Editorial / A Prophet in Exile
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. A former Georgia Governor--a Biblepounding Baptist--is President of the Great Republic. A Boston Irishman is Speaker of the House of Representatives. A...
...Ringling's Big Top, today he is trumpeted by the great publishing houses and invited to tour the cultural Chautauqua circuit from Harvard to Cucamonga, California...
...The Profs underlined...
...So speaks Professor Charles Reich today, seven years after writing his memorable monograph, The Greening ofAme~'aa, a modern classic in cultural forecasting...
...If ever the forces of reaction heard such noble statements issuing from our Charlie they would have ammunition enough to destroy the Army of Decency forever...
...Such sentiments...
...Ralph de Toledano Technically informed, lively and polemical analysis compares the risks of nuclear power to those of its alternatives, concluding that it is safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented...
...Never mind that people were criticizing the family lives of English workers and Irish immigrants for exactly the same weaknesses perceived in black families...
...Our era abounds with such overnight luminaries momentarily cashing in on visions of apocalypse and tales of unsurpassed iniquity...
...This is pretty poor stuff...
...A higher conception of equality requires an understanding of what people ought to be as well as efforts to make them so, even if those efforts mean acknowledging existing differences...
...I have enclosed $10.95 per hardback, $5.95 per paperback...
...I believe he is being given it because the very boldness and breadth of his last book were simply too much for the culturati...
...Later he practiced with Arnold, Fortas & Porter, the prestigious Washington law bordello...
...Timothy Leary, Dr...
...Now he has published his sequel, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef, and attracted not a peep oflaudation, though this book is even more thunderingly moronic than Greening...
...I am unwilling to overlook injustice, cruelty, and oppression...
...When Charlie did that he mortified a large number of America's cultural entrepreneurs...
...Science News At once a useful handbook of nuclear basics and a biting refutation of the Naderites...An instructive, entertaining book that deserves the widest possible audience...
...Overnight, crazy Charlie was the new Plato...
...To: THE GOLEM PRESS Box 1342-T, Boulder, Colo...
...6 by 9; $5.95 softb., $10.95 hardb...
...Perhaps its lucubrations never jolted the unlettered, but Greening was learnedly dissected on all the talk-shows and even Rotarians heard tell of its prophecies...
...Witty, highly informative, thoroughly documented, caustic...demolishes the myths, distortions and outright falsehoods of the anti-nuclear crowd...
...Not even reviewed in T/se New York Review of Books...
...by the late 1960s it became apparent to all that the experience had idiotized him...
...I cannot in good conscience live in a country that imprisons people, humiliates them, degrades them, or ignores their basic humanity...
...There are no women in the Senate...
...M. Stanton Evans Dr...
...One way to achieve equality is to discard standards, in the absence of which all men are necessarily equal...
...College boys read him, and a squadron of butterflies took off in their tummies...
...As a cultural phenomenon Charles Reich has assumed room temperature...
...Today one has a better chance of finding good sense and generous sentiment in the corner barbershop than at practically any cultural redoubt...
...Yet not even The New York Review of Books has given Charlie a nod--an unusual event that, for this famous review is given to celebrating worthies like Charlie regardless of their future prospects...
...Such talk was "elitist" and reflected "ideological currents that assigned inferior status to nineteenth century blacks, women and working class men...
...In short and in sum, Charlie had access to practically all the benefits chic liberalism could shower on a young man--an elite education, access to elite institutions, power, ease, and the New York Times with breakfast...
...His every word was quoted...
...But by Gutman's statement, the possibility, not the actuality of separation precluded stable family life...
...The Sorcerer is an autobiographical account of Charlie's discovery of Consciousness III, the sudden awareness that finished off bourgeois America...
...This is no mere cultural quack...
...They fail for tales of terror and images of utopia, and whereas in an earlier era our Charlie would have been given an animal bladder and sent to perform under Mr...
...But it is only by denying the validity of applying external tests to black culture that he can claim that the black family was not damaged by slavery...
...I cannot accept living in a country where people feel powerless to affect their lives...
