Editorial / The Worst Book of the Year
Tyrrell, R.Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL - THE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR Every year this renowned watchdog of American culture lobs the garland toward that writer who, by virtue of bad character,...
...I laugh out loud when I see such headlines as "France Raises Taxes To Forestall Recession" (the joke is that without taxes there would be no recessions...
...how do you set prices.., mumble mumble mumble...
...But those who thought they might fetch the affection of the North Vietnamese are now making heavy weather of it...
...Shawcross will receive Robbins' complete works in handsome, pre-owned, paperbound volumes...
...And so they are in a fever to exonerate themselves by further diabolizing their opponents...
...Wills studied in a Catholic seminary where he read the Greek classics and Catholic theology...
...Yet the 1970 incursion came considerably after North Vietnam's invasion...
...Novak is himself a Catholic theologian, the assertion t h a t " liberation theology" mixes well with the Catholic idea of justice appears all the more incorrect...
...Soon it became a matter of dogma with the mesmerized that Southeast Asia could be no worse off than under the American military presence...
...How many people reading this could confidently answer the curious Chinamen...
...Savorless prose alone is not sufficient...
...The Americans have not been near the scene of the crime since March 29, 1973...
...I doubt Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington columnist and Washington editor of Harper's...
...Despite his furious conjuring with documents and the bugaboos of his fellow adepts, no intelligent reader will doubt that the party preeminently responsible for Cambodia's destruction is the party that invested eastern Cambodia with troops, coerced the Cambodian army to truck supplies to them, and then brought in (continued on page 39) C A P I T O L I D E A S EASY MONEY AND HARD Nineteen seventy-nine was the Year of Economics as far as I Was concerned, the dismal science quite agreeably matching my pessimistic nature...
...How do you set prices...
...Shawcross's honor to he held at the V/omen's Christian Temperance Union drinking fountain on the west portico of the Monroe County Courthouse in Bloomington, Indiana...
...What Mr...
...The reason for this oddity is that the price mechanism continually avails itself of literally tens of millions of very elaborate calculating machines which work about 16 hours a day...
...A s winner of the coveted Harold Robbi~.s Award for V/orst Book of the Year, Mr...
...How does one manage to win this award...
...I hope they will agree...
...that it is understood by one person in a thousand, desl~te its simplicity...
...More recently the same kind of snivelers have tried to work such miracles on the Marxist bonecrushers...
...Box 972, Ashland, Oregon 97520...
...Novak clearly demonstrates that the Pope is not receptive to "liberation theology...
...They are called brains...
...To swallow Shawcross's thesis takes a greater act of faith than to have believed in Hanoi's virtue a decade ago...
...William Shawcross's Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia fulfilled these high standards...
...in Commentary magazine (J~ mary 1979) that the Catholics were the only large, established American Christian denomination which retained a concept of sin more stringent th~in "not caring enough...
...one asked...
...Elsewhere he says they gained their popular strength from their alliance with Sihanouk...
...Their offensive had rolled westward, and on April 18 they were reported to have taken control of all northeast Cambodia...
...between the cause of inflation (too much money printed) and its effect (price increases...
...Like all clocks, a political clock is only useful if it keeps the correct time...
...Richard C. Phillips Atlanta, Georgia QoooIoo*ooQoe=o~IoaIIo~ooooooooIo*G~oIoooij~o===~Q*ooG~*o~a4og~IooI~'Ioooa~ogooot~oeI~oo=~o~to**Q~otr THEAMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 39...
...On the very next page he claims there was no North Vietnamese offensive eight months into Nixon's first term...
...DIAL-A-WORD, Box 144, Chatham, PA 19318...
...On page 130 he mentions that before the American incursion "the North Vietnamese moved westward into Cambodia with the apparent intention of securing their lines of communication...
...A peculiar feature of the price mechanism is that it works perfectly well even though those using it, businessmen and their customers, could no more describe how it functioned than they Could explain the folkways of Outer Mongolia...
...While I can understand liberal bias against Catholicism, I was surprised to see such sentiments displayed on your pages in a letter from Mr...
...Chesterton pointed out that since a clock is a piece of human construction, it "can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour...
...Send $9.50: ARDMAN GALLERY, P.O...
...Hand your child the first clue...
...An elaborate and bogus scholarship is heaved up, arguing that Western defense budgets affright the Marxist doves and force them into the lugubrious business of arming...
