Watergate: The Cartoon Revisited
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
prove the Watergate justice. One wishes that each reporter who had similarly used bugs illegally might spend an equal time behind bars. Cabell Phillips, in a book called The Truman Presidency,...
...I am presenting an axiom that is the only satisfactory explanation I can lay hands on for our tin pot cognoscenti's repulsive and moronic enthusiasms...
...Their quavering and indignant targets are more suggestive of Beckett...
...in days of yore they were more accurately put down as simply uncouth...
...The sanctioning by the state of a vague "right to happiness" of this nature holds explosive legal implications...
...Yet their actions belie another motive...
...Somehow the threshold vanished leaving only methodology to argue...
...Progress is not their goal, but rather the satisfaction and celebrity that comes from making a commotion-frankly stated, they like to bust things up...
...Let them glamorize their enthusiasms as "radical" or "progressive" or "advanced" or "liberal...
...The fundamental American craving for what is lurid and calamitous ensures that when you scratch the average American intellectual you generally discover a slob...
...If the child care program were merely to be another in a long line of absurd social services dished out by HEW and doomed to a bureaucratic fate, one could perfunctorily remonstrate those responsible for the waste of federal revenues, and then proceed to ignore the monstrosity...
...The child development program is, however, of a very different kind from all t h a t has gone before...
...9 This vulgar appetite was noted by Mark Twain years ago...
...May the child assert it against the parent and the government...
...In America, liberals are reactionaries and reactionaries are liberals...
...Life must always be a revelation of incredible treacheries and heinous schemes...
...Should the federal government subsidize miracle computer dating and marriage programs...
...In America, the distribution of news is a labor of tycoons and a spectacle combining the art of burlesque with the art of a down home revival...
...It is a banquet prepared by Shaw and served by Fielding...
...government in drawing guidelines for the personalities of U.S...
...Contrary to regnant myth, it is not so much a desire to implement what is new and progressive that characterizes the enlightenment mob, as a mania to scotch what is old...
...Sbnonds...
...It explains such enduring American abominations as Hollywo,~M, which has crippled America's legitimate theatre for years...
...Only in America would such gaud sell...
...Yet, these questions have never been raised, much less answered, in the present controversy...
...These questions are of no small judicial concern in a free society...
...Our essential boredom is a veritable invitation to foolishness, and the transcendental populism of our self-anointed intelligentsia is an invitation to worse...
...Note Phillips' use of the adjective"enterprising" in describing this sort of buggery...
...No nation has ever seen anything like it...
...Extravaganzas and zaniness are everywhere...
...Well, the reaction did not come out of the Heartland, but rather out of the progressive East, and it came from a much provoked government whose strong executive used the same kind of tactics Johnson and Kennedy had used to cow their less virtuous opponents...
...So on the evening of June 17, 1972, when the lights went on at Watergate, multitudes of expectant Americans knew something stupendous was in the air...
...sometime feature editor of National Review, lives in Falls Village, Connecticut, caches at I~dian Mountain School, and works the shell game at fairs and carnivals throughout New England...
...The family group as a basic social institution is very nearly universal...
...And it explains why this potboiler will eventually be reviewed with steamy superlatives by all the journals of haute culture in America...
...And when I posit my theory that Americans lust for the lurid and the calamitous, I am not confecting a mere literary flourish...
...Granted, all government programs have an indirect effect upon the character of those subjected to them, yet this still marks an ominous beginning for the involvement of the U.S...
...It is the denouement of America's lust for the lurid and the calamitous...
...The American university is the product of the working man's taxes and the sanctuary for the anti-intellectual's indulgences...
...As their strategy, child development advocates chose the old-line liberal tactic, successful since the 1930s, of ex nihilo manufacturing a right and then pressing the federal government to guarantee it (through expenditure of vast sums of money and use of legal sanctions...
...All that ever troubled them was some vaguely limned backlash that they expected to see marching out of Indiana or Iowa under the banner of apple pie or the Farm Bureau...
...While no final commitments were made one way or the other, it was obvious that Stevenson's name would go before the convention regardless of his wishes...
