Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Probably the most profound platitude one can utter today is t h a t Americans have lost confidence in their institutions. As with many platitudes, this one happens to be true, and I expect there...
...Perhaps this is another way of saying we await our Thucydides...
...To the Editor: You are to be congratulated for luring Lindley Clark into your magazine...
...In a way the intellectual is a descendant of the court jester, as Ralph Dahrendorf has pointed out, for he has the same privileges of dispensing with propriety and remaining beyond categories or roles established by society...
...Today each of those virtues has become transparent in the intellectual's eyes...
...When Nixon acknowledged the fall of Spiro Agnew and announced his substitution of Jerry Ford, the All-American center from Michigan, he chose the setting of a carnival soiree Such was the grossness of the President's lack of tact and subtlety that the television spectator was made to feel like a young Baptist minister who had strayed into an Irish wake...
...There is l i t t l e doubt t h a t what has become liberal democracy is a bit different than the popular government of the Founders...
...They praised America's encouragement of group life and diversity, its a b i l i t y to change peacefully, its generosity, openness, its relative classlessness, and its hospitality to foreign immigration...
...They do indeed seem to be a bit more like intellectuals...
...And to believe that this will happen in the more ideological salons of the intellectuals is to be dulcetly idealistic, but to be naive nonetheless...
...It certainly does not exist as a crisis in Houston or in Phoenix or even in Chicago, at least not in Mayor Daley's office or in the Aldermanic Chamber, on the North Side or on the South Side...
...Plunkitt's book is about the importance of altruism in politics and it is titled What's in It for Me...
...And because of the eminence they maintain and the characteristics they embrace, it is unlikely that there are any adjustments minor or major that we can make which will assuage this furious crisis in confidence...
...Another reason that liberal capitalism is incapable of propitiating its critics is that to defend our terribly complicated liberal capitalism the citizenry would have to possess an intellectual subtlety that is utterly beyond it...
...Now it is always difficult to define a noun that has only recently evolved from an adjectival state...
...Of course, the change was much deeper...
...8.00 [] 3 yrs...
...There is no scholarly quibbling here, and little evidence of scholarly sweat Middleton writes like a man on deadline...
...They placed about equal stress on both pillars...
...One striking sociological development in the [Vietnam] war," he writes, "was the manner in which the sons of the best people escaped it...
...At this moment, no...
...R. Emmett Tyrreil, Jr...
...What I want to know is, how do clams have sex...
...But I think we can be somewhat more precise in limning the characteristics of intellectuals...
...He is quite simply the best financial writer in the world, and while talent of this kind seems somewhat out of place in your zany journal, I am sure it wilt be to good purpose if your readers come to enjoy his graceful, intelligent commentary as much as I have (in the Wall Street Journal) over the past several years...
...It is a quality that was not much celebrated in the past, but in our day it has truly come into its own...
...Universities t h a t in days of yore only attempted education got into the business of research and thence into all sorts of follies like urban reform, strategy planning, and something they call human development...
...Nixon or Mr...
...To strike a just balance between the two extremes is a goal worthy of all Washington...
...Jameson Campaigne Chicago, Illinois To the Editor: Many thanks for your marvelous editorial on "Gatsby and Nixon" that merited the Chicago Daily News and my quotes...
...Secondly, it promised an equally unprecedented measure of individual freedom for all these same citizens...
...Facts and interpretations, in large part, are the fruit of the author's firsthand experience overseas...
...In fact, H.L...
...The Founders were somewhat visionary, though not ambiguously so...
...Not so long as our society is liberal, democratic, and capitalist---even welfare capitalist...
...Chicago, Illinois To the Editor: Your barroom brawl, last issue, was interesting...
...There is bureaucracy--which is the mode of the welfare state or the frankenstein of governmental benevolence...
...Veal that individual psychologies are very complex, consist of much more than sexual attitudes, that each individual must be judged scrupulously by a whole battery of standards--and that he should leave simplistic moral assessments of huge groups to liberal collectivists and frantic fundamentalists...
...To him they were a trashy collection of sciolists...
