Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial" Of Moose and the Movement During this century one American weakness which has inspired in the civilized minority many ribald hoots and much roistering derision has been the American weakness...
...moviemaker's struck his gold...
...Its response to the infamy of airport frisks is illustrative...
...The fact that Brother Armstrong had admitted to the bombings and to murder did not douse the conventioneers' enthusiasm in the least, for when the worthies of the movement talk about peace and freedom, they speak in lapidary phrases of ritual much the way Rotarians invoke their rote incantations to "service...
...The writer of course is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a man whose cause is unfathomable to Jane Fonda...
...It was a high-minded assembly in the great American style...
...These poor souls have very little regard for the highfalutin sentiments that ostensibly summon them to assemble...
...This autumn, just as foliage festivals were being celebrated in all the backwaters of Podunk, the movement held its fall convention, and no intelligent liberal will ever take them seriously again...
...Millions of American drivers, choosing of their own free will to wink at the Reaper by ignoring their seatbelts, will suffer harassment, though they endanger not one other soul on this globe...
...9 Siddhartha: A lesser work by Herman Hesse (1922) comes to the screen in gorgeens maxi-color...
...Meanwhile the ACLU will lie in wait for that one moment of libertarian melodrama when some cop, investigating for seatbelt evaders, apprehends a rapist in the act...
...Only then will the curtailment of civil rights prove interesting to the ACLU...
...9 Day for Night: Truffaut's song to the cinema, an intricate but easy ramble through the ironies of movie-making within the well-made movie...
...When he dismissed the Hon...
...It was a memorable spectacle in every way, and if the saintly Brother Armstrong is going to have to cool his heels in the calaboose for twenty-seven years, fie...
...9 The Paper Chase: Love Story at Harvard I_aw School...
...It is perfectly proper to protest if there is no danger to life, if the opponent is likely to back down and if you don't risk being denounced by the left (in fact, it is always better to protest together with the left...
...Bosh...
...And so it goes...
...I speak of the sad condition of the Russian Jews and intelligentsia and of the obvious hypocrisy of that crowd of American martyrs who seem to hold combined memberships in the peace movement, the youth culture, the counterculture, and numberless other trendy enthusiasms as yet unborn...
...Consider the American Civil Liberties Union...
...Engauded with the most sublime principles, it allows middle-class gringos to pretend they are freedom fighters without ever having to confront Solzhenitsyn...
...But they hoodwink only featherbrains, and one did not have to be in Madison this fall to note their hypocrisy...
...But while they frolicked with philosophy and paraded against repression in America, Solzhenitsyn and the other victims of the Russian Bill of Rights were making a last stand against the KGB, which now was taking advantage of the spirit of d6tente to crush Russian dissidence, and no one in Madison betrayed any evidence that he cared...
...for infants, teenie-boppers, and sub-thirty smartasses----eat your hearts out...
...So ardent is their Babbitt zeal that I would not be surprised to hear that Jane Fonda and the Berrigan Boys were planning a peace float for the Rose Bowl Parade, or perhaps the entry of a movement candidate in the Miss America Contest...
...They have done no more for the cause of peace or freedom in the world than the WCTU did for the cause of soft drinks...
...These trashy get-togethers are renowned for having nothing to do with their brassy ideals and everything to do with self-promotion and adolescent merriment...
...None of these illustrious American freedom fighters has yet to burn a Russian flag, picket a Russian Embassy, or show the jackbooted bureaucrats the least glimmer of their vaunted audacity...
...The Madison convention is the kind of sham that only native American conventioneers could carry out without a blush...
...Are these children of "the movement" as they call it actually serious about peace, freedom, vitamin E, or any of the other august sonorities their leaders roar about...
...Does anyone actually believe that the average ADAers assemble in a national convention to elucidate matters of democratic process like so many latter-day Madisons and Masons...
...To this moment the movement has yet to direct one imprecation against the Soviet government that compares with its mere benign references to America...
...Thinking Americans have almost become inured to such atrocities, but occasionally the dissimulations are riveting, especially when American pecksniffs choose to hold a peace and freedom spectacular at the very time when in another country brave men are sweating it out beneath the totalitarian's boot...
...But whatever one calls them and in whatever tent they assemble, they are always dull, mindless donkeys who ingest the received truths of their time only to burp up bubbles of flatulent sentiment in place of solid ideas or individual perspectives...
...sock 'era, knock 'era tale ill-teld...
...To attract the defense of the ACLU's pettifoggers the average driver will have to be arrested while fleeing a bank robbery or a multiple kidnapping...
...Since the time of Twain genial skeptics have heehawed at their asinine pretensions...
...It is a facade, behind which thousands of unserious clods escape the gray realization of their own uselessness...
...the young Buddha (sorta) discovering himself, you should pardon the expression, in longago India...
...Nevertheless the movement did have the opportunity to get together, reminisce, smoke a little cannabis, and roar about peace, freedom, and justice...
...For the movement is like so many other American organizations composed of congenital joiners and doers...