...As chairman of the delegation, Governor Stevenson pleaded earnestly with his fellow delegates neither to place his name in nomination nor to support such an action by any other delegation . . . . The assurances he had pleaded for were not given...
...The McGovern campaign was not only a campaign for bad judgment, it was a crusade for tastelessness...
...The stage sags beneath mounds of grappling limbs and sweating torsos, tortured visages and faces blossoming in triumph...
...But it is not only the luridities that fascinate the American audience, it is the calamitous-crashing edifices, clouds of dust...
...Flatulent self-promoters lurk behind every bush...
...Contributors Duke J. Armstrong is a former employee of the Office of Economic Opportunity...
...They propose more than mere advice and counsel...
...So all the highfalutin piety that has become so infectious amongst the enlightenment mob merely adds to the many lurid visions that arise from the capitol of the great American republic during these golden days...
...The pageantry of Watergate has even transcended the political conventions...
...and the faint sense that somewhoro bodies are writhing and organiam.~ are dying...
...Of course no intelligent observer expects a better tomorrow...
...It tantalizes the cosmopolitan Americans' appetites for luridity and calamity...
...Yahoo...
...But the room had been %ugged' by an enterprising radio correspondent, and a group of other reporters, clustered behind a plastic room divider behind the speaker's table, overheard the entire proceedings...
...It is uncertain what the future may bring...
...For the next months, we will be treated to the accusations of three hypocritical factions, each calling the other kettles black...
...On page 421 he recounts a little bugging at the 1952 Democratic convention: "On the Sunday preceding the Monday opening of the convention, the Illinois delegation caucused in a private dining room of the Morrison Hotel in Chicago...
...But all that is conjectural...
...May the parent assert it for the child against the government...
...For decades ritualistic liberals have prescribed centralization of power in the White House, and since Franklin...
...And despite all their talk of a better tomorrow, not one participant in the Watergate pageant has suggested a philosophy of government to replace the amalgam of notions they have all so furiously fallen upon...
...Nefarious designs rattle behind the most innocent facades, and foreign policy is decided by witches and goblins...
...Veal, a Yale graduate, is a law student at the University of Illinois and a columnist for a campus newspaper Richard Wheeler, journalist and free-lance writer, has recently completed his first book, The Children of Darkness...
...A life spent in progressive reform is more often than not a life spent overturning garbage cans and stoning alley cats...
...They were furiously impatient with those prissy intellects who warned of the consequences of such primitive behavior...
...This was presidential power exercised for the commonweal...
...Naturally, this indelicate appetite influences our politics also...
...America was the first nation to make education a national right and then an impossibility...
...it wants calamity, in full view from its armchairs...
...Phillips, writing in 1966 when the bugging issue had been well aired, chose to use tacit praise rather than condemnation of such tactics...
...It has survived, virtually intact, since antiquity in a myriad of societies as the basic living arrangement, with primary responsibility for meeting the requirements of its component members for food, shelter, recreation, and what we now must call child development...
...It is powerful and prodigious medicine...
...To tamper with t h a t l~e Alternative October 1973 9...
...Indeed most come off with a handsome profit...
...Indeed, it is the most colossal orgy ever thrown...
...That a change of such massive proportions is contemplated points out the imminent need to debate t h a t threshold question, to analyze the root assumptions behind the new child development concept, and to consider the grave legal and social implications for American society...
...another John Randolph once said, "I love iii),~ty, I hate equality "' Peter Rusthoven is ~tudying at Harvard Law School...
...Duke J. Armstrong A View of Child Development In recent years the hue and cry has 3een raised for a national child development program by a plethora of liberal social workers and educators...
...If such a mob had descended on Philadelphia in 1785 to initiate our first American government, James Madison would have thrown in with the Redcoats, Patrick Henry would have bound himself over to the benevolence of crazy George, and General Washington would have burned Philadelphia to the ground...
...It is but the latest edition of the miracles of television...
...Politicians act like clerics and clerics act like politicians...
...What we have before us is a nation fraught with idiotic contradictions and full of joy...
...The sight of Nixonian Bright Boys revealing their intimacies before a graven panel of flyblown solons fascinates them...
