Capitol Ideas

...This conservative country has apparently been manifesting its symptoms by repudiating government programs and beneficence, and for those who administer such programs, or undertake public relations work on behalf of them in the Washington Post and the New York Times, this is indeed an ill-humor, a testiness, a disorder, or disturbance (cf...

...In a word, it is time for conservatives to take the offensive...

...Credits...

...thus his plan is a devious way of diverting a considerable amount of extra cash to the Washington area...

...Shortages resulted...

...This was the fatal flaw in the analysis of anti-McGovern Democrats like Scammon and Wattenberg, who had argued that if the Democratic Party turned its back on the New Left and thus forestalled Republican exploitation of the social issue, it could reconstitute the old, New Deal coalition on the basis of the economic issue...

...My own father, a respected and prosperous orthodontist, seldom spoke about them...

...The Linnaeus Nollson Archive sheds a good deal of light on this mystery...

...I suppose that my message here is that it is simply impossible to exaggerate the cynicism with which the programs devised by dogooders deserve m be regarded...

...Great aunt Anais was not a Nollson by birth, yet she never used her maiden name...

...Admittedly, Tom Wicker still discerns a comforting glimpse of wickedness in our midst, and every week he will busily fan with his quill the cooling embers of our inequity and iniquity...

...In cases where it is not, it will nevertheless serve the salutary function of warning liberals that they tend automatically to be viewed as a menace to the community, and that the untoward outcome of any of their pet projects will no longer be indulgently waved aside as a miscalculated good intention...

...Great uncle Linnaeus remained a Platonist to the end of his days...

...Rationing...

...Consider the following complex history of my recent emergence as prominent literary critic...

...real estate, by any chance...

...They will be the ones who will pay for yesterday's special-interest victories...

...Joe Kraft, the columnist (who lives here), is thrilled...

...In fact, what is surely the original manuscript is preserved between two pages of great uncle Linnaeus' order book for March of 1925...

...Indeed, Farrel Mangrate of Toronto, North America's leading authority on quatrains, argues for this alternative reading of the rather cramped handwriting of the original m s . Still, we have a right to remain puzzled...

...To this day, he insists that his conversation about the birds and the bees with great aunt Anais changed his life...

...Watch out, Indianians, Iowans, Idahoans, for tinkerers, med"Edited by archcynic R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., The Alternative: An American Spectator is a witty 40-page newsprint monthly...

...Another report I have before me asserts that the 95th Congress, which was"supposed to be a liberal, Democratic" one, has turned out to be "surprisingly conservative...

...In fact, it may well be that in retrospect Carter's 1976 victory will come to be viewed as one of the watershed elections in American history...

...Why are we all supposed to be so traumatized...

...You don't want the FDA to ban saccharin...

...I now know, for example, who sent those two dozen petunias to Alice B. Toklas on April 14, 1924...

...Accordingly, he persuaded Timaeus to abandon the study of Plato...

...Unlike Brown, who prudently introduced a relatively small amount of new legislation upon assuming the California governorship, Carter has begun his presidency with a flurry of new policy initiatives...

...I suspect that such an analysis might well apply to Mr...

...During this symbolist phase of his career, we would surely have expected him to write: How nais, Is vais, Under a dais, With Thais...

...She entered the family by marrying Linnaeus Nollson, my grandfather's brother, that is, my great uncle...

...Since I could have been no more than seven when she told me this, I could do nothing but giggle...

...You don't want to pay for the operation to eliminate that swelling in the stomach that is so often the unfortunate by-product of an evening of sexual pleasure...

...It pleases them to construe their own warped psyches as a disease rampaging across the body politic...

...He responded swiftly and with maximum annoyance...

...Did you know that you have 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 distemper because (and these are the points itemized in Mary Russell's article): You don't want to fund busing programs...

...distemper...

...You don't want to give money through international lending institutions to Cuba, Uganda, Cambodia, Vietnam, You don't want to fund public housing or legal services for homosexuals...

...Jay Kinney in Chic A Larry Flynt publication that somebody quotes...

...Even though great uncle Linnaeus bad delivered flowers to Alice B. Toklas, and knew a thing or two about what went on in her house, he still believed in drawing the line somewhere...