...What we have today are concentric circles of intellectuals...
...But I suspect t h a t the shivers of a crisis in confidence are being felt through some of the suburbs...
...the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values...
...Take the extreme case so dreaded by "Randolph"--that of a Bestial Libber...
...Criticizing oneself, for an intellectual, becomes problematic...
...James Grant EDITORIAL (continued from page 3) lishes it for its own sake...
...He can't advocate the censorship of "Maude," drag the State into the abortion area, and simultaneously advocate sexual freedom...
...Nevertheless these are flush times for the intellectuals and their coming of age can be marked a t least symbolically when Philip Rahv and William Phillips were annointed professors...
...John Woodrift Somerset, Virginia To the Editor: I like your paper and I applaud it...
...Veal saying: Oh, to be sure, we must allow them their rights, but is homosexuality a volitional neurosis, hence immoral...
...The dulling trauma of the Vietnam war and the intellectual poison of the eastern liberals, Middleton concludes, have served to replace national self-confidence with national self-doubt...
...When all the thunder and lightning has subsided the intellectuals may usher us into a land of milk and honey and kinetic poetry...
...Certainly very few people call themselves intellectuals, a t least not on resumes or in biographical sketches, and the term has often been used as an epithet of disparagement...
...Senator Montoya Dear Senator Montoya: I fully apologize for my animadversions on you and on your race...
...For one, many of our institutions have fallen into the habit of promising far more than they can deliver, and many people would not want them any other way...
...But then alas, this might just be another way of saying we await our Gibbon...
...Their political concerns are certainly antibourgeois...
...After watching your latest performances on television I want to compliment you for being one of the few men I have known to be able to sleep with his eyes open...
...Capitalism is so successful at producing goods and services that the need for its function is eventually lost in an avalanche of transistorized components, electric gadgets, trashy houses, preposterous automobiles--mass-produced goods that but a generation ago were considered luxuries...
...To all of this I should like to add or emphasize that the true intellectual must be possessed of a critical mind...
...Their population was small, and their influence much different than it is today...
...All of this might sound either exasperating!v .~cademic or faintly sophistical, so allow me to suggest t h a t the famous crisis in confidence, once patented as the credibility gap, exists only in the peculiar way many such crises exist in America...
...A pretty odd performance in a sophisticated libertarian publication...
...The first was self-interest "rightly-understood" The second was what the Founders variously referred to as a sense of "Republican virtue," "civic virtue," or "republican morality...
...One might say they moved from folly to folly...
...I do not believe any important thinker has undertaken a sufficiently dispassionate and Olympian analysis of the influence of the Cold War on our singular American institutions...
...But, on the basis of reading him in other publications, I'd like to suggest that the time has come for him to adopt a little Libertarian consistency...
...But "Randolph" has a right to a lock on his door, to an unlisted phone number, to a "No Trespassers" sign on his private property, as well as the right to evaluate others as he pleases...
...I am curious about life, and sensitive to all the wondrous beauties therein...
...The crisis in confidence certainly does not exist in the great American provinces--the average American never expected much from America's liberal democratic institutions anyway...
...Now the hard-core intellectual has not always been such a glamorous critter...
...Rev...
...So are their aesthetic or cultural concerns...
...And today I have no doubt that congeries of newspaper reporters, columnists, TV anchormen, librarians, computer jockeys, university administrators, medical technicians, typesetters, and insurance salesmen all secretly suspect t h a t they too are intellectuals...
...Both had been editors of the central intellectual review of the forties, Partisan Review...
...But most certainly they do not have their just society or their sense of a just society...
...Now every society promises something or other...
...As Irving Kristol points out, the American Republic was built on two pillars or perceptions...
...It exists in New York and Cambridge and Washington and all those cosmopolitan redoubts which sprawl across the nation like so many enlightened colonies...
...And I suspect it brings a scowl to the face of many a university professor a t Northwestern and the University of Chicago...
...But I am dubious...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The Establishment, R.R...
...For another reason, many institutions are undertaking far too much...
...While on a hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail, I shared a campsite with a Midwestern family, very typical saccharine liberals (even the grammar schoolers...
