Correspondence

...The basically conservative majority in America will thus remain split as usual, and Professor O'Lessker will be free to graze for at least four years more in the pastures of pure and undiluted principle...

...But my argument is not with those who think they see a way to fruitful compromise, but rather with those who are only too happy to bargain away our last vestige of freedom...

...Second, what policy consequences would likely flow from a Presidential victory of that sort of coalition...

...In practice what it will mean is that economic conservatives will have to do all the accommodating, putting aside their heartfelt regard for limited government and free enterprise in order to win the White House on a surge of anti-busing, anti-permissive, pro-school-prayer votes...

...The foregoing demonstrates a confusion between misbehaving pupils who are willfully disrupting classroom decorum, for which the rod or intimidation might be appropriate, and children with so-called "minimal brain dysfunction" (who may or may not disrupt the class), for whom disciplinary action would be as appropriate as if it were used to control sneezing or a grand mal seizure...

...Surely such a condemnation is better reserved for philosophical systems that are internally inconsistent, and ought not to be applied to conservatives who, without changing their own opinions in the least, seek programmatic accommodations with others who agree with them on many points but not on all...

...the parents of a child still retain certain responsibility and prerogatives, including choice of a physician, and the right to accept or reject his advice...

...For in this as in other great matters of state there is a mainstream so broad, so inexorable, as to require a virtual revolution to divert it...

...I am content to let the courts decide...

...Undesirable as lawsuits brought by government-funded organizations may be, and however self-serving the motives of the Youth Law Center advocates, they have raised an important question...

...You may be sure of getting the real thing in at least two bars in that land: the Bar Tal in Chihuahua and the bar on the roof of the Majestic Hotel in Mexico City...

...A personal note before proceeding...

...William A. Rusher New York, New York Mr...

...All you need are three ingredients, a limber wrist, some hard ice (as contrasted to cloudy or watery ice), a cocktail shaker, and a thirst for immediate release from all the sordid cares...

...The physician in this case is the only pediatrician in town, and has treated some children in her practice whom she also sees in a different capacity at school, and other children are treated by their own doctors...

...If it turns out, as I believe it will, that large numbers of them manage it quite nicely, it is always open to Mr...

...Representative Steve Symms of Idaho has said that the major obstacle he faced in his decision to run originally for the House of Representatives in 1972 was the advice of his conservative friends, who assured him he could never win...

...These agencies have a tendency to seek out causes where none are apparent, promoting liberal concepts of justice, and stirring up trouble where none existed...

...In addition, O'Lessker apparently subscribes with some enthusiasm to the doctrine that "conservatives cannot win" politically...

...Of course conservatives can be elected from individual districts and even from an entire state...

...One can overlook those minor lapses, of course...

...As to Mr...

...Thayer A. Smith, M.D...

...our beverages endure forever...

...I withhold half a cheer not because Professor O'Lessker disapproves of my proposal for a new-party coalition of economic and social conservatives, which is his right, but because he condemns it on an improper ground...

...It cannot be stopped, much less reversed...

...I'm sure there must be hundreds of other good bars, but I am here restricted by experience and by a passion for scientific truth...

...But then who of us now listens to the voice of Reason...

...By contrast, Mr...

...You need fresh limes, a good tequila (in These States that would mean Jose Cuervo, preferably Cuervo Especial Afiejo), and a bottle of Triple Sec...

...Two that strike me as especially important are these...

...Nor is it simply a matter of a Lyndon Johnson or a Jimmy Carter coming along just in time to siphon the votes out of the conservative gas tank...

...Those who think I'm being "defeatist" here should look again at the Congressional elections of 1972...

...Where in heaven's name was the basically conservative majority that year...

...Indeed it may be correct to say that my differences with Mr...

...Not incidentally, when stimulant drugs lose their calming effect in early adolescence, the junior high school teacher inherits 13-year-olds with the inhibitions of sixyear-olds...

...Certainly the American people talk a good conservative game, and on social issues are no doubt genuinely conservative...

...What then can it mean to say that there is a "basically conservative majority" among the electorate...

...At the very least, however, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers probably have a much more intimate understanding of what the reality of communism is like than O'Lessker...

...Rusher's attractive picture of me as a dreamy-eyed professor grazing in academic "pastures of pure and undiluted principle" is, alas, inexact...

...Rusher is not among them, so I do apologize...

...Having spent much of my adult life earning a living in state and national politics—as a senior staff member in the U.S...

...I strongly suspect, moreover, that he refers to those prefab horrors that one gets these days...

...I longago gave up ordering Margaritas in American bars...

...Nash, sets forth a lucid and broadly accurate exposition of the various threads in the rich tapestry of conservative thought...

...Electing a non-mainstream President may provide psychic satisfaction to his followers but it will do little or nothing to change the course of policy...

...since everything else was rotten to the core I see no reason for doubting his word about the lovely Margarita...

...But let it go...

...There is a second grave misconception...

...The reference to the litigation in Taft, California, in which "parents of 18 children have filed suit charging that the school doctor improperly prescribed psychoactive drugs," reinforces the paranoid overlay that the school officials, teachers, and school doctor are somehow in cahoots to do some children in...

