution, the Cuban Communist Party has called for greater ideological and economic orthodoxy, threatening "severe punishment" for those who fail to comply.Party leaders also sharply criticized features of the limited opening of the economy in the last three years that has rescued the Cuban economy from the brink of collapse, demanding increased self-reliance and discipline instead.

Paris -- There is gathering resistance to that economic orthodoxy which says the marketplace can and should set our priorities in social policy, and which believes that maximizing global trade is the way to produce the greatest prosperity for all.The religion of markets has given us the school of management which declares return on investment the primary criterion of corporate value and considers work-force layoffs and transfers of corporate production to...

God, says Paysach Diskind, is in the midst of his latest miracle.And Mr. Diskind wants in on it.When communism fell in 1990 and the former Soviet Union began allowing Jews to leave -- nothing short of a miracle, says Mr. Diskind -- thousands of Russian Jews began arriving in Baltimore.Mr. Diskind has made it his business to meet just about every one of them -- not to peddle insurance or sign them up for English classes.He says: "I want them to be good Jews."A former salesman for the phone company, Mr. Diskind now works full time trying to make good Jews out of people who grew up under a system that said there was no God.He began his work as a free-lance volunteer after visiting Russia in 1989.

"Strawberry and Chocolate" ventures into uncharted regions, the zone of connection between straight and gay males, notable for an absence of etiquette and an excess of awkwardness. To this it adds yet another level of complexity: a totalitarian cultural milieu in which homosexuals are axiomatically scorned as politically unreliable.Sitting at a table near a Havana ice cream stand, orthodox, rigid young David is feeling blue. The woman he loves has just married a man she doesn't love, because that man's prospects are better in the depressed economy.

WASHINGTON - -As the nation mourned the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on Wednesday, President Barack Obama and members of Congress began to size up what the loss of the legendary deal maker and the liberals' most powerful voice will mean for Democrats as they seek to redirect the nation's domestic and foreign policies. Shell-shocked but not surprised by the end of Kennedy's yearlong battle with brain cancer, many Democrats worried that no one could fill his shoes as Congress moves toward a crucial juncture in the drive to overhaul health care - his lifelong passion.

Erica Jong, the writer who schooled a generation about women's desires and the pleasures of commitment-free sex, has some new bits of knowledge to impart as she pours her passions into grandmotherhood. The secrets to staying young, she told a full ballroom at the Sheraton Columbia Hotel on Tuesday, are laughter, cardio, yoga and teaching the next generation. The other recipe -- aside from sex -- is grandchildren, she said. "Generativity" is the stage of life where one invests more in the next generation than in oneself, she said, adding, "I want to point out that very few people get to that."

It was 50 years ago, schmoozing at a deli with friends over a kosher corned beef sandwich, that Jacob A. Max hatched the idea for a synagogue for a growing Jewish neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore. Since its inception in 1952, the Liberty Jewish Center has moved a couple of times, absorbed other synagogues and changed names. It has seen its share of peaks and valleys. But Max is still at the helm. What he founded as the Liberty Jewish Center in Howard Park is now called the Moses Montefiore-Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation in Greenspring.

WASHINGTON -- That was one mushy pie in the face that now former Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords inflicted on President Bush in one of the most historic and significant defections ever from a political party. Mr. Jeffords, in his customary mild-mannered fashion, cast his reasons for leaving the GOP to become an independent in terms of disagreements with the party, not just Mr. Bush. But the practical effect of his action is to throw a huge monkey wrench into Mr. Bush's plans to deliver a conservative agenda reminiscent of the Reagan years.

NEWS OF the death of Gus Hall was a lead item on Moscow's independent NTV television this week. And why not? During the chilliest days of the Cold War, when American mainstream political visitors were rare, the Kremlin always welcomed the longtime leader of the U.S. Communist Party as a head of state. I met Mr. Hall a couple of times in Moscow in the late 1980s. By that time, the Soviet Union's game was pretty much over, but he was still whisked around in a black limousine. It was all make-believe, of course.

IT SEEMS AS IF the major presidential candidates are running more for the schoolhouse than the White House. George W. Bush brags that he has visited more than 100 schools so far. Al Gore has promised weekly, all-day school visits during the campaign. Both proclaim K-12 education as the No. 1 issue. That's no surprise, since that's how voters rank it. But what is revolutionary is the nationalization of school politics. Only a few years ago, local control of schools was sacred political dogma.

Once again, the Jews are victims. A new wave of post-Holocaust Jewish intellectuals has revised the rules for remembering their 6 million dead. Silence and muted utterance, this movement insists, are the appropriate modes of expression. This revisionist position denies Jews access to the healing process through redemptive expressions of grief. Until now, such catharsis has found voice in literature, music, painting and sculpture as a source of relief from unremitting pain. Ironically, the new orthodoxy is reminiscent of the policy of stunted speech and restricted expression that was rigidly enforced by Nazis in the death camps.

WASHINGTON -- Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that, if correctly decided, will strengthen First Amendment freedoms of speech and association, and demonstrate that much of John McCain's strength in the primaries resulted from state election laws inimical to those freedoms. The question at issue is whether California's "blanket" primary abridges the freedom of individuals to associate in political parties that serve as their right to express their chosen philosophies.

Who's Who in America" lists 18 O'Malleys, none of them from Baltimore. Eight are in law, five in science or medicine. Surely the editors will want to include the first to be named Martin, the first to be in mayoring.History, to be sure, has its O'Malleys. Tops, perhaps, would be Grace O'Malley, the pirate. In the 1500s, she "plundered British merchant ships off the stormy Connemara coast," her husband helping; later she met Queen Elizabeth I "as equals." The church has its O'Malleys: Father O'Malley in the films "Going My Way" and "The Bells of St. Mary's.

LISTEN carefully to the keening in Republican ranks after this year's election, and you can hear a distinct echo of the Democratic lament during the party's darkest days of the 1980s.After the massacre of 1984, when President Reagan won 49 states in a record-setting re-election, Democrats still controlled 34 governorships, three more than Republicans do now. As they picked through the wreckage, smart Democratic governors such Arizona's Bruce Babbitt (now the Interior secretary) all asked themselves the same question: Why are my party's national leaders sinking like lead in the same states where we're golden?