...Mere celebration of the ensuing whoopee is diversion enough for me...
...In 1964 Barry Goldwater's telephones, unbeknownst to him, were transmitting messages all over the globe...
...Our great Republic is crossed with a subtle schizophrenia, rendering us severe wowsers one moment and voluptuaries the next...
...These hinds are drawn to the pageantry of Watergate by the same kind of ineffable and unyielding attraction that draws lawyers to automobile accidents and to family brawls...
...But Watergate was not meant for them anyway...
...America was the first nation on earth to disfigure itself with franchised parodies of the good life...
...Watergate is one of those rare historical episodes where not one of the participants distinguishes himself, not even a vagrant wit...
...Proponents of the child care program argue t h a t they wish only to supplement the family institution and not supplant it...
...Kennedy has run his executive branch like a bureaucratized Tammany Hall...
...What is more, many of these hinds spent the golden years of the sixties extolling violent idealists, vulgar rhetoricians, and lawless demonstrators for selected acts of illegality meant to intimidate society and provoke government...
...It is a breakthrough in dreadfulness...
...The entire concept builds upon the basic and false postulate t h a t banks of computers and batteries of trained technicians and "experts" can somehow substitute for the traditional family institution...
...First is the obvious detrimental effect upon the family i n s t i t u t i o n - - t h e basic unit of social organization in society...
...And his slob audience is still mystified as to why the rest of the American electorate judged him below the salt...
...This is political pageantry unsurpassed by mortal man since the dawn of democracy...
...Even before the caucus broke up, news wires across the country were crackling with speculations 'on the highest and most unimpeachable authority' that Adlai Stevenson's name would be put in nomination and he would not block it...
...Child development proponents have made only one thing perfectly clear: they desire to take a long stride down the path toward standardized federal programs governing the development of American children...
...Today in Washington, destruction is in the air...
...How else can one explain the celebrity of the unreadable New York Review of Books, unitarianism, astrology in high places, health foods, eastern gurus, and reform politics...
...Wagner has combined with Berlioz to compose the score...
...It is in America that oily moralists roar for pornography, gentle humanists demand subsidized abortions, scientists revile science and businessmen denounce business--and no one suffers the consequences of his foolishness...
...Considering the importance to future generations of the establishment of a child development program, this is a tragic omission...
...It operated in the same atmosphere of malversation that allowed Johnson, Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, and a cast of thousands to get out of town with everything but the Washington Monument...
...The concept advocates the turning of government from its proper bailiwick of regulation of the extrinsic conduct of its citizens to the regulation of their intrinsic nature...
...The attacking politicians, the media moralists, and the keepers of public virtue are reading scripts prepared by Rabelais...
...And it was done under the administration of a man who saw his first run at the White House publicly stolen from him in 1960 by Mayor Daley and Lyndon Johnson...
...But this is the first time it has set a hand to the task of determining what kind of people we are...
...it is unthinkable t h a t any man is going to advance any lasting improvement in a system of laws without first possessing some coherent philosophy of govermnent, and what passes for a philosophy of government amongst the participants of the Watergate pageant is indistinguishable from the razzle-dazzle rdchauffd of the public relations hack...
...that this press bugging was not employed to rout out malefactors or improve the public weal, but was used purely to satisfy a lascivious curiosity...
...Perhaps the most striking example (and never mind the infeasibi]ity) comes from the final report of the Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children (Fall, 1969) wherein the Commission states t h a t among other rights, the infant has the "right to continuous loving care...
...The sad thing is that such illegal activity by the press will eventually cause some grand juries to begin an investigation of invasions of privacy by the news media, and the result may well by a curtailment of our first amendment liberties...
...If it is true, _~s we have so often been told, t h a t the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world, it should give us pause to reflect on the prospect of a single hand in Washington rocking cradles across the country...
...C. Bascom Nlemp is the chief Washington correspondent of The Alternative...
...The current Great Awakening amongst them would impress me more deeply if I did not know that their chosen candidate for the presidency is a man who allowed an erstwhile lady companion to soak in the waters of Chappaquidick for a dozen or so hours...