...but meanwhile every American, the media and Representative dare not hush-hush but must shout from their rooftops and demonstrate that Congress' first priority is to immediately get at the root causes and remedies for our spiralling burglaries and murders...
...They hold common attitudes and beliefs and most earn t h e i r livings from a limited number of occupations t h a t are all very closely related...
...As Lewis Coser has written, intellectuals are "gatekeepers of ideas and fountainheads of ideologies...
...In the course of our interview, they mentioned that their home was in Bloomington, Indiana...
...15.00 [] 3 yrs...
...As penance I intend to stand on the steps of Saint Patrick's Cathedral and perform the tango for twenty-four straight hours while ingesting nothing more nourishing than chile dogs and peppers...
...By the late sixties the intellectuals had arrived...
...Three bully boys and one constitutionalist...
...In the arena of world politics, where states wrestle barechested, the temptation is strong to seek the vicarious excellence of collective action--redemption through foreign meddling...
...This kind of a statement generally sets ritualistic liberals and t h e i r chic mutants to fussing and vibrating...
...Both reader and author find themselves on more substantial ground in the concluding analyses of strategic and military policy...
...If there is one elemental nexus stretching from the Attica uprising to the glorious revolution of the campus on to the pother over the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate spectacle, women's liberation, gay liberation, the liberation of marijuana, the prohibition of hexachlorophene and on to the lofty moral high jinks which lends such charm to our Democratic conventions, it is the diminution of institutional or social authority...
...And finally, there was Brudnoy, ducking the punches and low blows, and yelling: They're people, they're people, so they have a right to existence, to self-expression, and to the pursuit of happiness...
...The term has often loosely been applied to writers, a r t i s t s , humanists, scholars, and scientists...
...The system of higher education with its propensity for sectional unemployment, underemployment, and the tendency, for example, to mass-produce highly sensitized schoolteachers who will earn less than truck drivers (how often have you heard them grouse about this) is a perfect example of one of our liberal institutions cultivating its own cancers...
...If "Randolph" now cancels his subscription on the grounds that a voice has spoken up in these pages for "Bestial Lib," send it to me Edith Efron Los Angeles, California To the Editor: R. Emmett Tyrrell's likening of the Great Nixon to the Great Gatsby was no exaggeration...
...One reason for this is that it is "an error to believe that political attack arises from grievance and that it can be turned by justification...
...During the fifties and late forties, after America had boxed Hitler's ears and when we resolutely faced the Soviet tyrant, intellectuals for the first time in years whooped it up for the USA...
...I have enjoyed the whole gaudy show...
...He even has a right to compare it to the bond between Heloise and Abelard--under the First Amendment...
...I have in mind, of course, the university and the American college campus...
...11.00 Naine Address City College or Univ...
...Their outlets were a few magazines with small circulations and their institutions were ad hoc associations designed generally for political purposes...
...Middleton has offered us fair warning of the wages of weakness...
...They need not direct their heat upon me...
...Sincerely, Sidney Blackstone President of Sidney Blackstone & Co...
...After all they have probably identified with a t least one 24-carat intellectual as he induced sleep while on a television t a l k show...
...11, Box 360 Bloomington, Indiana 47401 larly feature the essays, reviews, and interviews of intellectuals...
...They live for words and ideas, they are very The Alternative December 1973 23 much engagds...
...And t h a t makes the crisis a serious problem (or a t least a difficulty) for all of us...
...h i l e earnest practitioners tend to focus on the tasks at hand, the intellectual delights in the play of the mind and re(continued on page 22) The Alternative December 1973 3 Drew Middleton, the distinguished New York Times correspondent, has written a newspaperman's account of the decline of American power...
...Obviously, many people possess the intellectuals' qualities only by degrees...
...Then there was the anxious-civilized ET...
...11.00 [] 2 yrs...
...There is the syndrome of rising expectations-which is the pathogen of a kind of politicized benevolence...
