Editorial/The Worst Book of the Year
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL THE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Have the eminent minds who dissect our time ever annotated and scrutinized the marvel that until very recently the great bulk of...
...What is their next move...
...Most of these dreadful books are prominently listed on college bibliographies where they amplify the fears of wimpy college boys and gals, and where they fortify the cleverer students' assumption that the teacher is an ass...
...At any rate, today the quacks who prey on them are fully employed, ministering to lunatic anxieties of lush variety...
...tism.'' And for some 400 pages he yammers along, gathering thousands of elements of Americana, trimming and embellishing them to accord with his idee fixe: friendly fascism...
...We have here either two nuts or two quacks...
...Gordon Coogler Award'' * for the Worst Book of the Year...
...I doubt that they have, and yet a pair of sore dogs is no trivial matter...
...Ask General Hannibal and his Carthaginians...
...Professor Gross is in the same boat...
...Now this is not to say that giantists are very democratic or even very nice, but so far as I can judge from Human Scale they are not as political as friendly fascists...
...He calls it "friendly fascism," for despite his high positions as Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Planning at Hunter College and Professor of Political Science at City University of New York, he is also every inch the super salesman...
...Professor Gross is not telling, at least I do not recall his proffering these revelations...
...The first piece of catastrophist twaddle is Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America...
...Our laureates long for the times when yokels still lived under sod roofs, and, midst flies and staphylococci, waited for the dusty -foots.for the dusty -foots...
...Alack, now, with the Founding Fathers' edifice derelict and overgrown with such statist marijuana, the great architect has become unnerved...
...For the South, her books have grown fewer- /She never was much given to literature...
...One believes that people live in large cities merely out of thoughtlessness...
...In other words they are everywhere- in giant corporations, giant bureaucracies, giant cities, giant buildings, everywhere...
...Are they happy...
...Is there anything we can do about them...
...We rename it this year "The J. Gordon Coogler Award" for obvious reasons...
...it runs along like this for over 550 pages...
...According to Professor Gross, there is an "emerging Big Business-Big Government partnership (that) has a global reach...
...During the 40 or so years that this book gestated in Professor Gross's cerebrum, he and his liberal coconspirators were apparently fervently engaged in the construction of the Liberal Paradiso...
...Here is an astounding truth: Education spreads, science advances, medicine banishes infectious illness, and capitalism forks over the goods-nonetheless, as many yokels as ever live in terror...
...Nor is Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, our other prize-winning effort, a reader's delight...
...Then again, they might not...
...With the advance of the podiatrist's science, with the passing of the old guard in dentistry -the executioner mentality departing, the dental-hygiene mentality stepping in-there has come about a dramatic change in the topics of popular thought...
...Who is the Duce...
...Ask Rudolf Nureyev...
...How any normal human being could read such a book and depart feeling informed I cannot say...
...Sale's findings the giantists are behind paperback books that fall apart during the first reading, home hair dryers whose plastic knobs and hooks break off, window shades that never go all the way back up, plastic "sponges" that disintegrate in a week, rotary can-openers that rip and slip, kitchen towel racks that snap off after a month, ballpoint pens that run dry the second time you use them, charcoal lighting fluid that flickers away in moments, flashlight batteries that never work, dresses with buttons that fall off after the first wearing, costly towels that shred after a few washings, and toy trains that are in pieces by the day after Christmas...
...Hurrying across a wide range of intellectual disciplines, the catastro-phists gather bogus facts and idiotic arguments to cut and paste into huge incondite books, which they then hawk to the hypochondriacs and neurotics of the land...
...Here is Tafel music for maniacs...
...Friendly Fascism is not a pleasurable reading experience...
...One must even have edited Mr...
...Most have actually gained what passes for intellectual renown, though it is a renown that would have been impossible in days past when our system of higher education was not so vast and pervaded by hokum...
...When did the putsch get under way...
...Sale has merely called his opponents "giantists," people who advocate that all Americans wear size 13 EEE shoes, regardless of need...
...Perhaps I am trying to forget...
...On the other hand it seems that giantists are even more pervasive than the smiling fascisti...
...Would the brethren in the Kremlin be of any help...
...Have the eminent minds who dissect our time ever annotated and scrutinized the marvel that until very recently the great bulk of mankind's speculative thought was pretty much absorbed with aching feet, sore teeth, and allied miseries...
...Quite possibly their angst is one of the eternal verities...
...How did the fascists take over...
...The other believes that 220 million Americans are the unsuspecting victims of a coup d'etat...
...It left me with a ringing in the ears...
...He will be read by neurotics, but not even a fawning social scientist will ever be able to remember a line...
...They work with con-sumerist groups, ecologists, pacifists, members of the Democratic National Committee-wherever there are simpletons who have any doubts whatsoever about modern society, there you will find a host of quacks feverishly assuring them that madness, enslavement, and doom are our present condition and that things will get worse...
...Truth be known, it is very difficult from his garrulous besotted spiel to recall any memorable passages, so quickly is one diatribe replaced by another-all equally replete with error and dizzying contradiction...
...No longer can the quack make a killing by selling him a jar of foul-smelling ointment...
...What is the uniform of our fascisti...
...Perhaps I forgot...
...Coogler (1865-1901), the illustrious poetaster, an unintentional humorist, awed Americans for years with volume upon volume of Purely Original Verse, from which we pluck: "Alas...
...Why do they not call themselves fascists...
...Freed from confecting smelly ointments, the quack now sells the yokels propaganda to keep them anxious...
...More importantly, they are selling their propaganda to a multitude of inflamed half-wits...
...He is proud to have been a "major architect" of the 1946 Employment Act and the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill...
...Sale's book...
...Freed from the mundane miseries of his person, the yokel now often takes a college degree and settles down to a lifetime of worry over such matters as the imminent, irreversible poisoning of all life on this planet and the storm trooper potential inhering in the Fortune 500...
...Every page of Human Scale has a lunatic passage like the above...
...It is rooted in Colossal transnational corporations and complexes that help knit together a 'Free World' on which the sun never sets...
...According to Mr...
...They ruin Christmas and love BIGNESS...
...Today they prosper...
...Yet, whereas Professor Gross, if he is right, has probably lit out for Albania or some other land beyond the CIA's grasp, Mr...
...The answers might be in this endless book...
...Without apologizing for the damage he has done or even acknowledging how the damage was achieved, he perceives that the American polity has become a scandalous menage a trois of Big Government, Big Interests, and Big Business...
...Where are our Nuremberg Rallies...
...If our Coogler laureates and their customers have their way, popular thought will again be taken up with meditations on primitive miseries, for under them America would return to primitive times...
...These are elements of a new despo* Formerly ' The Harold Robbins Award...
...No more does the yokel puzzle and contemplate his swollen peddles...
...Great haranguers like Hitler and Castro are noted for their ability to harangue on an essentially fallacious point for dozens of hours, but who recalls a line of their bilge...
...These are the catastrophists...
...Both have moved on to higher concerns...
...I choose to think that they are quacks, though I shall not take issue with the charge that they are also nuts...
...Like Friendly Fascism, no element of Americana is left unused if it can be fitted into the author's idiot theme...
...In 1980 there were published two portentous tomes so prodigiously idiotic as to elicit the unprecedented recommendation from our distinguished panel of judges that both books share the coveted' 'J...
...Assuming for the moment that these men are sincere-and it is a difficult assumption to entertain-we have here two authors who see no validity in the present whatsoever...
Vol. 14 • January 1981 • No. 1