...That is, controversy over the program has centered not around the threshold question of whether or not the United States should have a national child development program, but rather on the routine bureaucratic questions such as how much it will cost, how it will be administered, what delivery system will be used, and whose children will use it...
...David Brudnoy is a visiting professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, a commentator with WNAC-TV ~CfkSI and WGBH-TV tPBSI in Boston, a free lance writer and lecturer, and an associate of The Alternative...
...The list of absurdities runs interminably, and what catalyzes the whole gorgeous spectacle is that in America there is little sense of prudence, moderation, dignity, or decorum...
...Thus in the last few years a new "inalienable right" has emerged from the copious and redundant child development rhetoric (Tom Jefferson negligently omitted it from the Declaration of Independence...
...It is a spectacle of extraordinary excess...
...Over the course of the last forty years Americans have seen increasing government involvement in their lives...
...The vacuous speculations of John Chancellor thrill them...
...The great McGoo was not only a low-grade populist, he was an egregious charlatan, who did everything trashy but campaign in cancer wards...
...citizens...
...they propose the creation of a force paramount to the family and advocate direct federal involvement in the growth and training of American infants through providing a full panoply of services...
...Yet, lurking behind all these glittering promises lies a number of fundamental, philosophical issues raised by a massive federal program of this nature...
...And old hound dog Ervin's hayseed eloquence draws them ever closer to their boob tubes, deluding them into dreaming that they The Alternative October 1973 7 are partaking in another historical goings-on...
...America with its bored congeries, its moralistic tubthumpers, and its deep reservoirs of self-guilt and self-contempt is a setting divinely endowed for such a fabulous show...
...Peter Hughes, a former resident of Berlin, is an associate of The Alternative who is currently comNeting a Ph.D in international relations in the Nation's capital...
...And these issues have not been adequately discussed...
...Every president since John F. Kennedy has viewed himself as a Sun King, and every president since Mr...
...It is America's equivalent to the Cultural Revolution...
...America had to have a Watergate...
...This mob of misperceived neomaniaes is forever destroying and disrupting established customs and institutions, because its members suspect them all as being the creations of superior men and because it is always easier for a second-rater to flummox the works than to chisel out some substantial achievement...
...When Mr...
...That is what the enlightenment mob wants...
...E.T...
...in political science from Ohio State University...
...No doubt you will be relieved to hear that a thorough diagnosis of the origins of this complicated condition is beyond my expertise or interest...
...Watergate is a beast with a lashing tail, a tail that may well strike Democrats and the press...
...Yes, and supposedly each American adult has the right to a happy married life...
...The pro~am would squarely put Washington into the business of raising the nation's :hildren through federally funded and )perated child care centers...
...To them he was the dream candidate of the century, Bryan without the Holy Spirit...
...Shattered hulks of humanity stumble about in the company of grinning clowns and the audience wheezes and gasps for more...
...Twelve Swiss bankers control the world...
...Who exactly possesses this right...
...If Watergate has proven nothing else, it has proven that the greatest democracy on earth is presently in the hands of public relations men, ambulance chasers, and porch climbers...
...Gary North is fm the staff of the Foundation for Efx>nomic Education and the author of Christian Economics, newly released by Craig Press .John Randolph is an assistant to a high public official...
...That is the highest encomium normally paid to newsmen: the want ads in the trade publication, Editor and Publisher, bristle with requests for enterprising reporters and editors...
...Though the enlightenment mob talks about reforming our politics and unveiling the truth for all the world to see, their real accomplishment is the destruction of the modern American presidency first embodied by Franklin 8 The Alternative October 1973 Roosevelt and recently prescribed by the likes of James MacGregor Burns, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Galbraith, and other horrified spectators of the Nixon White House...
...Debate on the program has suffered from what columnist James J. Kilpatrick has described as the "Phenomenon of the Vanishing Threshold...
...Nell Howe, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, is managing editor of The Ahernatit,e...
...There may well be a drastic change in our political structure once the dust settles, including the possibility of multiparty politics if the two main parties die or decline from a lack of funds and trust...
...It is with relief that they flee to their country clubs or to their taverns...
...The social implications of such a program are manifest...