...Liberal capitalism or modern bourgeois society while creating many marvels shaped a thing called intellectuals (I will not say liberal capitalism created intellectuals because they existed in slightly different forms centuries ago in monasteries and in the courts of aristocrats, high-toned joints like that...
...tf one understands the concept of rights, one applies them to all people whether their values (sexual or otherwise) are congenial or displeasing...
...He must be willing and capable of criticizing absolutely everything--everything but himself...
...I think this is true today, and I t h i n k this is true because our society has, for better or for worse, become intellectualized...
...According to Joseph Schumpeter this was ever meant to be, for liberal capitalism actually emboldens the mentality of the intellectual...
...The Alternative R.R...
...Plunkitt expects to earn ten million dollars from sales of his new book, he has agreed to continue to advise public figures through this column...
...The Alternative December 1973 25...
...Then stimulate your students with The A l t e r n a t i v e - bring it into the classroom...
...There is technological change or the alleged rate of t h a t change...
...The most smashing refutation of an antagonist will not necessarily silence him...
...Dear Mr...
...They were chary of what Irving Kristol calls the "urban mentality," a mentality t h a t is "irreverent, speculative, pleasure-loving, self-serving, belligerent toward all conventional p i e t i e s " - - a mentality t h a t has become intellectualized...
...Finally with all of the money floating about in our society, well, let's face it, it pays to blow spitballs at the system...
...and the quickest alleviation or remedy is NOT to squander more billions of dollars to trap and put away a handful of criminals who are immediately replaced--but by Congress investing in adequate training and jobs for every American's unique abilities, "from digger to musician, tradesman or physician...
...But the intellectuals' special domain between the two world wars was Greenwich Village and to some extent Paris...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401, Continental U.S.A...
...Generally the circulations of the intellectual journals have soared...
...The conceit of the Great Society was that greatness, never mind excellence, could be imposed by sociological fiat...
...The problem of co-existence with unpleasing people of any category is not particularly difficult of resolution...
...I can always choose another dance...
...McGoo or others like them are going in the midst of a campaign to blush and fess up that they have been out to lunch...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Please enter a new _ _ rcnewal subscription to The Alternative...
...Either the State must be kicked out of the entire area, or it mustn't...
...Second is the quality of moral commitment...
...Regular Subscribers: Student or Faculty: [] 1 yr...
...I would also tell E.T...
...not even a presidential trip to Moscow will long still Soviet ambitions...
...Indeed it seems to me that the whole dynamics of the society in which we live makes the existence and the point of view of intellectuals inevitable...
...Thus they "increase a society's self-knowledge by making manifest its latent sources of discomfort and discontent...
...They are cosmopolitan...
...This sort of ad hominem argument is despicable...
...All, I believe, were heterosexuals...
...Vhich means, really, do we have the will...
...I demand an apology...
...Now from the above taxidermic rendition of the qualities of the intellectual it becomes manifest why it is so difficult to lay down a satisfactory description of intellectuals...
...And there is the decline of religion...
...Schumpeter feels that "the capitalist process produced that atmosphere of almost universal hostility to its own social order...
...My new friends must have been acquainted with ya'll, for their countenances became exceeding wroth, and they avoided me thereafter as if t were a deadly pox And to think, I owe it to ya'll Cum grano salis...
...They are apt to be more cosmopolitan than their ancestors...
...GWP talism, our bourgeois state, are inimical to intellectuals...
...On the other hand, if you feel t h a t something/~ shaking the foundations, you can choose from a wide variety of causes, all tailored for your particular paranoia...
...Oh, it's true t h a t for short periods the intellectuals have fared residence in America congenial to the highfalutin tastes...
...And while liberal capitalism was producing many wondrous and advanced blossoms, intellectuals were slowly multiplying and crawling throughout the vines...
...Any student of political discourse in America today knows that there is no way either Mr...
...There have always been a few strayed intellectuals roaming around campuses...
...Orders may be placed for any number of months, for one month only, or for an entire year...
...Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind...
...The country has got to grow, and as the intellectuals have become a growth industry I expect authority will continue to drain or confidence diminish until finally . . . well by t h a t time I shall reside with the angels and so good riddance...