...Perhaps they will initiate their own contest, say, a Miss Anti-American Contest...
...JeanPierre l.~aud, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jacqueline Bisset, nice naughty Nice, and Truffaut himself make this satinsmooth...
...Your average teenage cellist cure basketball player and his beautiful first girl, holding hands and more in a spotlessly clean New York...
...Mencken called them and their gullible epigonos boobs...
...These windy frauds spent the last years of the Vietnam war signing anguished proclamatious in local newspapers, molesting their neighbors, and conventioneering, with an avidity that stunned even seasoned troopers of the Shrine and the American I.~gion...
...Not only is the average member of this service organization a prodigious ass, but he is a perpetual sophomore when it comes to thinking seriously about primordial questions of liberty...
...Relevant...
...Of Moose and the Movement During this century one American weakness which has inspired in the civilized minority many ribald hoots and much roistering derision has been the American weakness for inane ceremony, fatuous commemoration, and nincompoop pageant...
...And so it goes...
...Whether Americans join together to further the highest standards of their trade or the highest ideals of the human spirit, the organization they leave behind eventually degenerates into a pretext for singing songs and flying paper airplanes...
...The ADAers assemble for the same reason any other conventioneers take leave of their wives' cuisine...
...Neither fantasy nor quite reality, it is warming;, inconsequential, yes, but it feels good...
...And though they have marched for some of the most dubious causes ever confected, though the times are no longer auspicious for their spoonery, they nevertheless show no sign of making any reassessment, not even after dissidents of the genuine variety like Alexander Solzhenitsyn warn them that their tomfoolery is threatening the flickering light of freedom behind the Iron Curtain...
...Solzhenitsyn recently spoke out against the rising generation of Chamberlains in the West, the movement pretended he was on their side (pretending being one of their most popular intellectual exercises...
...Brother Kuntsler set up his soap box on street corners, church steps, and wherever a gullible crowd would have him...
...They require you always to bow and scrape toward one side, and always to kick the other side (which happens to be the one that feeds you...
...While Solzhenitsyn stood in the shadows of secret police and torture chambers, declaring his people's right to freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom to exit an inhospitable country, the well-heeled and widely-celebrated American peace movement issued press releases from its Holiday Inn headquarters, grousing about the grievous state of repression in America...
...It would come as no surprise for they are 100 percent American boosters...
...And it is about all one can expect from a mob of joiners and doers...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 3) ideals than their recent hollow get-together in Madison, Wisconsin...
...Hot-shot young first-year student (Timothy Bottoms) seeking success and boodie, matching wits with his contracts prof (John Houseman, who gets all the best lines) and gropes with his prof's daughter (Lindsay Wagner, who is luscious but a cipher...
...On September 22 Brother Karlten Armstrong pleaded guilty to the secend-degree murder of a University of Wisconsin graduate student and to a spree of bombings throughout southern Wisconsin, all on behalf of world peace, freedom, justice, green grass, etc., before hightailing it across the border back in 1970...
...9 Jeremy: Young love and sex...
...A self-indulgent little film destined to make more money than it's worth...
...Brilliantly drawn, viciously objectionable...
...Well . . . . Big, brassy, arrogant, but it bowled your servant over...
...9 J e s u s Christ Superstar: Nobody loves it but The People...
...Despite class, vocation, or political mythology, the clods who join these bogus organizations generally act according to instinct rather than intellect---their spasming hearts instinctively pump vast gushes of blood into their cheeks whenever the time is at hand for some exaggerated ceremony or convention...
...Rotary shindigs and other such hollow shows of yahoo sentiment are plainly ludicrous, and the skeptics have long delighted in snatching by the scruff of the neck the impresarios of these oaf gatherings, raising them above the wallow of their disciples, and exposing them hissing and shrieking for all the world to see...
...Only the most gullible sap would think so...
...9 Last Tango in Paris: Ha-cha, hacha, Brando bold...
...These are not serious defenders of peace, freedom, and justice, but Rotarians, Elks, and American joiners...
...Americans gather for some grand purpose, hoist exalted banners around the convention hall, and shoot spitballs...
...There were marches, lectures, rallies, theater skits, and other forms of traditional highjinks...
...Incomparably the finest epic treatment of the great European folk migration to the United States in the nineteenth century...
...The same applies to the various forms of Meutrality' and 'nonalignment' that have become so widespread...
...A must see...
...Then these doughty defenders of civil liberties will pounce, the Bill of Rights will be rescued, and freedom preserved . . . but only for the seatbeltless rapist, kidnapper, or bank robber...
...9 The New Land: Conclusion to Jan Troel's two-part epic (first part: 1972's The Emigrants...
...Think of it...
...Those heavy-lidded dark eyes flashing, those green green glens shining bright, those lessons in Life...
...For overthirties, a must...
...The Americans for Democratic Action is the same kind of floorshow...
...9 Heavy T r ~ c : Cartoon full-length feature: vulgar, cruel, cheeky, not for your Bambi and Dumbo crowd...