...Into a shaker with ice pour the juice of one lime, one ounce of Triple Sec, and two ounces of Cuervo...

...Smith says I have confused ill-behaved children with those suffering brain damage, but in fact I claimed that it is educators and parents who have mixed up the two groups...

...To be sure, Coors is, as Bakshian says, a better than average beer (I drank it for years while living in the Southwest), but there was no need for him to tell us that it was vastly inferior to San Miguel...

...A deceptively politic term...

...Place your glasses in the freezer and sprinkle some salt on a piece of wax paper...

...What might we expect to follow such a victory...

...Even school doctors do not treat patients...

...Evidently it is difficult for him, since he apparently believes in no form of metaphysical reality...

...Norwalk, California Patricia Kavanagh replies: Dr...

...Whether either party will offer us such a candidate this year is not, as of this writing, clear...

...But those who do accept metaphysical reality have little trouble in recognizing communism as the physical and intellectual embodiment of evil theologically understood: it is the ideological system which logically flows from the negation of God, although the entire argument for this is too involved to be made here...

...The litigation was fomented and is being sustained by the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, an arm of the Legal Services Corporation, whose attorneys are paid with your money and mine—federal funds...

...What I said in my article was that "there will be no conservative victories, certainly not at the national level, without the votes of these people [i.e., those who demand welfare-state economic policies...

...Charles A. Moser Falls Church, Virginia To the Editor: Two and a half cheers for Karl O'Lessker's review of George Nash's magisterial Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, in your May issue...

...As with Kennedy's replacement by Johnson in 1963, the Democrats have been either smart or lucky in settling upon Carter...

...They put their votes where their pocketbooks are...

...Rusher is too sophisticated to believe that any new President and his cadre of national security advisers could bring about fundamental change in the face of united opposition from State, Defense, Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations, the national news media, America's allies, and the foreign policy establishment in general...

...Fortunately (from Professor O'Lessker's standpoint) the apparently impending nomination of Jimmy Carter by the Democratic Party materially reduces the prospects that a coalition between social and economic conservatives is "the wave of the future," at least so far as 1976 is concerned...

...He almost certainly can and will repatriate a great many social conservatives who wouldn't dream of voting for any identifiably liberal Democrat...

...About the most that can be said for domestic brews, or at least those which are most widely advertised and sold throughout the country, is that the best ones are nonpoisonous...

...Miss Kavanagh correctly points out the necessity for some form of discipline...

...that is to say, it triggered my memory of many of those marvelous foreign beers I used to drink, but at the same time reminded me that them days ain't no more...

...That's rather like telling us that a Model-T is inferior to a Mercedes or a G. Ford to an A. Lincoln...

...We mortals are here but a day...

...Rusher's courteous and thoughtful letter raises questions of the greatest consequence for American politics...

...The first paragraph refers to the "bad boy" who in more enlightened times was "thrashed," and is now given "a daily dose of stimulants," which at once relieves parental guilt "for their children's misbehavior" and is convenient for teachers "who can restore order to these classrooms by using 'the smart pill' rather than the rod or intimidation...

...Since few of us live within easy distance of those divine locales, I herewith offer, free gratis, to give Everyman a simple and nigh infallible recipe for concocting one of the world's great drinks...

...First, is there in fact a "basically conservative majority in America" that can be raised to electoral eminence by the fashioning of "programmatic accommodations" between social and economic conservatives...

...before pouring the drink you will need to rim the glass with lime rind and then turn it in the salt...

...As a matter of fact he is wrong, but that is not the issue for your readers...

...But it is a little unfair to assert that those who reject this course and make instead a deliberate decision to seek a political compromise are guilty of being "intellectually shoddy...

...Senate, senatorial and gubernatorial campaign manager, governor's legislative assistant, Congressional candidate, and more—I have long since lost that special innocence about politics that characterizes so many of my academic colleagues...

...Moser to conclude that I "apparently believe in no form of metaphysical reality...

...To the contrary, the evidence clearly indicates that nothing less than a George McGovern candidacy or a Democratic Party disaster of like magnitude can facilitate even the appearance of a victory for the conservative coalition...

...Moser to question their integrity, dismiss them with contempt, pray for their damnation, or inflict whatever other punishment he thinks meet and condign for such vile error...

...Rusher's confidence that there is a conservative majority out there may well derive from his essentially intellectual approach to the severely practical problems of coalition-building and vote-getting...

...No doubt we would see—or, more accurately, hear—some changes in the conduct of 36 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1976 foreign policy: a new-party coalition President would likely sound tougher than his predecessors...

...Consider 1968: running against a quintessential liberal whose own party was in shambles, with the nation torn by years of Vietnam and race riots, the respectably conservative Richard Nixon, at the head of a united and heavily-financed party, barely managed to eke out a win...

...He was wise enough to reject that advice (as we should O'Lessker's), and has become a strong voice for conservatism in the Congress of the United States...

...Moser's second complaint, that I am a defeatist of the sort conservatives would do better without, let me observe that his example of Steve Symms' election to Congress from Idaho speaks hardly at all to the point of my analysis...

