Among the Intellectualoids/Pennsylvania Prophets
Carlson, Allan C.
he has visited as evidence and proceeds with him to the point where he is to be picked up by helicopter, the bureaucrat tells the helicopter pilots not to land. It is a powerful scene:...
...Bad as all but Uncommon Valor ar e , they tell us something about the American people and the Vietnam war...
...Q 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985...
...Most of the new old men are unrecognizable to me, Art O'Duffy's battered guitar now resounds off some other tavern wall, and today the students appear to favor a ghastly, disco-like kip down the road...
...in a word, a family, with a truer ring to it than the big happy cliche...
...asks...
...The Russian, played by Steven Berkoff in the most hilariously overdone villain performance since Richard Lee's nasty "Jap" in every World War II film, tortures the magnificent Stallone body and threatens to stick a red-hot piece of iron in the MIA's eye unless Rambo gets on the radio and announces to the world that he is an American spy...
...Though my own brief existence here on earth has been marked by innumerable errors in judgment, I was at least fortunate that my initiation to the world of saloonery was consummated in a place of suitable taste and refinement...
...If we were going to go in at all, we should have fought to win...
...The Church falters, the Commonwealth crumbles, but by and large this man has barred the worst elements of our wretched century from his domain...
...With all this variety Brady's was without doubt big, and for the same reason it was impossible to describe it as always happy...
...And with that, he walks into the Thai sunset, whence he will presumably be returned for First Blood Part IlL When Stallone made First Blood, Rambo's impassioned speech about the troubles of being a Vet was quite dramatic and stark...
...The C.O...
...the C.O...
...According to the terms of the agreement, Vinnie was to be supplied with free drink for the duration of said project...
...So whatever wisdom was imparted to us during that formative year we owe less to the classroom than to our more informal academic pursuits at Brady's...
...We only want our country to love us as much as we love it...
...And the tragedy is that had they made movies like this during the Johnson Administration (John Wayne's silly Green Berets doesn't count), perhaps those responsible for selling the war to the American people would have had enough confidence to make the case that was eventually made by the deaths of three million Indochinese...
...Vinnie Doyle's mirror is still there, aging rather gracefully, but the same cannot be said of everything else...
...For at the westernmost extremity of Europe, the same green isle that kept learning alive during the continent's Dark Ages has kept the lamp lit in our own...
...Everybody loves the Vietnam veterans these days, and though no apologies have really been given to them for the years in which they were treated shabbily, even those who once denounced them can be heard sighing over Agent Orange or post-traumatic syndrome...
...I t ' s going on a decade now since I first...
...loans extended and repaid...
...Now, three years later, it sounds almost like self-pity...
...matches arranged...
...Only when the catastrophic and monstrous behavior Of the Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia quieted some of the more vociferous voices on the left, and gave some leeway to nervous voices on the right, did the discussion really begin...
...downstairs there are both the traditional Irish lounge (where women are tolerated) and bar (where they are not...
...In such dealings Brady's proved itself to be like any fine saloon...
...under this arrangement, work quite naturally dragged on for days, with people popping in and out every hour or so each day to check on his progress and offer their critiques...
...Upstairs can be found the modest Brady residence...
...Rambo is taken back to the camp and, significantly, is interrogated not by a Vietnamese, but by a Russian general...
...business deals struck...
...joins him on the tarmac...
...poked a tentative head through Brady's black wooden doors, and each new visit reinforces the sense of one's own mortality, in this case reinforced by the absence of those clients who have already departed for worlds beyond...
...A few days later he could be observed there in defiance of the ban, but he kept to the shadows lest he arouse Mrs...
...Those valiant holdouts from the ferns-and-lite-beer ethos grow fewer with every passing day, and decades from now scholars doubtless will link the phenomenon with the general enervating of America...
...Don't you love your country...
...This is what is meant by family...
...Rambo agrees, and wires Thailand...
...A seminary that once spewed tbrth admirably reactionary Men of God now graduates concerned candidates of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament...
...Vinnie, of course...
...Against this mounting clamor of foolishness, the Irish countryside has thrown up its one faithful soul, the noble publican...
...brawls instigated and put down...
...not to mention some more surly types, a fair representative being the meatcutter who one evening voiced a strong objection to the current arrangement of my face...
...In the lounge, too, there occurred one of the more notable disturbances of our stay...
...Where are you going, Johnny...
...Brady who still rules, not the age...
...I'm coming for you," he says, the camera in a tight closeup of his mouth...
...Perhaps the most cherished furnishing of this room was the yellowed lithograph that still hangs beside the entrance, in a frame that can be turned upside-down: Right-side up carries the label "courtship" and shows a man and woman smiling at each other...
...Under his patient eye the daily needs of the Irishman are sorted out in a manner well befitting the appellation public house: Here local news is reported and digested...
...Theology, however, counsels that the only unforgivable sin is despair, and as usual even in these sorry times we are not without some measure of hope...
