The Bootblack Stand
Plunkitt, George Washington
sire to save the world and partly to a desire for self-aggrandizement—a potent and often explosive combination down through the ages. Keynesian economics' sweeping array of strange new intellectual...
...I have taped interviews with hundreds of crazy people, and—a real breakthrough here—I have taped conversations with cows from all parts of the country...
...My problem is how to leak this information expediently to the concerned citizens of Washington without raising any more criticism from the kept politicians in Washington...
...My evidence isastonishing...
...Sincerely, Ron Nessen Dear Mr...
...Before all surface coal was used up, any coal underground was likely to be too "uneconomic" to be counted by "practical" men, however many centuries' supply that might be...
...You must get this information into the hands of the intellectual leaders of the Washington community...
...GWP The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 27...
...Apparently he is stirring up the immigrants and now George Meany is getting into the act...
...McKuen would even strum a ballad for Susan Ford, though she is so sensitive that too much introspection could be damaging...
...For example, the existence of a price system means that any resource facing a realprospect of exhaustion would also be facing the prospect of a future price rise—and that would immediately cause a present price rise (due to speculation), which in turn would curtail its current consumption and ration its use over time...
...But it would (continued on page 34) Bootblack Stand by George Washington Plunkitt Dear Dr...
...Views to the contrary are based on considering as "usable" resources only that tiny fraction of the available supply which can compete at present prices under present conditions...
...He is big with those true-believer types who wanted the President to meet with him in June...
...Nessen: As I see it the momentum is with you...
...Even Henry was against letting him into the White House...
...Sincerely, Michael J. Harrington, M.C...
...Do you suppose the Democrats are behind this joker...
...Johnson puts his finger on the fatal flaw in most of these theories: they extrapolate blindly from past behavior without any allowance for feedback mechanisms which automatically modify that behavior...
...Apparently some of the major news magazines are coming around to your side...
...On Economics and Society closes with an analysis of "environmentalism" and its related "over-population" and exhaustion-of-resources hysteria...
...The President has got to do something to propitiate them...
...The best way to do this is to leak it immediately to the editors of the Washington Post Style Section...
...Do it today, but try to protect the identities of those cows...
...And then he had that session with little Davison ChalmersMuncazzio, the Boston schoolboy who wrote that moving ecology poem "When Pretty Butterflies Get Squashed on Trailer Truck Grills There's Something Wrong Somewhere...
...Dear Congressman Harrington: This is indeed chilling information, and to think that I have been serving the CIA's dastardly ends all these years by having three, sometimes four, glasses of milk a day...
...I looked into Solzhenitsyn and found that he was just an egghead malcontent...
...GWP Dear Dr...
...Ford's more sophisticated constituents...
...Plunkitt: I have finally come across "hard evidence" that the Central Intelligence Agency has for twenty years ardently and secretly been attempting to overthrow the Constitution and perhaps even gain access to the mailing list of the Harvard Alumni Association...
...I suggest he invite Rod McKuen over for cookies and milk...
...Plunkitt: Who is this beatnik Solzhenitsyn and what should we do about him...
...Marxism certainly had similarly novel features at one time, though its priesthood has long since exhausted everyone's patience with its attempts to see how many "contradictions" could dance on the head of a pin and with its various sects' attempts to be more-dialectical-than-thou (not to mention such declarations of moral bankruptcy as the Berlin wall...
...Your real problem is that you have angered Mr...
...Newsweek did a piece alleging that Solzhenitsyn is mad, and I think Cosmopolitan is with you...
...Actually, practically nothing—not even petroleum—is facing exhaustion in the near future, where "near" includes the next couple of centuries...
...Essentially the CIA has been doing this through three very powerful front groups, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Association for Mental Health, and the Associated Milk Producers...
...So we nixed the meeting and all hell broke loose...
...Ultimately the Keynesian revolution faced a counterrevolution from the monetary theory of the Chicago economists, which likewise offered "a degree of difficulty of understanding just sufficient to deter the old and to challenge and reward the young...
...Apparently he is one of those guys always popping off about what's wrong with Russia and never what's right about it...
...Keynesian economics' sweeping array of strange new intellectual categories created a priesthood of interpreters with a vested interest in keeping the religion alive, while the fact that these categories lent themselves to mathematical and statistical elaboration opened up whole careers to the ambitious young adepts in these areas...
...He caused such trouble at home the Russians had to throw him out of the country, he looks like a hippie dope-freak, and Dobrynin says he drinks...
...Maybe Mr...
...But the President's schedule was chock-full of important political meetings with groups like the Junior Farmers of Atherton, Wisconsin, the Schenectady Girls for the E.R.A., and the La Leche League of Skokie...
...It is an intriguing suggestion that such features explain why some theories suddenly seize the imagination of a whole generation of intellectuals...
...One is an extremely articulate Guernsey that actually witnessed her owner accepting monies from CIA Director Colby...
Vol. 9 • October 1975 • No. 1