...Wills admits to a "retarded" political childhood...
...The award has had an immense influence on the literary world...
...I'll send you 100 rhymed clues, enough for many treasure hunts, for $3.00 postpaid...
...Rabelais should remain the only picture over my bed...
...Past Robbins Laureates Theodore V/bite, Peter Schrag, Lillian Hellman, Robert Coover, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., head the list of invited dignitaries...
...And what were North Vietnamese lines of communication doing lying across "neutral" Cambodia...
...Based on what I have seen in Sideshow, I do not doubt it...
...The faithful issued testimonials to the romance and idealism of Hanoi...
...Our most renowned novelists are of the magnitude of E. Phillips Oppenheim...
...Quite an impressive case for a "ceremonial and symbolic" monarchy...
...Here is another of Shawcross's botched theses: Cambodia was neutral ground not to be violated by the Americans who were being assaulted from it...
...Pay yourself first and invest in your future...
...The results of their extravagance are being felt today all around the world...
...I t took a colossal act of faith to side with the North Vietnamese against the Americans...
...In the text itself contradictions abound...
...Daniel MacGregor Chicago, Illinois Blatant Bigotry Arthur Schlesinger has stated that anti-Catholicism is the last bigotry which liberals have been allowed to maintain...
...Whoops of anguish are let out over the imperialism of the West, and the rapacity of its bourgeois gnomes...
...they called for an American defeat--"Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF Is Gonna Win...
...To have to endure such dreadful propaganda as Sideshow and all the attendant guff with which quacks like Prof...
...Charles O. Harris, P.O...
...Upon turning its last pages I was reluctantly sympathizing with the Georgetown Metternich...
...Pursuant to this goal they rise up in praise of the Marxist ideal, though the Marxist means are duly hemhemmed...
...Mouths gaped open in response...
...LiUa further opines that the Catholic idea of justice (which he does not define) "mixes quite easily with such things as 'liberation theology' and nuns with chubby legs playing guitar while singing anti-war songs during High Mass...
...this is a complete non sequitur...
...Moreover, there is the constant suggestion that the author is hellbent on bamboozling...
...APWP, Box 28594, Sacramento, CA 95828...
...Arnold Beichman (August 1979...
...Many disagreed with the war on legitimate grounds, and without suffering the delusion that Hanoi's war of conq.est was a war of liberation...
...PROFIT through Investment...
...Such bigotry should not be accepted by true conservatives...
...E D I T O R I A L THE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR Every year this renowned watchdog of American culture lobs the garland toward that writer who, by virtue of bad character, tastelessness, artless stupidity, or some other minor defect, has written "The Worst Book of the Year...
...All the invincible and inscrutable forces that have clanked and goose-stepped through this century have at first been conjured with in this way...
...Our Day and Generation: The Words of Edward M. Kennedy Edited by Henry Steele Commager, with a Foreword by Archibald MacLeish This book provides a very accurate vision of the world as seen through the eyes of a very nice little girt...
...For my part, I am glad to forgive and forget...
...Another of his key points is that the aforementioned American "incursion" forced the Vietnamese to go deeper into Cambodia than was their intent...
...Surely Shawcross knows this...
...Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard celebrate it is too much...
...On page 109 Shawcross mentions a captured enemy document's references to a 1969 North Vietnamese spring offensive...
...Complete instructions included...
...Lilla is nothing but blatant bigotry...
...It did...
...The thing will not wash...
...Information $3.00...
...This book is a h o / t u b for the aching conscience, and if it does not offer new gods to pant after, at least it gives fresh reason to fear and revile such Lucifers as Kissinger and Nixon...
...I am convinced, after much surreptitious THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 5 MISCELLANEOUS TREASURE HUNT CLUES...
...ABC, Box 1507/TR3, Kingston, Canada K7L 5C7...
...Otherwise, Sideshow is a mere tract of laughable intensity and shoddiness...
...Another attempted assault like this, and I will be hanging a picture of the former Secretary of State over my bed...
...Ummmmm...
...WIN UP TO $10,000,000...
...I began the book harboring a profound and well-informed disrelish for Kissinger...
...Rumors now circulate that Shawcross actually misused the thousands of documents he received through the Freedom of Information Act...
...But there are limits even to my Christian charity...
...It is not unlike black magic...
...Completely new, unique opportunity...
