Editorial / Reflections on a Merry State
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial / Reflections on a Merry State" A few ribald quips having been excised, the following diatribe was loosed at New York's St. Regis Hotel on the occasion of a dinner celebrating the tenth anniversary of The American Spectator. A...
...He stopped writing English around 1975—but what a salubrious sex life...
...There is not a pharmaceutical company in the country I am unfamiliar with...
...In the early afternoon of 1 September 2nd, 1939, as millions of lives were being thrown into tragic and unexpected pother, as careers and relationships were being dizzied in a whirlwind from which they would never recover, one man's life was taking on a dazzling new purpose...
...Our course was as clear and well lit as Norman Mailer must have been the night he essayed to disfigure Gore Vidal's dainty muzzle...
...LSD and other chiliastic movements vouchsafed only by Changing Your Address...
...McGovern' s unswerving devotion to wrong policy has been a public service...
...Now his transmigration is complete...
...Hill watched in amaze-ment he strode to a cupboard behind the First Lord's desk...
...Carter, the Warren Gamaliel Harding of the Post-Watergate Morality...
...Neo-conser-vatism...
...They are more often than not on the left, and there they are more stupen-dously obnoxious, absurd, and dangerous than any rube ever seen...
...so is Bob Nisbet) were ever to give up that tobacco cloud that hovers over him, his life would be thrown into immediate peril...
...Howls of vaticination and bogus salvation continued to sound in the hinterland, and now they were heard in cities too...
...An issuer of volupt and glorious moonshine, he even had the same enor-mous dome, of a kind by all rights hairless and by all means brainless...
...During such times those who participate and do a competent job really do not deserve applause...
...Anyway, it was clear for all to see that the likes of Jerry Rubin and William Sloane Coffin were at one with every snake-oil salesman who ever dustied his feet in the ghostly regions of east Tennessee...
...After nearly a decade of derision and isolation, Winston S. Churchill had sud-denly been resurrected by history and made First Lord of the Admiralty...
...Now this is perhaps a digression, but it needs to be said...
...All this is a direct result of vigorous physical exercise which, along with the claptrap about the urgency of a good sex life, is the modern equivalent of the 1920s fad of taking "an apple a day to keep the doctor away...
...My joints creak, my limbs ache, and food makes me nauseous...
...Please attach the address label from the most recent issue of your American Spectator in the space below...
...We have had an opportunity to maintain a forum that, along with the other publica-tions represented here tonight, presents the most accurate analysis of world conditions today, the most thoughtful cultural criticism, and the most promising solutions to our present malaise...
...But I grow thirsty...
...As with Bryan he issued nonsense of course, and, also like Bryan, he actually believed his nonsense, which made him all the more entertaining and occasionally even touch-ing...
...Such ignorance of a man who has done so much for world agriculture is worrisome in the extreme, causing us fellows at the White REFLECTIONS ON A MERRY STATE (continued from page 4) and all the parallels have been drawn, it is enough to say that we are left with Jimmy Carter, a chaste and forward-looking Harding...
...Then there has been Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the flipside of Amy Semple McPherson, but the same violent and prehensile record...
...illicit science...
...Even the peace movement looks today, upon reflection, as nothing more than a suburban fad, and the kids have moved from marching to jog-ging...
...We at The Ameri-can Spectator had no control over our subsequent decade of public service...
...How he does remind me of the author of Bambi, and so he will be known to history...
...We are the neo-intelligent of the party of liberty...
...Frankly, when poor George made that shocking suggestion during the 1972 campaign, I was under the impression that it was simply campaign oratory for the new politics—the new politics equivalent of kissing babies...
...And Gore Vidal...
...Never does he pick up a pen without writing turgid bile chastising a man for being too successful or for being a failure, or making some other idiotic point...
...My maxim has been: "Do precisely the opposite of whatever McGovern thumps for, and you always know you will do your country no harm and might even do it some good...
...God how I wish he had lived to see the beautiful accomplishments of his youthful disciples, the darlings of the 1960s, the autistic , tramps of the seventies —Squeaky Fromme, Patty Hearst, and so forth and so forth...
...There are epochs too perfect to be the work of human schemes or human botches...
...Fanaticism was back in season...
...A full report can be found on page 41...