...This had the effect of encouraging demand and discouraging supply...

...Predictably, he became a homosexual...

...The best way to drive this point home might be, as I have suggested, to presume the existence of a self-interested motive behind all such crisis-mongering and postulating of injustice...

...How many times did he tell me --though always omitting the details: "John, your great aunt Anais was one helluva gal...

...Caveat Iowans...

...essays and features...

...It remains to be seen whether this formula, which so clearly fits the temper of the present moment, will stand the test of time...

...Clearly, this is a curious verse...

...I don't know how many additional millions of people were represented in the lobbying against Carter's program, but the number must have been considerable...

...It appears, however, that the electorate has lost confidence, not only in the efficacy of the old, New Deal economic remedies, but in the ability of any President to achieve a meaningful improvement in the economic situation...

...According to a recent television advertisement, 14 million people have stock in oil companies...

...then found that this did not, as advertised, land them in personal utopia--far from it...

...I had once heard my parents discuss the fact that great aunt Anais was far in advance of her time on sexual subjects...

...And the nature of many of those initiatives does not inspire confidence that Carter's policies will be anywhere near as successful as his rhetoric has been...

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...its budget is $10.5 billion so far--more than the profits of the seven major oil companies...

...Does it auger a time when we will have no excuse to go on loathing ourselves ?--a deprivation that would surely leave Mr...

...But you get the idea, I am sure, even if it is only Mary Russell making it: A conservative country is one affected by distemper...

...From his small shop at number 24 on the Rue Saint Jacques, not far from the University of Paris, in the Quarrier Latin, on the Rive Gauche, Linnaeus Nollson delivered his carefully-cultivated flowers to everyone who was anyone in the Parisian cu)tural community of the 1920s...

...John No//son Lady of the Flowers: A Critical Study Winning the Pulitzer Prize for literary studies is no easy task...

...Theirs was a secret horror show...

...The writing on one side of the card is unintelligible, but the other side of the card reads plainly: My dearest Anais, I know you're not pious, But are a woman of spais, So let's get under the dais, For some vais...

...I discuss the significance of this in my article in the next issue of PMLA...

...Great uncle Linnaeus considered this something of an improvement, but it fell to great aunt Anais to set Timaeus straight...

...But no...

...make no mistake about it...

...Shame on you, out there in Indiana...

...I am referring, of course, to the"energy crisis," in which Carter the Quack has cunningly discerned an opportunity to play at being doctor, ministering to the Distemper of the Pipple...

...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977...

...Liberals must be made to see, if they do not already, that to have good intentions in this world is not enough...

...Why not...

...I've always been intrigued by this branch of my family...

...He became a classicist and read all the Platonic dialgoues in the original Greek...

...By way of background, the "energy crisis" began to manifest itself some years ago as the side effect of a blockage, or crimp, or obstruction that had been inserted, in a well-meaning way, into the economic arteries of the nation...

...So it is surely possible that the failure of those policies might wind up discrediting the entire Brown-Carter approach...

...Here we see the alarming extent to which Carter has fallen under the influence of those Washington rogues and knaves whose pleasure it is m carve out a comfortable existence for themselves by drumming up opposition to the productive sector of the economy on the false premise that this sector is not peopled by people...

...Stripped down to its essentials, Carter's energy program consists of a plan to create the funds for a large number of government jobs by making the government a compulsory partner in the production and distribution of energy...

...Imagine my surprise, therefore, when just this past summer I stumbled upon the Linnaeus Nollson Papers behind an old cabinet in the herbarium of the National Botanical Garden...

...Timaeus agreed, and took up the canon law...

...I have long entertained the theory that American liberals of the "selfloathing" variety can be satisfactorily understood only through resort to the argument ad hominem...

...predictably, he became celibate...

...2) fiscal conservatism and efforts to improve government efficiency to please the conservatives and a general public which is increasingly skeptical about big government...

...Sincere, in-depth opinion pieces run alongside blisteringly funny character assassinations--and if it's often difficult to distinguish between the deadly serious and the tongue-in-cheek, trying is half the fun...

...You use the diaeresis only if you think I'm like the iin naive," she would chuckle, "otherwise, just remember to put the emphasis on the penult...