...Never mind that family stability probably is identical with civilization, as Freud thought...
...Through all these years he gained no sympathy at all for the scarcity of economic goods, the fragility of political liberty, or the importance of lives led outside the public sector...
...synd...
...I want nothing to do with a country that oppresses the people of any other country...
...Natl...
...This is not to say that there are not civilized people to be found amongst the culturati, but such people are assuredly the exceF21,n...
...The fact that slaves knew the names of their parents tells us very little about the virtues and vices of slave family life...
...Moynihan and Gutman do not differ on their facts...
...Yet the culturati tire, and poor Charlie was soon left high, dry, and ranting...
...On the face of it there seems to me to be evidence of a curious conspiracy against Charlie...
...He wrote Greening, and gained wide fame...
...One day Charlie would harangue on behalf o f " t h e kids," the next day he might air his obsession with Brooks Brothers, whose suits were "scratchy" and "interfered with the free movement of my mind...
...But that is all beside the point for Gutman...
...Having done that, he will argue that slave culture and families were not "weaker" than their white counterparts, and that such judgments are the result of the racist application of white standards to black creations...
...I do not want to live in a country where there is such pervasive cynicism, corruption, and betrayal of its own dignity...
...Worse still he had a rhetorical quirk that was especially horrifying...
...He cites an 1870 editorial in The Nation and sniffs that "' The Nation identifies sexual restraint, civil marriage and family 'stability' with civilization itself...
...At one time this book was more intensely talked about than the Bible or any sex manual ever written...
...Even weaker is Gutman's insistence, based on plantation records, that slave children were often named after their grandparents, and that this phenomenon showed the strength, resilience, and autonomy of slave families and culture...
...In the midst of the most lunatic discourse he would suddenly gain his composure, clear his throat, and launch a pious declaration along the lines of the following from The Sorcerer, (page 244 for the scholarly disposed): "The major goal of my own work is fundamental, political change...
...And so poor Charlie is to be entombed in a conspiracy of silence, a quack undone not only by his own quackery but also by the cowardliness of his erstwhile press agents...
...Natl...
...And those words were not only idiotic, they were pristine ritualistic liberalism...
...This deserves scrutiny...
...Ship to: The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 33...
...A PROPHET IN EXILE (continued from page 4) a hunger for power, Charlie went to study law at Yale and clerked for Hugo Black...
...Senate...
...Therefore I want to bring down this system, and replace it with one responsive to human needs...
...It had the power of a primal event which had to be accepted with wonder and awe...
...I saw it more deeply at Yale, 1967-70...
...Daniel Ellsberg, and the gifted Berrigans...
...No doubt Gutman believes that he is serving the cause of equality by declining to use his data to judge black families...
...God knows it was potent stuff in Winnetka, Illinois, and how it did invade the universities...
...More than one Jaycee gave up the pursuit of Mammon to follow him, and his prognostications of pandemic whoopee were even entered into the Congressional Record...
...Nationally syndicated columnist John Lofton Shows, in great detail, that nuclear energy is significantly safer than any alternative source of energy--including those we are using now...
...Mein Gott...
...Raised in Manhattan's toney East Eighties by a father and mother who adored the New Deal, Charlie was given his foundation in New Class philosophy at Oberlin...
...Most of the cuhurati are chic liberals who devoutly believe in Charlie's personal philosophy of hedonism, selfabsorption and juvenescence...
...Ringling's Big Top Perhaps there was a time when the average Americano was indeed a poltroon and a sap for any fabulist intent on working him over, but times have changed...
...Now forecasts of social change generally fetch the culturati even if the forecaster is a has-been...
...He does wish to show that slaves had a culture of their own...
...Beckmann's lucid and readable book should be in the hands of every concerned American...
...but few would be so artless or so reckless as to harangue for all of it in one book...
...Charlie was one of the most formidable quacks ever loosed in those purlieus...
...Then Charlie sank from sight and from mind...
...How has such a prodigious metamorphosis occurred...
...National Review The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear BY PETR BECKMANN (University of Colorado) [] Fellow of the IEEE Editor and Publisher of Access to Energy 190pp., ill...
