The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS - Notwithstanding the armies of social scien-tists in our midst and the valorous bands of investigative reporters scouring the land, one sordid inequity remains stubbornly...
...Good sports all over Australia rose up on December 14 to cheer Mr...
...On he lunged, piling malapropism atop malapropism, distractedly looking up from his prepared text to discover the assembled Poles convulsed in laughter, then manfully trudging on until the thing was finished, and he was assured of being known as the most thundering hind ever to bloviate in the land of the kielbasa...
...In Minneapolis, a young man carrying a copy of How To Succeed With Women With Witchcraft by Warlock and wearing a black shirt, black pants, black knee-high boots, and a black cap was arrested as he wriggled to free himself from the hole he had kicked in the apartment door of a would-be female convert...
...A vision of the hell Alaskan life might one day become was provided by the state's learned junior senator, Mr...
...Incredibly enough FDR never even responded to the letter and may, in fact, have laughed at it, for the four-term president was known to laugh a lot, particularly late at night when all the lights were out in the White House and all that could be heard was the wind whistling through his wife Eleanor's ears...
...During these days Jimmy Carter and his colleagues proved themselves to be the legitimate heirs to the Marx Brothers...
...At the Shah's New Year's Eve party in Teheran he took aboard two glasses of wine and turned embarrassingly weepy...
...While making a grand entry atop her fabulous motorcycle-borne piano, she grasped a fan's upstretched hand, let out her inimitable disco shriek, and rode on, leaving the unfortunate fan flattened with a massive coronary and almost no chance of enjoying the evening's performance...
...Light was shed on the sources of conflict in Cuban-U.S...
...Fortunately, such political repressions are not going un-noticed, for from the Netherlands Mr...
...Nevertheless, Good Housekeeping reported that its readers had made Anita Bryant, the seething anti-pederast, the winner of its 9th annual Most Admired Woman Poll...
...Consider the events of Decmber 1 through January 14...
...After a year of incomparable absurdity the commentators stand with hats over hearts, ignore Carter's every botch, and extoll him for his remarkable capacities as a political campaigner, viz.: his amazing aptitude for dissimulation, exaggera-tion, and bogus passion...
...In Chicago, police booked Mr...
...At any rate, Mr...
...Elvin Small, an absent-minded attendant, turned on a nearby window fan, blasting Mr...
...still, the mis-adventure was reported in tones indistinguish-able from those reserved for chronicling debate on welfare reform or the opening of a new federal building...
...Coos Huijsen of the Federation for Free Human Partnership has issued an elegant admonition condemning this climate of "rampant discrimi-nation," especially as it affects homosexuals...
...The tide of intolerance that allowed the Massachusetts Senate on December 2 to sustain that state's 280-year-old statute against blas-phemy is cresting across the Republic...
...relations when it was discovered that in 1940 FDR refused 12-year-old Fidel Castro's polite request for a $10 bill...
...The hidden injustice of American society remains not that we are manipulated by the rich and the powerful, but that we are yoked by an elite that is without humor and, in point of fact, downright hostile to it on moral and intellectual grounds...
...In India he astonished government officials by insisting that he be photographed in an impoverished village...
...In the Philippines, a gunman holding 14 hostages suffered the painful humiliation of being hood-winked by his captives and shot to death...
...Some highlights...
...Arshad Ali Bisvas, the 85 -year-old possessor of Bangladesh's longest beard, was accosted by Pakistani soldiers who sheared off four inches of his beard when they decided that the 50-inch growth violated Islamic law...
...Thomas Reginald Jones, the 55-year-old pensioner from Brisbane who broke all existing records by being hauled before a magistrate and convicted of drunkenness for the 1,460th time...
...Jimmy's response was to add the absurd oaf to his travelling retinue, and off they went on his comic nine-day, seven-nation tour of the globe...
...No sooner had she opened his urn than Mr...
...And from Bangladesh comes word that one of the country's priceless treasures sustained perma-nent damage during that country's 1970 war with Pakistan...
...Amal Ghorbal, lawful wedded wife of the Ambassador from the sovereign state of Egypt...
...The generally progressive drift of the countries of the Third World suffered a dis-maying setback in December when Jean-Bedel Bokassa tilted his country toward neo-conservatism by having himself crowned His Imperial Majesty Bokassa I at an admittedly radiant $22 million ceremony in historic Bangui, now the Rome of the Central African Empire...