...His C.O...
...I'd die for my country," Rambo replies...
...the human appetite for companionship and song satiated...
...inverted, the expressions on the faces turn to snarls...
...THE GREAT IRISH SALOON SERIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BRADY'S OF MAYNOOTH by William McGurn In an age whose dismal hallmark is an almost universal decline in standards, decent American men and women do not need to be reminded what this has meant to the Republic's saloons...
...The untrained eye, it must be said, would grant Brady's nary a second glance...
...This establishment goes by the honest name of "Brady's" and is located in the County Kildare village of Maynooth, a miserable hour's busride on the Number 66 from Dublin...
...I don't know," Rambo replies...
...asks...
...divorce, people whose older siblings were weaned on fish-and-chips now congregate at McDonald's or Burger King, and the island's hierarchy has chimed in the general chorus of ecclesiastical babblings about Central America...
...urgent messages deposited...
...A refuge from the demands of a nagging wife and the ever-expanding State (much the same thing these days), the Irish public house remains a standard of normalcy in a most unnatural world...
...there were as well innumerable patrons who spent more time there than in their own homes and thought of themselves as having fraternal rights...
...That has been the signal contribution of these four movies...
...It is a powerful scene: Rambo shouting at the helicopter "Don't leave us here," the soldiers from the camp advancing upon them, the rickety, gangrenous MIA watching helplessly as his nation abandons him again in a cruel land...
...The Brady's alone included Mr., Mrs., Rose, and Noel...
...Only Mr...
...But inside, I am happy to report, inside it is Mr...
...Cramped together on tan vinyl couches of dubious design and no comfort, we would take our drink and talk, a turf THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 27 fire burning in the winter months to keep out the chill...
...Rambo only shakes his head...
...Labeled "marriage," this is the position in which the picture usually rests...
...The debate began in earnest only after the fall of Saigon in 1975...
...True, Ireland recently legalized contraception and is working on William McGurn is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/ Europe and a European editor of The American Spectator...
...suggests he return to America and what will almost certainly be a full presidential pardon...
...Ordinary by even ordinary standards, in its structure and ethos it is any bar anywhere in Ireland...
...elections fixed...
...Then, almost turning toward the camera and directing his words to the audience, he speaks for every Vietnam veteran...
...Even the symbol of manly Ireland, black Guinness, proudly known as "stout," has succumbed to the Pepsi Generation with a "Guinness is good tot you" advertising campaign featuring neat little Yuppie men and unconscionably thin women...
...And that is that the serious debate over the Vietnam war is now over...
...As there were women in our group, most of our business was conducted in the lounge, our coats piled up high in front of the large window...
...Brady remains solid, much the good publican of Matthew's gospel, yet even his judgment sometimes slips a bit, as evidenced by the presence of a Pac-Man leering out from the bar area...
...Then there was Lodger, usually soliciting a drink from whoever happened to be around...
...On the outside, too, I have noticed change, some inevitable, some not, almost all deplorable...
...the C.O...
...When finally the scaffolding was removed and the result of his labors unveiled--a ToulouseLautrec-like dance-hall scene--Mrs...
...it was, in fact, the first time such a speech was made on screen...
...There is in addition a small, somewhat hidden room where the select few might gather to enjoy their beverages after hours without upsetting the local constabulary...
...Upon arrival, Rambo destroys the fancy monitoring equipment at the base, beats up the bureaucrat, and lunges at him with a knife, implanting it finally not in the bureaucrat's chest, but right next to his head...
...Peter, who played dominoes with the women on Wednesday nights...
...Where the town I knew offered no alternative to fishandchips wrapped in greasy newsprint, this Maynooth boasts trendy boutiques and no less than three take-out Chinese shops...
...The ruling is now in, as the hundreds of millions of dollars spent at the box office and the videocassette store on these movies now attest...
...To our surprise we learned that there in fact existed a Brady behind the name-Phillip Brady--who with his wife and family have been servicing the town of Maynooth for more than half a century...
...At the time of my introduction, 1 and several other American expats were registered at the local university, primarily known for its seminary, the country's largest...
...rumpled Art O'Duffy, who spoke Gaelic and was the house balladeer...
...He then beats up the Russian and everybody else, gets all the MIAs, commandeers a helicopter, destroys a Russian helicopter gunboat, and proceeds back to base...
...Brady's ire...
...He asks to speak to the nasty bureaucrat...
...Brady adjudged the work obscene and banished Vinnie from the premises for life...
...Before then, those responsible for prosecuting the war never gave anyone a good reason for supporting it, while most of those responsible for coming up with policy, and writing about policy, had spent eleven years offering millions of reasons, some good, a lot bad, for opposing it...
...This was the time the resident artist and faithful patron, Vinnie Doyle, was commissioned to extend his artistic powers to the large mirror that covered most of the back wall...
Vol. 18 • July 1985 • No. 7