...from an attitude which spurns allegiance to extra-rational values, it does not follow that rational refutation will be accepted" by the critics themselves...
...While the world's work awaits the strong arm and the willing heart, the United States sets both its hands to wringing...
...But in the matter of society's claim on the individual--and perhaps no other issue is quite as central to the foreign policy of a free nation Mr...
...Ralph Waldo Emerson Third, in order to endure the daily grind that exists even in the sweetest society one must possess at least an emotional attachment to the social order, and as Kenneth Minogue has reminded us, it is extremely difficult to have an emotional commitment to our kind of liberal society, given its context...
...As with many platitudes, this one happens to be true, and I expect there are a lot of reasons for the diminished confidence we hold in our institutions...
...Up until the postwar period intellectuals inhabited a very limited turf...
...And capitalism in the words of Irving Kristol promised three things...
...When they do, when they fall in with a bad crowd of government bureaucrats, statesmen, politicians, and the like, as Arthur Schlesinger did some twelve years ago, they sully their credentials as intellectuals...
...No critic ever puffed up Brahms' German Requiem as '~brilliant...
...That is to say it exists as a crisis in t h a t part of America where t a l k is fervent and nationally infectious (not to say pathological...
...But during the postwar period the writer or intellectual migrated to new environs, environs which are now central to American life...
...A nation of free men must likewise forswear the statist road of crusade...
...Is there any truth to the rumor that your IQ ranks in the "vegetable" category...
...It is not self-evident that a homosexual James Baldwin is more sick-immoral than heterosexual rapist Eldridge Cleaver . . . that homosexual Michael Angelo is more sickimmoral than heterosexual Richard Nixon . . . that homosexual Noel Coward is more sick-immoral than the heterosexuals who love "Sticks and Bones...
...Plunkitt: As you can see from all the things I have been doing I have taken to improving my mind...
...Sincerely, Karen Stephens Kirkwood, Missouri intellectual's criticism must be annoying, and the more annoying he is, the more effective he is and the more opulently he can live...
...And the bourgeois is incapable of preventing this animus to swell up...
...Sidney Dome's Weird Sex Rites of Small Rocks and Lichens, and several months before the Book-of-the-Month Club featured Sister Mary Torrid's The Joys of Sado-Masochism...
...From the fact that criticism of the capitalist order proceeds from a critical attitude of mind, i.e...
...GWP Dear Desert Demosthenes: It has been brought to my attention that in your October column you vilified me and cast aspersions on my very intelligence...
...As for me, I choose to view the matter somewhat differently...
...The young men of the great universities in the Ivy League and of similar institutions in the far and middle West sat this one out...
...Charles S. Hyneman To s u b s c r i b e o r renew j u s t complete form below and m a i l t o d a y . the The Alternative, c/o The Establishment, R.R...
...The crisis addles every editorial office...
...But does America understand the challenge...
...Capitalist rationality does not eliminate subrational or superrational impulses, rather it encourages them by eliminating the restraints of a sense of the sacred...
...Political concerns, which had once been merely the concerns of a small band of intellectuals, now became the obsession of a major American u n i v e r s i t y - - a ghetto became intellectualized...
...Their ancestor never had t h a t kind of experience to broaden his horizon...
...Prof...
...If I have chosen the wrong race let me know...
...Simonds blaring out the frantic warning--that if the evil ones are allowed freedom, they inevitably end up committing mass murders...
...And lastly, it held out the promise that, amidst this prosperity and liberty, the individual could satisfy his instinct for self-perfection --for leading a virtuous life that satisfied the demands of his spirit (or, as one used to say, his soul)--and that the free exercise of such individual virtue would aggregate into a just society...
...Although Dr...
...Taking the long view there may not be anything wrong with this intellectualization of American society...
...And, I suppose that while I am a t it I might as well throw in the larger causes...
...I think Irving Kristol would say they possess urban values...
...These were the same people who, a few years before, had cheered John F. Kennedy's admonition to ask not what they would receive from their country, but what they could do for their country...
...Each student's copy costs only 20 cents a month...