...All they have to do is follow the flow and at the end of a day's good works they can wink at the havoc around them and glow with the merry muse who put them up to it, It seems to me this has been the fortunate history of The American Spectator, and for us to gather here tonight in search of applause would be a trashy thing [APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE, fulsome and spontaneous...
...Box 877 Bloomington, Indiana 47401 (Please attach address label here...
...Through this idiotic decade we have seen more tawdry fads flame out than in any period in our history: sexual revolution proclaimed by grim quacks, solemnly promising a pure heart, a serene pysche, and a sparklingly clean prostate gland through coitus perpetuus...
...Look at Bob Nisbet...
...He was a model Republican until sometime in 1969 when he fell into the arms of an intellectual cutie from Haight Ashbury and juvenesced until, by 1973, I could never read the classified section of the New York Review of Books without thinking of him...
...Had he made that state-ment to someone at the bizarre Democratic convention that nominated him, he might have found himself locked in a passionate and unusual embrace...
...The map was on the wall...
...Marx and Lenin have been undone by the promise of California...
...Kathleen Hill, at his side, roared up to Admiralty House, a building that he had not entered for more than 24 years, having been banished from it at the height of the Dardanelles crisis of May 1915...
...Hill called a dramatic gesture he threw it open...
...Powell: How about getting Jimmy busted for smoking dope...
...A sex change operation...
...It was a wondrous moment in a wondrous life, a life that must have been fashioned by a very superior storyteller...
...I am a physical disaster zone...
...He looks like a man of mid -40s—and in truth he was 92 years old last Saturday...
...GWP effects it can have on your heart and lower spinal column can be irreversible...
...Be sure to include the line of information above your name...
...A sizable percentage thought he was President Nixon's appointee, while others identified him as "Larry Flynt's brother-in-law," "the Perry Como of country music," and "the winner of the Kentucky Derby...
...We are a growing force in America today and we are enjoying our work—who could ask for anything more...
...q Please renew my subscription for one year ($10.00...
...women's liberation, homosexual liberation, and now animal liberation...
...At such times it is as though events have been choreographed eons ago for the amuseEDITORIAL Reflections on a Merry State R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...My neurologist is with me tonight, and as soon as this talk is over I intend to apprise him of a numbness that is gently climbing northward from my left foot...
...There are lives like that, lives marked with drama, stupendous luck, and uncanny neatness...
...More violent disagreement.] The What can we do to get youth interested in Jimmy...
...He made the choice of right policy easy...
...On that busy afternoon Churchill sent word to the Admiralty...
...This curious figure was taking up a role few dreamers would have, theretofore, guessed possible for him...
...Oh hell, why go on naming names...
...Idiots and rascals set themselves up for the pasting they have gotten...
...The only real difference with the battle map of today is that the charlatans, the fanatics, and the idiots are no longer purely amongst the provincials...
...I am in a constant state of ill health, and am known to every mortician in Bloomington...
...Consider Garry Wills...
...Plunkitt: Recent German studies claim that an immense number of German teenagers are ignorant of Adolf Hitler...
...Hardly a day has gone by in the past 25 years during which I did not swim one to five miles...
...Around the world the Board of the Admiralty signalled the British Fleet: "Winston is back...
...I thank Ron Burr...
...There are a whole range of gimmicks one might use...
...According to the German press, one young man claimed he was the designer of the Bauhaus chair and the "greatest dancer of his day...
...Proceeding to the First Lord's Room, he flung open the door, and as Mrs...
...But those who sniffed a fish when they encountered the 1920s superpatriot would have easily identified John Gardner for the slippery fellow he was...
...We have run through an obses-sion with Eastern mysticism, encounter sessions, est, organic foods, vitamin binges, and so forth...
...Now I know the following revelations will be put down as controversial...
...What about having him join a rock group...
...Neo-intelligence according to Arnold Beichman and to that I agree...
...What we discovered was not good...
...ours was not to quibble or to fuss, but to get on with the chore of pinning the tail on the various donkeys as they grazed so complacently and glut-tonously across the land, and to take advantage of every loophole in the Ameri-can system of libel laws...
...They thrive with the cosmo-politans...
...The whole thing was laid out for us on heavenly drawing boards...
...Biting the heads off chickens on the White House portico...
...There stood McGovern, the Bryan of his time...
...But the buffoonish McGovern has of course not been the only jackass in place on the map...