...Phillip Abbott Lute holds an M.A...
...Cabell Phillips, in a book called The Truman Presidency, written in 1966, indicates that the press has been bugging its victims for a long time...
...Y e t - a t the time, such technological achievements were viewed not only as manifestations of the Democrats' superior political wisdom but also of their virtue...
...After all, infantile skulduggery like the Watergate caper has been part of the normative politics of Washington for the past dozen or so years...
...The press had been excluded from the meeting...
...The state overflows with blood and gore...
...May the government assert it for the child against the parent...
...former editor of the Intercollegiate Review, now works for a Washington research group...
...Abram N. S;hulsky is an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America i.3 Washinoo/LOn, DC...
...Only Americans would think of combining the serious business of a cat house with that of a confessional box and put it on television...
...How else can one explain the continued popularity of Philip Roth and Norman Mailer or the existence of intellectualoids like Tom Wicker and Nicholas von Hoffman...
...Roosevelt they have praised forceful presidents for shady statecraft...
...It is noteworthy, also...
...They breathe easier in their baseball parks or before idiot boxes tuned to roller derby, professional wrestling, or "The Johnny Carson Show...
...Watergate is bread and circuses for an even lower species of Americano...
...Now admittedly some Americans have found the pageantry of Watergate revolting and burdensome...
...God was on their side, and so much for old Barry...
...It explains why the American Shakespeare, Norman Mailer, devoted himself to a blowzy biography of Marilyn Monroe...
...Wayne H. Vails...
...No one seems concerned about the t h r e a t explicit in a program built on such an ambiguous foundation...
...Washington has, to a greater or lesser extent, undertaken a role in determining how we are housed, how we are clothed, how we eat, how many cigarettes we consume, and so forth...
...Though contemporary American political etiquette, lib~,ral interest-group politics, the Nixon Administration, and the reputations of countless administrators and politicians are being disfigured, the worthies of the Ervin committee are no closer to knowing the truth today than they are to understanding the evil...
...Kennedy used the threat of IRS investigations against independentminded steel producers, all the divines of progressive politics hailed his vision...
...His campaign was thoroughly infiltrated by Johnson's agents...
...For they can only apprehend life when it is painted in blacks, reds, purples, and shocking pinks...
...Admirably they have complained to the networks about the Watergate telecasts, demanding that they be replaced by more seemly programs like "Search for Tomorrow" and the "Who, What, or Where Game...
...One wonders whether he would also tacitly praise the Watergate conspirators...
...Rev...
...Only the American Republic contains the elements and the appetites for such gluttony, such profligacy, such statecraft...
...The media mullahs, the ritualistic liberals, the bright boys of the Nixonian Era and the Senate's sages are all sweating and groaning in an enormous Gordian knot of humanity, straining to destroy each other and doing a pretty formidable job of self-destruction...
...R. Emmett T v r r e l l . J r . Watergate: The Cartoon Revisited There is something of the gorgeous, something almost of the voluptuous about the Watergate hearings, the Watergate conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up--the pious shrieks, the moral declarations, the newspaper revelations, the newspaper retractions, the presidential denials, the presidential clarifications, the eerie silence from certain famous Democrats who not long ago were so very windy, the occult analyses from the mountebanks of the New Age, whom history has jerked from the acute embarrassment of an unanticipated obscurity and sent squalling toward the embattled White House, a White House now silent, mysterious, and pathetic...
...he has authored mmaerous magazine articles and several books, including The New Left, Road to Revolution, and The Intelligent Studentb Guide to Survival Frederick IL Lynch is a graduate student in sociology at the University of California at Riverside...
...What surprises me is not that their lurid speculations were so accurate, but that their accompanying observations were so superbly hypocritical...
...Watergate is for card-carrying members of the enlightenment mob, those highly cultivated minds whose cultural tastes are bootlegged from Europe, whose politics are imported from Latin America, and whose manners are untouched relicts from the religious wars...
...The program, so the advocates state, promises to solve a host of individual and social problems which plague contemporary American society--from juvenile delinquency through mental illness and tooth decay...
Vol. 7 • October 1973 • No. 1
