Correspondence
C 0 R R E S P 0 N D E N C E To the Editor: It is not my purpose here to comment on the merits or demerits of Karl O'Lessker's review of George Nash's book, The Conservative Intellectual...
...O'Lessker's speculations), was a viable Republican majority...
...O'Lessker [see August/September Correspondence] to the crack of doom, may I have one more waltz...
...By saying "literary," I have in mind that mysterious acumen which, from Homer to Solzhenitsyn, has been successful in delineating the shapes of what's around us and in us...
...We, in the new Rockford College Institute, will be keeping watch on these peculiar fallacies...
...It is why we would tend to fondly castigate Mr...
...qlliamson replies...
...Hasn't Mr...
...I work for the RT because I particularly loathe psychiatrists, whom I consider a separate species--one having as much in the way of benevolent instincts as a pack of hydrophobic mandrills...
...George Edinger London, England To the Editor: Edith Efron's "TV, Conservatives, and the First Amendment" [August/September] is an eloquent defense of free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment...
...As to the poster, the graphic began as a nocturnal scribble done in a fit of "ennui" before the prospect of yet another Late Late Late Show...
...Not long ago, John Updike published a novel entitled A Month of Sundays, in which the Liberal-Protestant numbness was presented as victimized progressive sensitivity, and in which he lamentably confused human necessities with human prerogatives, as it the banality of evil were equivalent to the banality of sin--an unpardonable error for both a theologian and a litterateur...
...However, it is my purpose to disagree with a single statement of Mr...
...This was in reference to the Russian pogroms after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, and I fear it is too typical of the sort of arrogance that makes Americans so little beloved in Europe...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 39...
...He mentioned the piece of work as if he did not quite believe it had been done by a woman, or it it had, as if it was being displayed as a woman's work for feminist reasons...
...Still others (and I will be one of these, unless the GOP has nominated Ronald Reagan by the time this appears) will leave the Republican Party once and for all, and seek to fashion a new vehicle which can, on some happier future day, truly represent the broadly conservative impulses of a majority of the American people...
...Nellie Kendall Irving, Texas To the Editor: On my pledge not to stretch out my epistolary controversy with Mr...
...Keep plugging away with your nickelsworth...
...I know only too well what it feels like to have to send in a piece to a magazine spuriously: I do it all the time...
...while loathing WASPs is--welt, not quite what the English call PLU (People Like Us...
...I quote: "Consider 1968: running against a quintessential liberal whose own party was in shambles, with the nation torn by years of Vietnam and race riots, the respectably conservative Richard Nixon, at the head of a united and heavily-financed party, barely managed to eke out a win...
...The author, however, has mixed up her cast of characters...
...Contrary to what you may believe about anyone who does work for.the RT, I am not a feminist lesbian, I allow men to pay for meals, and I have, on occasion, been known to display bigotry...
...25 cents a word...
...They do not need the First Amendment...
...Judith A. Greenberg New York, New York Mr...
...I'm delighted to learn that a feminist hetero has achieved at least token representation at The Radical Therapist: you must be as a breath of fresh air in the editorial offices...
...O'Lessker's broad personal political experience to overlook...
...Usually my pieces are accepted spuriously, too--a fact of which the editors become aware only when they receive a lot of hot letters from the readership...
...The intellectual electricity ever generated between Kendall and Buckley was, to my knowledge, always laced with a great deal of personal regard for each other even though the chances of one not speaking to the other in any particular week were excellent...
...and they know that...
...Be careful, however, about scribbling things in fits of ennui...
...It would be wearisome to detail how, in every field, these immigrants 38 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 repaid their debt to the land of their adoption...
...On the other hand, there are hundreds of very articulate Americans, including Edith Efron, who are most anxious to correct the errors made daily by the Gatekeepers...
...Leopold Tyrmand Rockford, Illinois To the Editor: "There was nothing for the Jews to do," writes Max Geltman in his [June/ July] review of Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers, but go to Socialism or America...
...colonels...
...We have no "Gentlemen's Agreements" here and no "restricted" resorts...
...That will-o'the-wisp has been eluding conservatives for 44 years--and it will keep right on eluding them for another 44, if necessary...
...Stillman for not aiming at more and more and more...
...People of the Irish Persuasion also irritate me at times...
...A majority--perhaps a large majority--of the social conservatives will accept Jimmy Carter's warm invitation to rejoin the Democratic Party, and will stay there until and unless President Carter outrageously disregards their convictions and their hopes...
...Economic conservatives of the O'Lessker type will, for the time being, continue to vote grimly (and futilely) Republican...
...To imply that by their actions, the Gatekeepers are defending freedom of speech is sheer chutzpah...
...I readily agree that the "radical" press is conspicuousl), lacking in humor, l know from personal experience because every time I send out a non-serious piece it comes back like a fast boomerang...
...O'Lessker totally overlooks (or at any rate inexcusably omits to mention, in his account of the 1968 result) the fact that nearly 10 million voters cast their ballot that year for a third-party candidate, George Wallace That is quite a lot of votes for a man of Mr...
...CJ CLASSIFIED ADVERTISEMENTS REACH 45,000 READERS Starting next issue, The Alternative will be publishing classified ads...
...So, what I'd like to congratulate you on is Mr...
...According to John Leonard, true art is conceived in playfulness...
...For the moment, any practical hope of a conservative coalition is out the window in any case--two golden opportunities for it (one in the Republican Party after 1968, and the other outside it after 1972) having been incontinently thrown away...