...There are far too many signs, which have proven accurate in the past, that there is a general decline in the will, if not the energies, of America...
...Before discussing their current condition, let me proceed a l i t t l e further in this exercise in the taxidermy of the intellectual...
...And of course we should never forget t h a t many institutions are simply engaged in performing the impossible, and such performances are never apt to inspire much confidence from an audience...
...Ed Dupree Chapel Hill, North Carolina To the Editor: The article by Richard Wheeler is the best ever...
...It came out the month before Dr...
...They find themselves pecked a t in the unreadable pages of the New York Review of Books, and they have to scramble if they are ever to get back in the good graces of intellectuals...
...To C.H...
...And in 1964 while the Republicans were letting the hundred flowers bloom, something equally dramatic was happening a t Berkeley...
...And the description is not without its authenticity...
...What is more, an 22 The Alternative December 1973 To the Editor: Here is a true story for your reading pleasure...
...They have a special style...
...In order to reach those regions where the crisis in confidence or the credibility gap elicits gasps and raises blood pressures, one merely has to go to those hangouts where people earn their livings by flexing t h e i r tongues...
...Ideas are increasingly the tools with which we work in a post-industrial world...
...To your indictments may I add that Watergate culminates but at the same time smokescreens the fires and greater crimes beneath--the mounting horrors in our own streets, homes, and lives day by day...
...The culprits who have pulled the plugs are often called intellectuals...
...Gerard F. Yates Georgetown University Washington, D.C...
...It is downright exciting to observe that it is located f a r enough away from the swales where intellectuals clump and clog to offer a prospect that we may get a fresh examination o f some high p r i o r i t y problems...
...But this goes beyond our present concern...
...The author brings to Retreat from Victory both a broad background in foreign reporting and an unabashed love for his own country...
...First of all it promised continued improvement in the material conditions of all of its citiT~ens--a promise without precedent in history...
...I am not opposed to any of the above-listed glories...
...University faculties now embrace something like 600,000 souls, and pollsters claim t h a t over three-fourths consider themselves intellectuals...
...Further, capitalism creates '~a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own...
...Rather, concentrate on the improvement of one by one...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, is celebrating the publication of his new book, which is now available at avant-garde bookstores throughout New Jersey...
...Simonds, I would say that if mass murder is the "logical extreme" of Gay Lib, he's going to have his hands full explaining mass murders by Hitler, Stalin, Mao...
...And it is my contention that, as I hope I have suggested from the above analysis, they never will have their just society...
...His direct antecedent, the writer, scratched away at a marginal existence...
...Thus they live off ideas and they live for ideas...
...We have the core species, unmongrelized by outside pressures or responsibilities, and they are surrounded by more and more concentric circles of persons who approximate them in varying degrees, depending on propinquity to the core...
...State Z i p ~ Year Studies end t . . Right...
...Nevertheless the grunts and groans of institutions so engaged works hell on some persons' confidences...
...Do we have the capacity to fulfill our by Drew Middleton Hawthorn Books $7.95 commitments," he asks...
...After all, some very advanced ideas have personally influenced their lives in a very special way, known only to them, their select circle of like-minded friends, and the long-suffering bartender to whom they first unveil their clever or profound thoughts...
...Politically, intellectuals have in general been critical of established institutious and values, sometimes from the Right, more often from the Left...
...To me it is not a crisis in confidence t h a t afflicts us but rather a slow and steady draining of authority from American institutions...
...Special classroom rates are available for The Alternative for bulk orders of 10 or more copies delivered to the same address...
...This Coser refers to as the quality of "play...
...Incidentally, I was hasty in my judgment of your intellect...
...As Coser emphasized intellectuals transform conflicts of interests into conflicts of values and ideas...
...Down the bar a bit, there was C.H...
...But make no mistake about it, today intellectual is a discreetly sought-after epithet, and this has been increasingly true probably since the 1962 publication of Richard Hofstadter's rather confusing denunciation of anti-intellectuals...
...All have contributed in their prodigious ways to that sickly feeling we sense today when we muse on the prospects of the Great Republic...