...Louis...

...Bakshian is correct in his generally low assessment of American beers and, for that matter, American bars and saloons...

...That is not irrelevant to what follows...

...I suspect that the litigants share the feeling of the authors of the book that they are opposed to all forms of coercion, including giving children medication (however beneficial...

...If Mr...

...The author concedes that "organic problems do prevent some children from reading or concentrating," but then assumes that all children with learning problems (as well as all misbehaving children) are automatically and mindlessly put on the "smart pill...

...Shouldn't the Youth Law Center attorneys, as clever as they are, see that the children should be suing their parents...

...Again, treatment does not spring out of the school setting...

...The Missouri brews are far superior...

...Unfortunately, I am now too old to put much stock in future delights, but not nearly old enough (or anyhow resigned enough) to derive much sustenance from my recollections in tranquility...

...And then there are those "programmatic accommodations...

...I don't think my single sentence summarizing the Taft, California, lawsuit could possibly be read as in agreement with the plaintiffs...

...William H. Nolte Columbia, South Carolina To the Editor: I must take strong exception to Patricia Kavanagh's review of The Myth of the Hyperactive Child in your April issue...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1976 37...

...My own preference, in case anyone is interested, is for a President who will wage constant battle with Congress and the bureaucracy to slow the growth of federal power...

...Shake this vigorously (toward the Southwest) and strain into the frosted glass...

...I confess I still don't understand how an economic conservative could bring himself to make the enormous number of programmatic accommodations that would be required to keep the electoral majority happy...

...The reviewer seems to be as confused and uninformed as the perpetrators of the book, although to her credit she does refer to the book as "sensational," "incomplete," and "imprecise," and she does venture that the authors must have "used a dartboard in their research...

...The decision to treat, or not treat, and what the program of treatment should be is arrived at mutually by parents and physician outside the school (yes, with or without the child's consent, still a parental prerogativel—although I have never seen a child of school age, if he objects at all, to indulge in more than mild grumbling at oral medication...

...For that matter, one takes one's chances even in Mexico, where American incompetence has had a widespread influence...

...Professor O'Lessker finds it "difficult to account for the tendency to see [communism] as metaphysically evil," a tendency which is strong among many traditionalist conservatives...

...But surely Mr...

...The issue is whether it is possible to believe in a specifically Christian metaphysical reality and at the same time deny that communism is the "embodiment of evil theologically understood...

...Since, as I pointed out, it is parental consent and responsibility involved in prescribing medicine for their children, where is the case against the school and school doctor...

...But to a very large extent they are bread-and-butter (i.e., welfare state) liberals...

...Whatever the merit, or lack of merit, in the charges brought, it is ironic that a magazine like The Alternative is reporting this fiasco in apparent tacit agreement...

...No doubt the "saccharine Margaritas" that were served in Washington during the Nixon years were bad enough...

...Rusher on electoral politics have a great deal more to do with his political inexperience than with mine...

...Very little, it seems to me...

...Moser has some sound empirical reason for disputing that contention I should like to see it...

...Defeatist types like O'Lessker are the sort we would do better without...

...The fact is that a small, carefully-selected group of pupils with learning problems greatly benefit from the use of certain medications, and are able to benefit from education through increased attention span, where formerly learning was denied them...

...Rusher is quite right to object to my use of the phrase "intellectually shoddy...

...Finally, I would appreciate it if I could learn the source for the following statement: "A child who is fed stimulants by the clock is not free to improve...

...About where it will be this year, I suspect—lurking spectrally in the corner of the publisher's office at National Review...

...As James Thurber once said of the Martini, one is just right, two are too many, and three are not enough...

...Professor O'Lessker, like Dr...

...Finally, an apology...

...maybe, just maybe, slowed...

...It is all downhill from there...

...But calling me names and urging my excommunication from the conservative church—to which, incidentally, I'm not at all sure I belong—doesn't do much to refine the analysis or elevate the level of discourse...

...Certainly Mr...

...O'Lessker replies: What, I wonder, could have impelled Mr...

...One approach, surely, is to ask Christians whether they find it possible...

...Are you ready...

...To the Editor: Aram Bakshian's "Confessions of a Beer Snob" (May issue) both pleased and saddened me...

...Teachers, at least in California, are not licensed to practice medicine, and this includes prescribing medications...

...Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky do show that the absence of hard statistics on drug use and lack of clear medical definitions have encouraged haphazard diagnosis and treatment...

...A federal crackdown on pornography, perhaps, and just possibly a slowing down of Justice and HEW efforts in the field of school integration...

...Moreover, he fails to distinguish between the Budweiser and Michelob that is bottled on the East Coast and that which is made in St...

...It is perfectly proper for anyone so minded to waive the pursuit of political power and its fruits and stand foursquare for any philosophical orthodoxy that appeals to him...

...But Bakshian's denigration of the Margarita must not go unchallenged...

...But there will be no significant changes in federal welfare ("income support") programs or in any large fiscal matters, because a President can do little or nothing in these areas without the cooperation of Congress, and it is inconceivable that the coalition of Democrats and liberal Republicans will lose control of Congress in any foreseeable future...