...In the 1960s he began teaching law at Yale...
...Not only that, he scared hell out of them...
...There ~as a sense of dawn, of daybreak over the land...
...College girls read him and wept...
...He became a friend and disciple of William O. Douglas, whom he calls "the Sun God himself...
...It is an editorial writer for The Nation saying his morning prayers...
...In it he prophesies even vaster revolutions for America, and he includes helpful hints on how the reader can prepare for life in the forthcoming era...
...It is in his conception of equality that Moynihan differs from and is superior to Herbert Gutman...
...Old ways of thinking had become entrenched, obsolete, and finally desrructive...
...Spontaneously, almost accidentally, a large number of people discovered that they could change...
...synd...
...Full of zeal for reform and (continued on page 33) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 by Gutman that on plantations from which slave family members were not sold away, slave women often had all their children by one man...
...His perfumed and voluptuous visions were not long missed, however, for A Prophet in Exile American culture is colossally fecund nowadays...
...Notwithstanding the fact that the Republic's more knowledgeable reviewers greeted it with a general roll-of-the-eyes, university professors from diverse disciplines made it essential reading in their classes...
...Those who compose the rule are overwhelmingly ignoramuses adept in the most preposterous hysteria...
...Surely he is not being ignored because his early celebration of hedonism slipped so rapidly into the narcissism inhering throughout The Sorcerer...
...One of the New Age's most celebrated prophets spotted the stirrings of this historic change early, and he has meticulously chronicled the whole gorgeous process: "I saw new consciousness first in Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1967...
...It is Senator Edward Kennedy...
...Garry Wills and Gore Vidal on retainer for the sole purpose of whooping it up everytime a travesty like The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef comes along...
...Most accept a politics that grafts the idealism of Mao Tse-tung to the realism of Eleanor Roosevelt, and most desire that our foreign policy be based on the programs of the New York City Department of Public Welfare...
...But equal to what...
...Colorado residents please add tax...
...He acknowledges that "Antislavery critics had many good reasons to complain that as a social system, slavery weakened the slave household...
...Furthermore, as Charlie's career richly suggests, they fall for their own hocus pocus, and it foozles them beyond repair...
...What The Enemy could do to the liberal endeavor if they ever drew this connection...
...There are fewer women in the Ninety-fifth Congress than in the Ninety-fourth...
...They could grow by expanding their minds and opening up to new ways of thinking...
...I remember this as a time of incredible excitement and discovery, of opening up to unknown realms and corridors, lights and colors, undreamed-of places in the mind and the feelings...
...I believe Charlie is being given the old snub...
...It changed me and changed my life...
...It actually keeps connoisseurs like Dr...
...A Southerner and former Ku Kluxian reigns supreme as Senate Majority Leader...
...I even doubt that his latest confessions to a life of pederasty, a belief in magic, and a passion for "cookies and milk," brought him into his present low estate_ Such passions are common amongst the culturati, though most of its members were initiated into them in a different sequence than poor Charlie, who admits in his latest work never to have experienced any sort of coition until the grey age of 44--two years after the publishing of Greening!--and then only with a "male model" who charged him $25 and took a $10 gratui W. Women's delights he savored two years later...
...Charlie is the paradigmatic member of the New Class...
...Thus, after a decade of prophecy and prayer, we enter the New Age, the New Politics, the New Consciousness...at last the Change so fervently spoken of throughout the last decade...
...Nor is he being passed over because of his metaphysical maunderings over rock music, dope, and John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State, a book which apparently influenced him as deeply as I'm OK, You're OK...
...It is George McGovern on the floor of the U.S...
...80302 Rush . . . . hardbacks . . . . paperbacks of The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear to the address below...
...Today at least as many frauds ply their trade as ever ministered to the boobs of the 1920s, and their snake oil is infinitely more amusing and edifying for they labor amongst the tin-pot intelligentsia...
...Remember if you can those dizzy transients of yore...
...Such midnineteenth century cla.~ and sexual beliefs reinforced racial beliefs about Afro-Americans...
Vol. 10 • March 1977 • No. 6