...For an insight into the lowly origins of the now glorious American intellectual, I suggest you read Mencken's correspondence with his friend Dreiser and his reviews of Dreiser's work...
...4.50 [] 2 yrs...
...I would suggest to "Randolph" that rights are inalienable, and that he handle his fear of the seductive powers of homosexuals in some other fashion...
...Put another way the intellectuals do not have much reverence for the Protestant ethic, the idea of deferred gratification, the dull philistine life style of liberal capitalism . . . the contemporary evolution of the American Republic...
...Indeed they have some good reasons for the way they feel...
...Wherever t a l k and ideas abound there you will find the fever of crisis...
...At least the major source is from the 20-30 million desperate people in the families of our jobless and bankrupt small businesses...
...In fact it is best t h a t they have no firsthand knowledge of their material...
...When the critics sat in on Bernstein's pathetic attempt at a mass, '%rilliant" was about all that they could say...
...When the sunlight shines again upon Washington after this tempestuous time, perhaps the more fitting metaphor from the literature of the Twenties will be "The Nixon Administration as The Waste Land...
...Cancel my subscription if you move East...
...6.00 [] 1 yr...
...An altogether more wholesome approach, others have pointed out, is to avoid either question...
...Idleness and disastrous mal-distribution of our fabulous wealth are the cancers killing Americans and "metastesizing" presidents, and unless Congress quickly does more than throw a few more buggers in jail or even impeach the President, America is in for far more personal and collective agonies...
...At this point I should mention t h a t if my readings of Bernard Bailyn are sound, the Founders' visions of Republican morality would be shaken a bit by our contemporary evolutions in liberal capitalism...
...Middleton stumbles...
...The Founders doubted t h a t this mentality would comport amiably with Republican virtue...
...Not only did the editors and writers of select l i t t l e magazines become professors, but college and university curricula now became more contemporary, or more intellectualized if you will...
...You have not only insulted me but also my race...
...Carping the diem in my usual fashion, I began to sing the praises of The Alternative...
...Magazines like Playboy and Esquire now reguhistory, government, economics, literature, international relations...
...Wiser men in these heady days counsel that such qualities flow only from the spirit of those capable of lifelong commitment...
...Regarding your immediate question I believe there was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection several months ago which discussed the sexual longings of saltwater bivalves...
...It seems t h a t criticism is the f r u i t of his labor, and the criticism need not be especially prudent or thoughtful--though it must always be brilliant...
...They delight in the play of the mind...
...In a way they all have a point...
...Finally the very best of the intellectuals are independent and have no responsibility for their ideas whatsoever...
...obviously has a right to his relationship with a consenting billy goat...
...As such political concerns swept across the nation's campuses, the centrality of intellectuals to our lives became manifest...
...One of their identifying qualities is a commitment to ideas as such...
...Free desk copies are provided for eoch instructor...
...Well, too bad for them...
...Finally, the keepers of many American institutions are making the mistake of defining things as problems which are not problems at all, but rather difficulties or conditions...
...Today Americans are t h e "most dangerous people of the earth...
...Now the causes of this problem or difficulty are many...
...Mencken asserts t h a t this was true even before the F i r s t World War when Theodore Dreiser and his crowd resided in the Village...
...They, who had received the most from their country, repaid the least...
...Certainly many of us would be quick to categorize Mencken as a prototype American intellectual, yet he tirelessly rebuked his friend Dreiser for Dreiser's bohemian way of life and he reviled the Greenwich Village boobs...
...Newspaper reporters, who a generation ago might have had no less knowledge or talent, today consider themselves vaguely intellectual merely because at college they were told to read Sartre or Eldridge Cleaver, or because they have an enthusiasm for French wines or because they harbor deep within their besoms a gnawing conviction t h a t something good or beatific goes on inside Orchestra Hall...
...The Ervin Committee must quickly expose and the Courts punish every Watergater...
...In fact a glance at the issues of contemporary American society seems to indicate t h a t the urban mentality is a t war with this second pillar which the Founders felt so important...
