Spectator's Journal
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL First and Goal To Go A new movie has come along to cater to die masturbatory fantasies of the masochistic Left. Called North Dallas Forty, it purports to be an "expose" of...
...His characterization in the film is thus a commentary not only on religion in general but specifically on the Catholic Church as an organization...
...this we have from his two most distinguished intellectual supporters, James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...History teaches that when the ratio, which I have taken to calling the Pandolfo Ratio, reaches 3:1 the former leader is invariably decapitated...
...As our symposium this month [see page 10] should make clear, there is another generation of neoconservatives coming along, assuring that the concerns of older writers like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz will be around for a long time...
...The liberal is no longer a liberal...
...Wherever they have come from the neoconservatives have been vigorous and vigilant in facing up to these threats...
...Perhaps this is why he is in such a lather over the rise of the neo-conservatives...
...The inflation/popularity ratio, which can take decades to reach 1:1, thus quickly becomes 2:1...
...His strong point is character...
...Though highly intellectual and cosmopolitan, they seem far more in harmony with the Gallup polls than do the so-called liberals...
...To the so-called liberal this means war...
...Yet things have changed...
...Contrary to the sp-called liberals' denigrations, the neoconservatives are not an intellectual movement isolated by age...
...Carter's approval rating stands, according to the latest polls, at 19 percent...
...Thus, for the foreseeable future it will be most helpful,) The 5 percent rule was first demonstrated in Warsaw in 1318, when Prince Stanislaw Manglowicz had on his hands a depression so severe that inflation was but 1 percent and his popularity was 3 percent...
...Sportsmanship is nonexistent-if necessary, to protect your quarterback you deliberately break the leg of an opposing lineman...
...Arthur tells us that Chappaquiddick improved Teddy just as polio improved FDR...
...Indeed, a startling but inevitable mathematical development follows reaching the Point: The popularity rating immediately drops by half while inflation doubles...
...Called North Dallas Forty, it purports to be an "expose" of professional football...
...Thus we find the first qualification to the Pandolfo Rule: It only works when inflation exceeds 5 percent...
...What it unmistakably is at its deepest level is an "expose" of capitalism...
...These days he devotes himself to his life's work, which is to discover the relationship between the budget deficit and the number of Jane Fonda movies in any given year...
...Contrary to the denigratory howls of the so-called liberals, the neoconservatives are neither misanthropes nor elitists...
...Still, the world remains pretty much as FDR left it-or, if one is in a more radical humor, as the Wobblies left it...
...Pandolfo has donated his discovery to his fellow men...
...The neoconservatives are an important new American force, a force made all the more important because of the gross failure of the so-called liberals of the 1960s and 1970s...
...Then let us hear the so-called liberal wail over the "deadlock of democracy...
...Elliott Abrams unelected bureaucracies and to the courts...
...Particularly striking is the team chaplain: A mon-signor of the Roman Catholic Church, he is the most contemptible religious figure to appear on the screen since the bloodthirsty priest in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky...
...Rather, they are political descendants of James Madison...
...Thus, looking back over the last two decades, it appears that the so-called liberals have had many victories over which to purr and to lick their paws...
...To the so-called liberals nothing ever really changes...
...He no longer speaks for personal liberty, reasoned debate, fairness, expanded opportunities...
...Their war against meaning has been a success...
...inflation is at 13 percent annually...
...In their struggle against privilege they add the blacks, the browns, the women, the homosexuals, the handicapped...
...Among ancient Hittite tribes, at 5:1 the entire family of the former leader was exiled in perpetuity...
...When the farmers rose against him, he cried out, "My ratio is 1:3, better than Charlemagne's...
...And so on...
...He has, it is true, established Pandolfo Associates and a new subsidiary thereof called Pandolfo Resources (trading over the counter), but we all have to eat...
...But of course that's not really what the movie is about...
...I am therefore delighted to make known to the world the discovery of my dear friend Aldo Pandolfo, which reveals when a government will self-destruct...
...The coaches are heartless and brutal, the owners simply monstrous...
...Clearly, it will be but a few months before the Point is reached...
...Today it is merely mainstream liberalism...
...For the sake of brevity, this moment is known as the Pandolfo Point...
...And so, high on oath and full of duty they clap on their armor, pull their wash basins over their cocos, call their Sancho Panzas to arms, and resolutely advance on the enemy...
...At that level its message is that a player has to be either a cynical sellout (e.g., the quarterback) or a stupid hunk of beef (practically everybody else on the team) in order to survive...
...Players' minds are diverted from the desperation of their state by drugs, drink, and wild sex...
...The Point is reached when a leader's approval rating crosses the rate of inflation...
...There is but one recorded instance in which the Pandolfo Ratio exceeded 100:1...
...The threats may come from abroad, or they may come from within the United States...
...Not so many years ago North Dallas Forty would have been recog nized for the crudely-plotted essay in "socialist realism" that it is...
...Note, too, that he is not just a dumb kid fresh out of seminary but a middle-aged mon-signor...
...There is not the slightest hint or glimmer of humanity in any of the latter two groups...
...The players are the proletariat, the coaches and chaplain are the foremen, the owners are, well, the owners...
...Demons rise up...
...Soon his approval rating was down to 26 percent, but low inflation meant that his Pandolfo Ratio remained high...
...The neoconservatives favor the old liberal values, and do not ignore new threats to those values...
...Teddy Kennedy, who has told the New York Times' Adam Clymer that his economic policies differ little from those of Jimmy, will be their presidential candidate if the economy does not improve...
...Today, we are perilously close to reaching the Pandolfo Point...
...Yet everywhere they perceive new threats to their reigning vacuities...
...Hoover began with 1 percent inflation and 62 percent popularity, for a ratio of 1:62...
...Though these younger writers differ on some particulars, they are pretty much in accord that freedom, prosperity, and Western values are good things...
...Even the will of the people no longer receives his support...
...Needless to say, it has received ecstatic reviews in the nation's press...
...And so here we are, once again led by a liberal patrician struggling against malefactors of great wealth...
...But the crowd advanced and took out its wrath upon him...
...This is the origin of our term "expiingement...
...Further, they feel that meaning matters...
...If instead he is an intelligent, principled nonconformist (wide receiver Phil Elliott) or black, he will be exploited and/ or destroyed...
...Onward they slog full of weird declarations and fortified by illogic...
...And what an amusing spectacle the 1980s will present, when the so-called liberals strike out from their redoubts in the bureaucracy and the judiciary to thwart the taxpaying Americano and his neoconservative publicist...
...This is the origin of our term "mangle...
...In that example, which occurred among the Pung of Borneo, the former leader became the object of a devil-worshipping cult and all his followers and their families were banished from their village and from the oral history of the Pung-men...
...So much for the reformers' pretensions to democratic fervor...
...President Kennedy, with 5 percent inflation and 54 percent popularity, had a ratio of 1:11...
...KO'L The Pandolfo Point Only a few times in a century do we discover a truly great sociological tool...
...But let us be clear that the Pandolfo Ratio is by itself no guarantee of popularity...
...To take a brief historical excursion, President Eisenhower had an average Pandolfo Ratio of 1:24, with 3 percent inflation and 72 percent popularity...
...Conspiracies multiply...
...At 4:1, his ancestral home is burned...
...The team chaplain is a loathsome hypocrite...
...No government in recorded history has reached the Pandolfo Point and survived...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