...Forsaking their prior claim of Brother Armstrong's innocence, they began urging that it had been his constitutional right and sacred duty to wreak mayhem and destruction...
...Moose, Elks, Pythians, and their cohorts soak themselves in beer and tommyrot...
...For months the impresarios of the movement had been planning to make the trial of this American Gandhi an occasion by holding one of their peace, freedom, and justice conventions, and by September they were not about to cancel it...
...Even now the eminentoes of the movement are jetting around the Republic planning and organizing extravaganzas for peace and justice as though the 1960s had never ended...
...R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . 26 The Alternative January 1974...
...So it was that as the ACLU prated on about the tender rights of arrant criminals, a precedent was set that will authorize government agents to run their fingers over the bodies of ordinary citizens for years to come...
...Michael Moriarty and Robert De Nire are splendid as Henry and his hopeless pal Bruce...
...The ensuing jamboree lasted over two months, and kept the University of Wisconsin in a pother from the beginning of the school year...
...Jane Fonda officiously flitted in and out of town like the busy little beaver of virtue that she is...
...The Berrigans were in a fever, saving souls and leading processions...
...Stately, languid, superlative beyond words, The New Land (along with The Emigrants) ranks with the very finest films ever made...
...When Mr...
...They congregate to pickle their tonsils in booze, swap lies, and hopefully fall transiently in love with some $25-an-hour lady of delights...
...And the reason is very simple...
...There we have the whole hypocrisy of many Western protests...
...No matter if Americans band together to usher in world peace or to bring succor to crippled children, they usually end by playing golf...
...Most of them simply gather to parade their superior virtue before television cameras, while kicking up their heels, teasing the constabulary, and collecting anecdotes with which to bore their fated descendants...
...Coercion that throttles the great mass of the citizenry simply does not trouble the American Civil Liberties Union, Inc...
...Vincent Gardenia as the manager, and all other supporting cast members, including Tom Ligon as a hippy ballplayer, contribute to a fine cinema experience...
...Over five hours, beth halves, detailing a Swedish family's remove to America in the 1850s...
...Rather than defend the rights of the millions of Americans whose privacy was invaded by this totalitarian hors d'oeuvre, the ACLU instead sot off on a bizarre crusade to defend those hapless traffickers in illicit drugs who had been perchance nabbed during an airport frisk...
...Ramsey Clark as a "fluttering butterfly" for his collaboration with the North Vietnamese, the movement merely put him down as a CIA plot, and its members washed their paws of him...
...The celebrities shuffled in and out of Madison for two months, and were it not for the historic tumult in Washington and the Middle East, I have no doubt that half the nation's news media would have taken up residence in Madison this autumn...
...Paris, Paris, as of old...
...9 Bang the Drum Slowly: Friendship between two ballplayers, one goofy and dying, the other a star...
...This very day there bubbles in every state capital coercive legislation that will empower state police to stop and search any civilian automobile whose passengers are suspected of the high crime of riding sine seatbelt--not a peep has issued from the ACLU nor is one expected...
...No action could have more eloquently bespoken their disregard for their reputed (continued on page 26) The Alternative January 1974 3 Brudnoy's Film Index _9 American Graffiti: 1962 hot-rods, the hop, rock 'n roll, four boys, their girls, a time of testing for all: the best nostalgia flick in a long time...
...No center, no point, but the classroom scenes are delights...
...There, on that Main Street of American Radicalism, it became eminently clear that beneath every peace and freedom button beats the heart of a Shriner...
...When in concert, the ADA is not much different than the Shrine except for the fact that, whereas the Shrine's interest in little children is contained to little children, the ADA's solicitude for little children is directed at all mankind...
...From far away and without the benefit of television, radio, or the great American publishing houses, the world's greatest living writer has precisely analyzed their contribution to the struggle for freedom in the world...
...Old troopers like Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, and Tom Hayden were in attendance as were eight fullblooded veterans of Vietnam...
...Stunning performances by Max yon Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, and Minnesota...
...They are the most egregious species of pecksniff...
...Oh well, it is A Happening and worth seeing at least so that you can join in the dishing when your friends bemoan their five badlyspent bucks...
...And, as the years roll under the old bridge, it is becoming inescapably obvious that even the august organizations of the American Enlightenment are not exempt from this characteristically American hollowness...
...What has always intrigued me about this impulse to band together in high-minded organizations and juvenesce is that it inheres throughout much of American society...
...The ACLU's patrimony to the civil liberties of the average gringo is about as useful as a secondhand toothbrush...
...They let American POWs waste away in North Vietnam and they will allow the Russian Jews and intelligentsia to suffer in the glorious Soviet Republic...
...Every intelligent observer of the American scene knows that Rotarians are not diligent samaritans but goof-offs and glad hands...
...That is the ACLU's service to liberty...
...Sinclair I~wis called these patheticees Babbitts, and H.L...
Vol. 7 • January 1974 • No. 4