...Carter came to Washington and was instantly Naderized...

...spect, it is clear that great uncle Linnaeus was proof of the hypothesis developed at Duke University--that one's name has great influence on the course of one's life...

...It begins with the fact that my great aunt was the well-known poet, Anais Nollson...

...Happily, no...

...Washington real-estate agents are thrilled;/e tout Washington is thrilled...

...In these areas, common sense, prudence, and ordinary decency may yet prevail but there is one realm where Washington has the nation conveniently snagged by the trouser leg and will not be prevailed upon to let go, unless I am much mistaken...

...These people should be watched, kept in sight, suspected of the worst motives...

...Oh, you dirty, distemper-ridden dogs...

...That would reduce Carter to a merely "passive" President...

...There is our energy crisis...

...Carter the Quack has appreciated this point, having arrived from Plains with a large black satchel of nostrums and patent medicines for our benefit, and he does not intend to be thwarted in his plan to administer them as frequently as possible...

...Not for anything in the world would he want such a crisis to go away before he has had a chance to tinker and meddle with it...

...We have just experienced, he writes, "the kind of Fourth that was commonplace, even predictable, before the long successive traumas of Vietnam and Watergate brought America a decade of self-doubt, serf-criticism, self-loathing on the one hand, and responding denials, anger and chauvinism on the other...

...Resentful at having been so easily duped, they now presume Tom Betbell is Washington editor for Harper's and contributing editor to the Washington Monthly...

...This was the strategy followed by Senator Jackson in the Presidential primaries, but in 1976 it worked only in the older cities of the Northeast, apparently the last bastion of the ethnic and labor union politics that had for so long dominated the Democratic Party...

...Under both the decontrol plan and Carter's plan, the price of energy would go up...

...It is the one that reads: O yais, 'Tis nais, On a dais, With Thais...

...He was also a florist...

...What is the cause of this unexpected conservatism...

...Its 18,000 workers (so far) will meddle about with the new remedies from the Quack's black bag...

...This blockage, taking the form of price controls, held the price of oil and natural gas artificially below the market level for the benefit of "consumers...

...As such, he was one of the lesser-known, but most important, figures of the Lost Generation...

...It is not simple...

...Don't forget that Carter sees himself as an "active-positive" President, which in itself should have been enough to warn us off him...

...This is bad news to those beneficiaries (who are also the devisers) of programs aimed at alleviating the nation's quotient of "injustice," but for the rest of us no news from Washington must be counted as good news...

...Box 877 [] Three years $25 Bloomington, IN 47401 [] Payment enclosed PLEASE PRINT [] Please bill me Name Address City State Zip X71 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 25 criers, planners, and problem-solvers of all sorts, for they are also the crisis-mongers, just like those doctors forever urging you to get a check-up...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator has been lauded by such diverse sources as Time, Library Journal, and Chic for the quality and thoughtfulness of its...

...to denounce the whole system as being rotten to the core, and impute their personal traumas to an entire nation, which is instructed to mend its ways or soon come to a calamitous end...

...In those days, one had to assume that any mention of the penuk contravened the unwritten laws of polite society...

...In retro...

...Nonetheless, my own guess is that Brown and Carter have discerned and helped to promote a political trend that is likely to have a lasting impact...

...They are nowhere identified in Mary Russell's article, nor are there any unattributed quotations...

...In any event, if the Quack is to work his physick upon us, clearly his most important task is to see that the price controls on oil and gas are not removed...

...Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas Doe Carter arrfved in Washington and was instantly Naderized...

...Yet, so far as I know, I am the fast serious literary historian to make use of the Linnaeus Nollson Papers...

...nor do such intentions serve to distinguish liberals from'others, such as the advocates of "special-interests" and corporate interests, or distemperridden conservatives...

...All that may still be close to the surface," Wicker adds, "since traumas go on affecting people...

...You would think it would be easy for government, having inserted this blockage, and having had plenty of opportunity to observe its unfortunate outcome, simply to remove it...

...The thing I most remember about my great aunt, Anais, was that I could never remember whether there was a wbat's-it with two dots over the i in her name...