...And it might be well to remind our American cousins that the great Jewish writer Sholem Asch, whom Max Geltman selects for special mention, chose after a spell of American exile to end his days in London--the only place, he claimed, where a Jew found real tolerance, and not least from his fellow Jews...
...Abe Kalish Silver Spring, Maryland To the Editor: In his review of " radical" magazines in your April issue, Chilton Williamson puts in his two cents about The Radidal Therapist, and specifically about my poster--in his view another manifestation of superserious feminist pandering...
...However, since I do not have a literary agent, I have a market problem...
...O'Lessker is convinced--I am tempted to say "determined"--that no conservative coalition can be built in this country...
...I suspect that outside the LNS graphics, the RT cannot get another artist worth a plug nickel...
...And anyone with a market problem cannot get an agent...
...Letting men buy you meals is surely a sign of psychic health, although detesting Poles and Bulgarians is merely in accordance with the Spirit of Helsinki...
...It is comparable to the judge who, having released an assailant on a technicality, lectures the little old woman who had been beaten to within an inch of her life that she is lucky to be living in a society of law, otherwise it would not be safe for her to go out into the street...
...I detest Poles, Bulgarians, WASPs, and retired S.S...
...ish soldiers...
...I offered them another illustration but too late and in vain...
...O'Lessker ever heard of the phenomenon of family quarrels that erupt from time to time, especially where father-and-son relationships are close but rambunctious...
...It can safely be claimed that no one has better materialized the inherent grotesquerie of mental deformations of the recently omnipresent man of cloth who embraced the naked truth of the Hustler magazine...
...Hence my "beautiful graphic...
...Send advertisements with full payment to: Classified Ad Department, The Alternative, P.O...
...Today a handful of Americans, the Gatekeepers, can say to tens of millions of Americans at any time anything they want even if it is untrue and subversive of all our values...
...The Alternative reserves the right to reject any copy for any reason...
...IVilliam A. Rusher New York, New York To the Editor: May I congratulate you on your moving closer to what seems to be the most trenchant need of the contemporary American culture--the literary -exposure of idiocy...
...For nobody dares challenge their awesome power...
...The First Amendment was designed to protect the right of any American to start a newspaper and disagree with government policy, without Congress passing a law to forbid the dissemination of such dissent...
...C 0 R R E S P 0 N D E N C E To the Editor: It is not my purpose here to comment on the merits or demerits of Karl O'Lessker's review of George Nash's book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, which appeared in your May 1976 issue...
...To say that the Gatekeepers are merely exercising their right to free speech is gratuitous...
...It consequently consecrates cretinism as humanness and with the help of friendly pop-mass-media, promotes moronicality as innocence and sincerity in Manhattan's East-Side Arcadia...
...It was sent to the RT spuriously and adapted by the staff as a cover-illustration...
...Where in heaven's name was the basically conservative majority that year...
...Yes, Chilton, there really is a "Judy Greenberg...
...O'Lessker's in this review--that William F. Buckley, Jr...
...I still think that's what's missing from underground journalism...
...What was missing in 1968, and will be missing again this year (to answer another of Mr...
...Please specify ad classification: Help Wanted, Positions Wanted, Books & Periodicals, Literary, Conferences, Personal, Miscellaneous...
...Box numbers $2 each...
...was "detested" by Willmoore Kendall...
...They are prevented from reaching the Gatekeepers' audience by being systematically kept off the publicly owned airwaves...
...As such, literature still remains man's ally, in spite of the current concer_ed effort of publishers and reviewers to reduce it to reporting on endocrinologieal secretions of an individual or an entire society...
...they seem subtly deliberate and we don't underestimate their impact on man and society...
...I am also not too fond of Albanians, Syrians, and Iraqis...
...Box 877, Bloomington, IN 47401...
...Since I am worth at least a plug nickel, I had to fill the bill...
...See "For the Love of Gob" in August/ September.] Chiding him for delivering a superb piece of writing seems incongruous, but what's needed is a novel--an attempt to revive the devastating fury of Swift, Voltaire, Gogol, or at least of an Evelyn Waugh...
...Jews came in waves to Manchester and Leeds and London, and their descendants to this day have, to quote our Chief Rabbi, "had nothing whatsoever to complain of," unless it be a coolness towards Zionism because it reached its goal by killing Brit...
...O'Lessker makes his judgment as an "outsider," I'm afraid...
...J. Whitney StiUman's splendid sketch (I don't know what to call it otherwise), and express regret that he did not complete more than two pages of print...
...It certainly takes tunnel vision of formidable severity for him to cite 1968 as the best recent example of his contention...
...They subsequently decided to use it for the poster...
...The answer, of course, is: split, as usual...
...Suffice it to say that we need not look far to find Lord Rothschild and Lord Melchett in the Labour Party, Disraeli and Sir Moses Montefiore in the Tory Party, Herbert Samuel and Lord Reading in the Liberal Party...
...12-word minimum...
...It has always puzzled me that the British, the most insular, not to say xenophobic, of nations, have always been the least anti-Semitic people in the world...
...As Willmoore Kendall's wife and as a person who assisted him with his work during the last ten years of his life, I must protest...
...It was natural for Jews persecuted in Russia in 1881 to turnfirst to a country that six years before had had a Jewish Prime Minister and leader of the Tory Party...
...Stillman has a precision of touch which transcends the popular satire and drills deeper, until it zeroes in on the very imbecility of the imbecile...
...And it just happens to explain what I am talking about when I speak of the desirability of a conservative coalition outside the GOP...
Vol. 10 • October 1976 • No. 1