...I offer a bargain: I shall not point the finger at any living dove for his past imperfections if the doves will promise to spend no more time calumniating Kissinger...
...For those, like Worsthorne, who worry about putting the clock back, a nation which regularly jumps its clocks forward and back should no more fear a monarchical instauration than a return to Standard Time...
...The award will be presented at a ceremony in Mr...
...Lilla then ascribes such "political retardation" to the fact that Mr...
...As to his assertion that the Catholic idea of justice mixes well with "liberation theology," I would refer Mr...
...As time went on they grabbed strych4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ' FEBRUARY 1980 nine' and snakes and became as hysterical as any faith-healer in an Arkansas hollow...
...America can either welcome a monarch in through her front door, like a long-lost relative, or have Big Brother come through the back window, like a thief...
...Lilla's inclusion of the reference to "nuns with chubby legs playing guitar while singing anti-war songs during High Mass" is religious bigotry (unless, of course, Mr...
...Some journeyed to the enemy camp, some scolded American POWs, some became apologists for the invincible Communists...
...A monarchical instauration would be well within the American tradition, as Virginia was the first of Charles II's domains to restore him in 1660...
...They are living through a crisis of faith...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 36) The magnetism of the Royal Family lies, as Peregrine Worsthorne writes of Prince Charles, precisely in "being endowed with ordinary qualities at a time when ordinary qualities are as rare as gold and as beautiful as works of art...
...Based on Shawcross's own evidence, it is apparent that, of all those involved in Cambodia, these men were probably the most benign in their intentions...
...I draw Laffer Curves on paper napkins, patiently p6int out the difference between tax rates and tax revenues, quote Jude Wanniski (who is a tad optimistic for my taste), lecture people on the diff e r e n c e - b i g difference...
...Thus we see man, through p r a y e r and ritual, forever attempting to placate the gods and thereby dissuade them from gobbling him up, from raining fire on him, from exalting his mere flesh with a swastika, liberating him with a hammer and sickle, raising his taxes, and so forth...
...All these attributes are helpful, but to win The Worst Book of the Year award, one must rise above the flotsam and jetsam and produce a book that states unctearly and unmemorably a thesis that ranges from the untenable to the imbecilic...
...They by Tom Bethell were eagerly trying to learn all they could about capitalism, their great new discovery...
...Lilla reports that Mr...
...Liberal bias against Catholicism is easily understood because of its strong stand in favor of personal morals and against "situation ethics...
...It would take a special sort of genius to prove Shawcross's case that the people who fought Communism in Southeast Asia were responsible for its ravages, and Shawcross is no genius...
...Indeed, this vast public unconcern strikes me as constituting a threat to the Republic...
...ONLY $2.95 plus phone number...
...Alice Rivlin...
...Box 572, Gettysburg, PA 17325...
...Always decrying the corruption of Hanoi's enemies, they called for peace...
...This assertion by Mr...
...Our authors of non-fiction are punier still, and only a few of them can take refuge in the novelists' occasional alibi of insanity for art's sake...
...2,187 ways to "dial" your telephone number...
...The Vietnamese still slaughter and starve Cambodians...
...The only reason that explains Mr...
...In the end he actually leaves Kissinger looking dignified and intelligent...
...In short, I go around boring people to tears, such is the general level of indifference to economic theory...
...George McGovern and the various quack profs who encourage him hope to placate those mysterious powers in Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi...
...Sideshow is Shawcross's attempt to diabolize Kissinger...
...So much so, in fact, that it has now become de rigueur for the Republic's leading review of books, the New York Times Book Review, to open its pages almost exclusively to bad books and to encourage worse...
...Lilla to Michael Novak's article "Liberation Theology and the Pope" (Commentary, June 1979...
...The first clue leads to the second, the second to the third, and so on until the last clue leads to the treasure...
...Since its inception, the quantity of bad books published on these shores has suffered a large and gratifying increase...
...Lilla has an unusual fetish...
...They THE HAROLD ROBBINS AWARD Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross HONORABLE MENTION The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong This book provides a very accurate vision of the Supreme Court as seen through a proctoscope...
...Despite this industry0 these calculating machines arenever included in any inventory of economic resources and are, in a sense, invisible...
...Again, how many people understand the consequences of price controls...
...Like early man creeping through foresty habitats hoping to win over the author of thunder, men like the Hon...
...It is doubtful that the best-seller list in Bulgaria contains more trash...