...There are moments in history in which everything suddenly appears preternaturally in place, and in which the protagonists recite their lines and play their fabulous roles according to benign impulses beyond their control...
...A young Christian Democrat called him "the broth-er of Dr...
...the intellectual curiosity of our youth is amazing...
...Let me say it here and now—all these simpletons jogging towards eternal youth, jogging from the bony grasp of the reaper —they are shortening their lives with every step...
...Con-servatism...
...They made more money but we had more fun—and we did more good...
...In the late 60s charlatanry was being practiced on the most awesome and enormous scale ever envisioned—but this was merely because the charlatans had taken note of the marvels of modern marketing...
...I thank the Baron for putting this together despite ailments even beyond my own, and I thank you all, and charge you to take on the most gifted bartenders we could find in all New York City...
...There was the childlike farceur Paul Goodman, the Stuart P. Sherman of his time...
...Print your new address and mail this form to . The American Spectator...
...That evening Churchill, in top hat and greatcoat and with his secretary, Mrs...
...He has unwittingly educated me to all the proper limits of government, the fragile condition of dignity, freedom, and prosperity, the importance of defense, the value of a productive, relatively unfettered economy, and the imperative of never, never telling a heckler to kiss one's gluteus maximus...
...We are not responsible...
...They are more populous, and because of our proud, pluralistic society, they have more angles to play...
...ment of some other-worldly host and for those few blessed mortals who have the brains and the spirit to enjoy the show...
...Violent disagreement from the audience.] Don't ever jog and for God's sake avoid sex...
...He would be arriving later that day to take possession of his office, and to fill the First Lord's chamber with clouds of Jamaican cigar smoke and reverberations of his Edwardian oratory...
...And look what it does to the mind...
...Cordially yours, Jody Powell Dear Mr...
...This worries us, for, as the saying goes, youth is America's proverbial future...
...He's in the pink...
...q Payment enclosed q Please bill me (please print) Name Address City State Zip Date of change X71 House to poll American teens about Jimmy...
...If Irving Kristol (who is about to light up a cigarette...
...Thanks to the eerie conditions of the last decade different strains of intellect are here tonight...
...To one young person he was "the oddball of the Carter family...
...The same kinds of idiots were holding forth as had held forth in the twenties...
...Twelve percent identified him as Billy Carter's twin brother...
...When writing to us about your subscription, always attach your address label or print your name and address exactly as they appear on your address label...
...Today charlatans are better educated, as are their clients...
...All the louts were in their places...
...Bill Buckley will protest and ask for my citations...
...Their acts are fore ordained...
...So only allow me to say that our job has been easy...
...The American Spectator is the only journal of ideas in America with its own practicing physician on the premises at all times...
...With what Mrs...
...The fact looms large...
...Old liberalism...
...As I say, the map already hung on the wall...
...He tells me he has never spent an hour exercising...
...now I play two hours of handball, lift weights, and run...
...What we are here for is the opportunity to put on a communal glow with so many of the mortals who have put us up to our mischief...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Circulation Department P.O...
...avant-garde culture—what's dreadful is instructive...
...Some lives are kissed by friendly gods, some are kissed twice and allowed to live in special times...
...We walk arm in arm with the gods...
...The same kinds of messiahs were striking grave poses in Washington, and their sonorous tosh was not new...
...When all the names have been trotted out (continued on page 38) Dear Dr...
...Rudolph Hitler and a lifelong pro-ponent of staunch lederhosen...
...Sure, I have the heart of a bull elephant, but it pumps blood into an anatomical wasteland...
...Important: allow six weeks for address change...
...I thank Judy, my wife...
...There behind the paneling was a large map showing the disposition of all German ships just as they had been on the day Churchill had left the Admiralty in 1915— the map had remained miraculously un-touched for over 24 years...
...What brings us together...
...I am a lifelong athlete, and I spend more time with doctors than with my wife...
...With Wills exegesis is always difficult...
...George Will—who wanted to be here this evening, but he is a jogger and, this is the truth, he has pneumonia—will likewise protest...
...Who would have believed it possible...
...When the Baron, Ron Burr, and I tripped into our first editorial offices, so many decades after Henry Mencken's withdrawal from magazine journalism, we found the battle map was on the wall and it was not much different from the map that Mencken had left...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