...Wilford Lam-bert, 32, for murder after his defenestration from a third-floor window of an unidentified glutton who had eaten Mr...
...The young Cuban, who would one day become George McGovern's favorite dictator, made the request in a letter recently discovered in the National Archives...
...A renowned child psychiatrist, the former assistant head-master at an exclusive boys' academy, a teacher at the school, a consultant in psychology at the Lindamen Center for Mental Health, and eight others have been arrested for rape, sodomy, indecent assault, and other so-called "un-natural" acts against children...
...Mastering the thesis that we live under a tyranny of the humorless antiquates Marx and places one on the threshold of the deepest kind of insight...
...Ted Stevens, who warns of TV violence and "advertising aimed at young people to stimu-late them to get grown-ups to buy products...
...Miss Patty Hearst's purse containing $400 and house keys was stolen from the van of a San Francisco policeman assigned to protect her...
...Still more proof of how close America came to slipping under the totalitarian veil during the ghastly Nixon years was provided on December 10 when 61 red-blooded Americans, just re-leased from Mexican prisons, revealed that their convictions on charges of drug smuggling were another element in the fiend Nixon's heinous plan to undo our liberal democratic edifice...
...Brassard all over the terminal, soiling Mrs...
...and finally he attempted to whisper abrasive diplomatic instructions to his Secretary of State only to discover along with an aston-ished collection of newsmen that the mysterious object in front of him was an open microphone...
...during a state dinner he was harassed by a common housefly necessitating the profes-sional services of Prime Minister Desai's official fly swattist...
...At the month's beginning Ham Jordan, at large in Georgetown, was caught with his hand upon the pectoralis major of Mrs...
...Appre-hension was expressed for the continued rich-ness of Alaska's cultural life when it was divulged that television is replacing drinking as the citizenry's chief diversion...
...Intimations of the catastrophe appeared earlier in the year when 23 villages got their first tubes, and now the indigenous intelligentsia are fleeing their bar stools in immense numbers...
...According to reports received in western capitals on December 31, Mr...
...Brassard's brand-new Roberta di Camerino dress, and in-ducing in her an embarrassing sneezing spell...
...And just how superior Soviet socialism is to American capitalism was clear for all to see when short-sighted bank robbers in the capital of Soviet Armenia absconded with over $10 million in rubles...
...never-theless Charlie Chaplin died...
...THE CONTINUING CRISIS • Notwithstanding the armies of social scien-tists in our midst and the valorous bands of investigative reporters scouring the land, one sordid inequity remains stubbornly inaccessible to practitioners of social justice, to wit: the over-whelming influence wielded over the com-monality by an establishment of essentially humorless minds...
...Rita Brassard has carried the ashes of her husband on all her travels, but on December 19 calamity struck at San Fran-cisco International Airport when she paused at a snack counter to rearrange his ashes...
...At any rate his meeting with Egypt's President Sadat went smoothly enough, but then he was only in Egypt for 59 minutes...
...Thanks to a spectacularly inept translator, Jimmy's arrival speech in Poland will be put down as the most hilarious ever delivered by an American president on foreign soil...
...Evidence of disco star Grace Jones' capacity to wow an audience was provided in a whopping dose at a Cleveland discotheque...
...In New York, four pious teenage devotees of witchcraft were clamped in the calaboose for practicing their faith with bones allegedly pilfered from the local golgotha...
...During a Paris meeting with the head of the French Socialist party he attempted to pass himself off as an American edition of Trotsky and sent the Paris stock market tumbling 2.5 percent...
...Such is the subtle genius of the Soviet system that this, the largest bank robbery in Soviet history, improved the robbers' position hardly at all, there being absolutely no place in the Soviet economy to spend their loot...
...After earnestly notifying the assembled Polish dignitaries that he had aban-doned America forever, he soared into his human rights spiel, assuring them that he understood all the sexual desires of the Polish people...
...And in Boston, some of the most distinguished child molesters in the nation, men of fine breeding and notable accomplishments, are being shamelessly ha-rassed by the local carabinieri...
...For five years Mrs...
...Castro has never mentioned the rebuff, though it is apparent that he would still like that $10 bill...
...Not since Harding has a president presided over a staff so pro-digiously ludicrous, yet the press reports their hijinks with strenuous decorum...
...Lambert's bologna sandwich without authorization...
...RET The American Spectator February 1978...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
