The Continuing Crisis
The Continuing Crisis • • ^ April brought a further discrediting to the once warmly debated domino theory. In fact, so discredited has the domino theory become that hardly a dove can be found to...
...Thailand's Foreign Minister Chatichai Choonhavan denounced the United States as a country "without morals," declaring that all American troops would be expelled from Thailand within a year, while his government waxed loveydovey toward the Communist governments of Cambodia and South Vietnam and the Philippines began reviewing its policy vis-a-vis the United States...
...Alexander Mitchell...
...William Kunstler, the modern Darrow, had no sooner asserted that "American students have no spirit left" than an American student, armed with an American-made chocolate cream pie, launched it...
...First they attempted to show their revolutionary solidarity with the progressive peoples of the world by returning the three-hundred-year-old Portuguese colony of Macao to Red China...
...Actually, April might have seen the public discourse assume a dignity it has not had for over a decade, if only our journalists were as cowardly as our politicians...
...In England the possible dangers of excessive humor on television will be investigated by a Royal Commission in the melancholy aftermath of the death of . Mr...
...Mitchell, a King's Lynn bricklayer, was seized by a fit of uncontrollable laughter while watching the comedy show, "Goodies," and died after 25 minutes of fatal hilarity...
...about two-thirds of South Vietnam tumbled...
...And the doctrine of the people's right to know received a notable boost when that country's four daily newspapers published nude photographs of former foreign minister, Miss Elizabeth Bagaaya...
...Arnold Cooper, for killing Stackhouse's cat...
...And in response to the last sepulchral events of Southeast Asia he delivered several speeches, which Christian charity enjoins us not to dwell upon other than to mention that, just as he generously joined his Democratic colleagues in a plea against blaming others for the collapse, Speaker of the House Carl Albert notified a Democratic fundraising dinner that it was the Democrats who brought an end to war in Southeast Asia...
...Another lady went on a tour of Colonial America with stops at some of the most elegant fashion spots in Washington and New York...
...In fact, so discredited has the domino theory become that hardly a dove can be found to discuss the issue...
...Consider that $3,750,000 fund that the government forced the Bank of America to establish in order to redress sexual inequalities and to train women for higher-level jobs...
...The pet suffocated when the loutish Mr...
...On April 17 ex-Secretary of the Treasury, John Connally, was acquitted of bribery charges, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, the traditional mayor of Chicago, scotched newspaper reports that his son was about to marry a princess of a local mafioso by declaring that Miss Mary Lou (Pretzels and Beer) Briatta "is a good Catholic, college-educated girl, who paints and plays the flu...
...James Stackhouse set fire to his landlord, Mr...
...President Ford continues to sweat it out...
...Violence continues to stalk the land of the free...
...On April 17 Cambodia fell...
...The Chinese refused it...
...into Mr...
...Meanwhile, Chadologists in the State Department say it is still too early to predict the future orientation of that volatile African nation, but the political career of Chad's erstwhile president, Mr...
...Unfortunately the journalists did not follow the politicians into hiding, and America was soon awash in an idiotic spate of lurid headlines celebrating what the journalists seemed to consider America's international abasement during the surrender of Cambodia and South Vietnam—this after Congress did everything humanly possible to insure that no other outcome was possible...
...Despite the fact that America's social revolution is finally bearing fruit, the foul spirit of enterprise still permeates American life and occasionally intrudes where it is least expected...
...Then they tightened the noose around Cambodia's capital...
...At the end of the month Newsweek reported that a "massive bloodbath" was reforming Cambodia...
...Addressing a Vanderbilt University audience, Mr...
...It was reported that Miss Elizabeth Taylor has amoebic dysentery...
...The Communists mustered only 12% and the blanks did worse...
...Chad is now governed by a General Noel Odingar, one of that progressive republic's first disc jockeys...
...One woman went to Europe to learn how to cook because she "liked to give dinner parties and wanted expertise in fine wines and foods...
...But the assailant made good his escape, and Mr...
...Kunstler's face...
...And finally the Communists and Socialists combined to make their May Day celebration such an embarrassment that some observers suspected that their ranks had been infiltrated by the American Democratic Party...
...The discredited domino theory, originally propounded by President Eisenhower, elucidated the naive view that were one Southeast Asian country to fall to Communist aggressors other coterminous nations would tumble "like a row of dominoes...
...Cooper rolled over on it during his afternoon nap...
...At Yale he delivered a remarkably intelligent speech on law and order, which caused visible alarm amongst the students and apparently induced sleep in the press box...
...War suddenly broke out in Laos, and on the day before South Vietnam was surrendered to the Communists by perhaps the fattest general in South Vietnam, the New York Times reported the recrudescence of war in Thailand...
...The pedagogues, armed with syllogisms and superior erudition, made short shrift of it, and by the early seventies it had slipped into the New York Times Style Book as the "discredited-domino-theory...
...Then they set up an election tilted so as to give a large vote to the Communists or to assure a large number of blank votes...
...And in Philadelphia Mr...
...Tombalbaye was shot dead when Chad army forces stormed his palace in Ndjamena, killing 16 members of the palace guard, 12 chickens, and the presidential oxen...
...Flabbergasted" is how federal judge Charles B. Renfrew described his feelings when he discovered that the fund's female directors had used it to send female friends on world junkets whose rationales had a queer ring to them...
...Kunstler, as he picked himself up from beneath the creamy debris...
...Come here, you coward," yelled the engooed Mr...
...But—though the pedagogues can work prodigies in their seminars—nothing so expediently discredits theory as practice, and it took Communist armies merely six weeks to expose the theory for the absurdity that it is...
...Finally, on May 2 North Vietnam ordered the United States out of South Korea, and South Korea began a review of its national security policies...
...From Kampala in scenic Uganda comes word that the government has rounded up a large number of businessmen and flogged them at government expense for hoarding beetle wine...
...On April 23 he warned of the increasing power of the Soviet navy, just as that navy entered upon a world-wide maneuver, its most extensive naval exercise since World War II and an exercise almost wholly neglected by the American press...
...But if things went awry for the American government, consider the miseries of the left-wing military government of Portugal...
...In Weston, Massachusetts, the most popular Presidential candidate in the United States was driven from a speakers' dais by a mob of disgruntled citizens led by a gaunt, humorless woman who continually jabbed him with "a tiny American flag on a stick...
...Ngarta Tombalbaye, is definitely on the wane...
...You can label this jostling," smiled the popular Senator as he galloped along in front of the enraged mob...
...For that matter, the unusual quiet which befell Capitol Hill as the news of Southeast Asia worsened was about the only pleasant news during the month...
...RE1...
...From Vietnam some one hundred thousand refugees straggled into America, setting off an annoying chorus of yelps from Americans who feared their jobs would be jeopardized by this melange of immigrants—mostly doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, intellectuals, and prostitutes...
...His inherent delicacy restrained him from explaining how this feat was accomplished...
...First they marched upon South Vietnam's central highlands...
...By the end of the month Australia was reviewing its defense capability as Lieutenant General Sir Mervyn Brogan stated that he saw a "subversive threat to Indonesia and ourselves...
...Despite his tragic passing, his spouse, Nessie, is writing the program's producers to "thank them for making Alex's last minutes so happy...
...And so a chorus of Bronx cheers for the domino theory as it hunkers down the corridors of history along with such other laughingstocks as "containment," "balanced budgets," and the "Copernican theory...
...Indeed, hardly a dove can be found to discuss any aspect of Southeast Asia...
...Kunstler was left to ponder the diabolical lengths to which the CIA will go to wipe out vestiges of American civil liberties...
Vol. 8 • June 1975 • No. 9