...Millions of students presume to be intellectuals and every major publishing house is blessed with young editors who are either themselves intellectuals or are in close contact with intellectuals...
...Mere assertions will not end the Cold War...
...There was "Randolph," adopting a pseudonym to air the classic-hostile view that homosexuals are evil, have an unholy seductive power, thus must be deprived of certain rights...
...For our purposes I have selected from the pages of Commentary Nathan Glazer's working definition: "Intellectuals are people who make a living from ideas, and are in varying degrees directly influenced by ideas...
...These last few years have provided me with joyful employment, and I have been vastly amused by every clubfooted step we have taken towards the New Age...
...He also dresses funny, as Woody Allen has percipiently pointed out...
...Please try to tighten up on your (plural) writing...
...Well, the intellectuals have their affluence and they have their freedom...
...A robust, imaginative society, after all, is ultimately no more than a collection of robust, imaginative individuals...
...Intellectuals are as much an interest group as pig farmers...
...An examination of the more awesome question, to wit, history's melancholy deracination of the American Republic, would also shed light on today's crisis in confidence...
...The point is t h a t both the democracy of the Founders and of our own liberal capi24 The Alternative December 1973 Dr...
...Great American Series Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist...
...The characteristics they embrace will not allow them to satisfy that appetite...
...Robert Nisbet claims never to have heard the word "intellectual" used as a noun before the late forties, and in the thirties the word "writer" served the august purposes for which intellectual is now used...
...While arguing effectively against portside historiography, he avoids, for the most part, the pitfalls of the unreflective "It is encouraging to observe the appearance of a new carrier o f acute analysis and bold opinion...
...It is done, but not often, and never very seriously...
...Unlike the scholar or the scientist, the intellectual is a committed judge of his times...
...As for D. Brudnoy, I'm on his side...
...Its economics were beyond their imaginations and seem to be a bit beyond our own imaginations...
...Middleton has argued a credible and timely thesis--Jane's Fighting Ships, in late July, declared the Soviet navy the world's strongest--but the reasonably informed reader may ask why he took 250 pages to do it~ Much of the book, particularly the chapters of historical background, ring with textbook familiarity...
...Exactly how highly intellectualized these magazines have become is revealed by the recent incidence of suicide amongst their staffs...
...Now this is also the pastime of the clergy, and if we are to distinguish the two we should add a third quality...
...Their current political fascinations are a spike into the heart of liberalism...
...To E.T...
...The B.L...
...And Robert Nisbet adds a fourth quality, emulation of a certain style the style of brilliance, beyond intelligence or profundity...
...For me it has been a gorgeous feast, though viewed more objectively and less personally, the late sixties and on to the present have been Liberalism's years of embarrassment, or America's years of embarrassment, and no doubt for many good persons they have been years of heartbreak...
...At any r a t e it has been notoriously difficult to frame a definition of intellectual...
...It exists in t h a t part of America where crises are spawned...
...Veal, I would point out that the world is full of neurotics, that all have volitional components in their neuroses, and that, even assuming that homosexuality is a volitionally induced neurosis, he still has to face the chore of individual judgment...
...All of this is to say t h a t if the crisis of confidence strikes you as insignificant or if you seem vaguely to recognize it as a part of an advertisement for women's lingerie or deodorant, well, you are perfectly justified in your hazy perception...
...Subjectpredicate, subject-predicate, he recounts the course of American foreign policy since the close of World War I. Later, he turns to the present state of American weaponry and resolve...
...They were a t best a few congenial publishing houses and even these were not run by intellectuals...
...In fact it is probably just one of the many things that the average university professor holds in common with every Playboy bunny...
...If your mind continues to develop, you may replace Kingman Brewster as president of Yale...
...What Irving Kristol dissects as the elements of Republican morality: "steadiness of character, deliberativeness of mind, and a mild predisposition to subordinate one's own special interests to the public interest," are the kinds of values guaranteed to make the paradigmatic intellectual choke...
...Peace and Freedom and an Open Sky, Jane Fonda Dear Miss Fonda: Once again you have thrown me...
...He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness...
Vol. 7 • December 1973 • No. 3