...Lilla's letter concerned the book Confessions of a Conservative by Garry Wills and its review in The American Spectator by Mr...
...In that article Mr...
...South Vietnam is a conquered and pillaged country...
...Lilla's anti-Catholicism is made explicit when he states that while "the Catholic idea of justice has had its impact on the American political tradition, Protestant individualism has been a much more potent force, and an American conservative must be willing to accept and work within that tradition," (My italics...
...Not only did the author fail to prove his thesis...
...Nor is weak conception, a public-relations agent, or an implausible or asinine subject...
...With theory neglected, economic practice is left to the manipulations of left-wing academics, charlatans, professional economists, the eager handmaidens of politicians, just plain ignoramuses, and people like Dr...
...And it was with many hosannas that they greeted Sideshow...
...The attack continues...
...Results guaranteed...
...Cambodia has become a vast charnel house...
...by R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . Throughout history timorous men have contrived to enter into alliance with the dark and horrifying forces they deem in control of the universe...
...Consider, if you will, the price mechanism--the central nervous system of a market economy...
...It is manifest that the "Catholic idea of justice" is totally unrelated to nuns playing guitars...
...It is an old story...
...Mark T. Lilla (October 1979...
...There are boat people, and in Laos mustard gas is rained on Men tribesmen...
...are about as responsible for the destruction of Cambodia as Roosevelt and Eisenhower were for the World War II damage to Holland...
...Penna...
...religious intolerance is not an attribute that is likely to attract the young intelligentsia...
...Furthermore, as Mr...
...Unlike the Kennedys, then, the Royal Family does embody "those quiet virtues which tend to regularity in the body social," virtues which, one and two centuries ago, were called "republican virtues...
...Samuel McCracken pointed out in his article "Are Homosexuals Gay...
...Many dissented honorably and decently...
...Of course I am speaking of the Communist Vietnamese, ethnically an ancient Cambodian enemy--an enemy that launched an all-out attack against Cambodia beginning March 29, 1970, four weeks before the American incursion into Cambodia...
...One of his key points is that the American bombing of Cambodia gained Cambodian acceptance for the Khmer Rouge...
...residents add 6% sales tax...
...This wobbled me...
...If Britain's socialist future doesn't work, Worsthorne is telling us that its monarchical present does...
...southeast of Phnom Penh...
...This is not because people are stupid, but because they rarely think about something that is invisible, hence taken for'granted...
...It is written by nitwits with a yen for high public affairs...
...Still the Americans gave no military support...
...We live in the morbific glow of a kind of renaissance age from which we may all emerge with a new esteem for book burning...
...Lilla is attempting to do is to hang a "No Catholics Need Apply" sign on the door of conservatism...
...In the 1960s and early 1970s this time-honored occultism inspired some unusually foolish behavior...
...It is written for nitwits with a yen for high public affairs...
...Americans should not allow the irrational fears of a few 18th-century Public Nuisances to stand in the way of solving the monarchical question by legitimate means, rather than EDITORIAL (continued from page 5) hostile American fire by regularly attacking Americans from these enclaves...
...So far were the North Vietnamese into Cambodia by then that they were reported to be a mere 40 km...
...Besides, G.K...
...LEARN CALLIGRAPHY (italic writing...
...All of the sudden I am alert to the difference between marginal and average effects (too complicated to explain here, but important, even if ignored by the Congressional Budget Office...
...he actually disproved it...
...The thesis here is that the policies of Nixon and Kissinger directly led to the Cambodian holocaust...
...I n the 1960s a select minority of Americans let themselves go...
...All in your own home...
...ELR Company, POB 1063, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio 44223...
...In 1979 Mr...
...Reduce Income tax interest- up to 50...
...focusing on the Camelot Buncombe...
...About a year ago a friend told me about a group of Chinamen visiting Capitol Hill...
...Send $2 for details...
...This is art...
...In the twenties and thirties, many pols and profs at first attempted to sweeten the Fascisti with suave gestures and soothing rhetoric so as to assure a place for themselves in the New Order or at least to avoid a barbed-wire future...
...Not all critics of the war in Southeast Asia were capable of it...
...How could a propagandist of Shawcross's obvious gifts so botch his mission...
...Thus, when the price mechanism is under attack, as it is today-with worse no doubt to come in the form of price controls--there are very few people around capable of mounting the appropriate defense...
Vol. 13 • February 1980 • No. 2