...Anything but remove that original obstruction...

...Please check the [] New subscription appropriate boxes and [] Renewal mail this form to: The Alternative: An American Spectator [] One year (10 issues) $10 Subscription Department [] Two years$18 P.O...

...Uncle Timaeus became quite a mover--even a bit notorious...

...The poem is written on a small card clearly meant to accompany two dozen red roses that the poet bad ordered to be sent to none other than my great aunt Anais...

...Here, Washington's great ally has turned out to be that grinning, tousleheaded idiot of a President who ran so successfully against Washington, but found, when he arrived, that the prospect from his mansion beside the Potomac was a pleasant one...

...The "special-interests" referred to were: the oil companies, the automobile companies, the United Auto Workers...

...and 3) an anti-politician style to appeal to a public mood of "alienation" and distrust of government common to liberals and conservatives alike...

...Wicker with a good deal of time on his hands...

...Uncle Timaeus No//son, carrying on a family tradition, was also much influenced by his name...

...A convenient diagnosis...

...The people of this country will be the ones to suffer if our hopes for an energy plan are thwarted," he quacked...

...Having been named after the great botanist who discovered the curious fact that all plants, without exception, have two Latin names, great uncle Linnaeus was himself a botanist...

...I will make you wait for my new book to find out everything I discovered there...

...Entitlements...

...In most cases, of course, such cynicism will prove to be well justified...

...Listen to Mary Russell, a writer who is employed to interpret the news for the benefit of the Washington Post's readership: "Some say the House, subject to election every two years, is simply a barometer of the public mood and the House is responding to a malaise, an uneasiness, a distemper in the country...

...The well-known poem by e e cummings - - o r is it w h auden, or is it Ogden Nash?-has long puzzled literary historians...

...Oh, worrisome Fourth...

...Readers will be pleased to hear that not much is happening in Washington these days...

...Nary a crisis in sight...

...Most of these new government jobs will be in Washington...

...For now, I will whet your appetite and share with you one profound insight into the creative process--an important episode which would have remained forever unknown bad I not made my fortuitous fred...

...For example, I believe that in many cases such people sampled the new liberation, acquired new wives and new lifestyles, did their own thing, embraced the new "morality," and generally acquiesced to whatever current folly came their way...

...Note the childishness and petulance of the rhetoric--as though "special-interests" did not represent people...

...The best thing, I think, is simply to assume that such people have a personal stake in their cause that they wisely keep concealed...

...In the former plan the money would be distributed to stockholders, under Carter's the money will go to pay additional government employees...

...Given this skepticism, coupled with resentment at high taxes and continuing inflation, the public mood seems receptive to tight fiscal management, which it hopes will at least prevent further economic deterioration...

...Carter would be our Superdoctor and so he likes a crisis...

...Because--and here, I fear, the cynic in me gets the upper hand--to do that would be to remove one more "crisis" from our midst, and thus leave our doctors in Washington with very little to do...

...Leon Shull of the Americans for Democratic Action (a group that caters to "specialinterests") is said m be "considerably distressed...

...Taxes...

...Incidentally, the program is plainly tailor-made to create a huge new bureaucracy in Washington, a bureaucracy which is already well on the way to being funded...

...The Brown-Carter formula, then, can most succinctly be summed up as follows: 1) compassionate rhetoric, liberal and minority appointments, and support for consumerism and environmentalism to please the liberals and the media...

...If this happened, he would very swiftly be confronted by a patient with no more symptoms, and such patients have a way of telling the doctor to snap his black bag shut and go on home...

...The Thais known m history is not necessarily the kind of person with whom one would want to share a dais...

...Thus, when the threat of decontrol came, Carter saw it for what it was...

...This explains why he and Anais named their first son Timaeus, after the fellow in the Platonic dialogue...

...The popularity of this conservative posture showed that the traditional, bread-and-butter programmatic liberalism of the Democratic Party no longer retained its former appeal...

...Nor does the poem fit the poet's development as we know it...

...Who are these "some" who say this...

...Wicker of the Times, and probably a good many other of our contemporary gloomy liberals...

...That Washington editor so enthusiastic about the expansion of government programs--is he speculating in D.C...