Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. If you follow the gutters of New York's Fifth Avenue to the south, past the fashionable shops, past Saint Patrick's Cathedral, down past the old...
...Hitler...
...Her education may have given her a wobbly capacity for analytical thought, but it gave her a superb capacity for hate...
...She sees an invincible army of women streaming out of some mountainous province of the American interior, eager to right the wrongs that are daily perpetrated in the kitchens and bedrooms of the Republic...
...He takes a commonplace of American, indeed, of modern, thought--dull work leads to dull minds...
...No (}erie McCarthy...
...This was the editorza/ wrzter's now-famous answer...
...BOOK REVIEW In Our Time by Eric Hoffer / Harper & Row / $7.95 William F. Gavin Perhaps the best way to show the difficulties Eric Hoffer's new book presents to a reviewer who admires his work is to quote two passages...
...They believe in nothing beyond the confines of their little minds...
...A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times a thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood...
...and it has devolved to Madame Abzug to provide the lunatic left with a praxis that is at once economical and easy to use...
...The first passage appears in a chapter entitled "Dull Work": It may be true that work on the assembly line dulls the faculties and empties the mind, the cure only being fewer hours of work at higher pay...
...Ugly, some sniff...
...The capitalist system has allowed a mysterious handful of fat people to gain almost total control over the Republic, and the Americano must be made cognizant of this development...
...Virgenza Needl,,man 115 West 95th Street Virginia, your little friends are wrong...
...Was Mussolini more perfectly sculptured...
...I ! HOWL...
...and the legendary activist scolds India...
...In Conrad's famous phrase, Hoffer only wants to make us see...
...She is a born shouter...
...Yes, Virginia, there is a Gene McCarthy...
...All minds, whether they be men's or children's are little...
...Taken one with another they amount to the old Marxist flimflam...
...It's "composing sentences" that makes all the difference between daydreaming and philosophizing...
...The haranguer from New York's 20th Congressional District gained her understanding of human nature in a neighborhood composed of the most demented elements from academe, Hell's Kitchen, and Scarsdale...
...It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias...
...Alas...
...My social psych profsays "lf you see it in the ~)ir it's s o . " Please tell me the t r m h . is t h e r e a Gene MtCarlhy...
...Doubtless such a limitation does not cause her too much unease, for another of her excesses is manifest in the area of male-female relations...
...These realities, however, have no impact on an assiduous activist from the VilHowl...
...Instead of the thinker who stunned the intellectuals with his style and stoic indifference in The True Believer, we have the "personality," the "character," the Hoffer whose excited outbursts and facial contortions made him an instant (if short-lived) television celebrity...
...Is it all real...
...34 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 She is against them...
...gutter life and sidewalk society merge into one coarse throng...
...The Voice had received a letter from a girl named Virginta asking i f there really was a Gene McCarthy...
...He does not call for a federal program to eradicate boredom or ask that Nancy Hanks or Ronald Berman endow some yahoo with tax money in order to interpret or investigate the causes of creativity...
...All this and more she relates in her published diary modestly titled Bella...
...The speech itself is an empty tradition amongst our politicos, who yearly intone it to ingratiate themselves to those of their (continued on page 34) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS by Paul P. Somers, Jr...
...By the last sentence in the paragraph, he has taken away all of our certainties about the evil effects of dull work and has even hinted that leisure, that most sacred of American institutions, may not be all it's cracked up to be...
...Discuss social policy, and her ears resound with the Internationale...
...He does not succumb to that most powerful temptat i o n - t o "offer solutions...
...This was once the neighborhood of fourth-rate writers and artists...
...There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no spite to make tolerable this existence...
...tences...
...Nobody, not even Gene McCarthy, really wants him to be elected President, but that is no sign that there is no Gene McCarthy...
...Madame Abzug is one of those feminists whose apparent enthusiasm for women derives from a basic hatred of mere, though from all the available evidence she does not like women all that much either...
...She has never had to defend the hare-brained legislation she confects...
...Apparently she feels that women should have as little to do with men as with an)., other carcinogenic substance...
...the Africans are beaten, jailed, and deported...
...Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world...
...Even then there is no guarantee America will be delivered up to the tidy glory that is modern China...
...I have not heard of it...
...But we also have more than enough professional optimists who tell us either that things are good, or, if they are bad, that it's because of those other guys or because we' re not following good advice...
...Here we have Foxy Grandpa telling us things are turning out all right, even if they seem to be wrong...
...What has this tough-minded old man, this classic loner to do with uplift or warnings...
...Hoffer has attacked them quite effectively...
...How to bring Americans around to an understanding of this state of emergency...
...Those real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see...
...it is now the neighborhood of failed oulturati, of the lumpenproletariat, of degenerates, addicts, and Iowa runaways reborn by a stupendous encounter with J.D...
...Instead she ran through a few arpeggios of left-liberal platitudes and concluded in her traditional manner, inveighing against the great dictatorships of this century, the United States, the late regime of Mr...
...What is even more remarkable is that throughout the entire speech not once did she mention the Soviet Union or one of the Captive Nations...
...continued from page 4) constituents whose names still end in ski and wicz...
...I don't know of another American writer who could pull it off...
...To the political philosophy of arrant hate she has welded the political technique of the blood-curdling yell...
...Most of us would settle (if we managed to gain insight in the first place) for writing "Opportunity to think...
...Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding...
...if life were as Madame Abzug would have it she would turn us all into Bulgarians...
...This is Greenwich Village, and for Bella Abzug it served as a veritable Walden Pond...
...The closest she has ever come was in her July 21st speech commemorating Captive Nations Week, and then the dictatorship she chose to upbraid was India...
...Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn...
...Superstition is rampant, as is general ignorance, sloth, and dudgeon...
...If the plain folk do not wake up, something truly untoward and violent will occur anon...
...Life seemed glorious...
...This is a typically Hoffer touch...
...Not believe in Gene McCarthy...
...It is flatulent, shapeless, dead writing...
...Appropriately enough this is the home of Mrs...
...In this great universe of ours, Virginia, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge...
...He then turns the commonplace on its head and shows us that dull work can provide the opportunity to "compose sentences," i.e., not only to think, but to refine and cut and edit thoughts into sentences...
...The man who wrote The True Believer had a voice...
...It is an odd book whose style appears to be the combined work of a J. Walter Thompson ad hack and a mass murderer...
...America has a super-abundance of professional doom-shouters who rake in large sums for writing and lecturing about the depravity of the American life style, the decline of the West, and other subjects that the middle class loves to wallow in...
...Yes, Virginia, There is a Gene McCarthy Of all the words written about Eugene McCarthy, the most remembered are those penned by an editorial wm?er of the Village Voice forpubtication on August 22, 1968...
...This comes as a surprise...
...You might as well not believe in fairies...
...the aforementioned Padre Coughlin comes from a long line, and more recently we have witnessed the tirades of Governor Wallace...
...To hear her talk of it one would think abortion the culmination of romantic love, an operation of aesthetic and metaphysical beauty, limited solely by the misfortune that men cannot also partake of it...
...In fact such excesses are actually desirable, and Madame Abzug has always provided excesses in great variety...
...Chances are that had my work been of absorbing interest I could not have done any thinking and composing on the company's time or even on my own time after returning from work...
...His style suggests that he wouldn't be offended if we reject his insights...
...No beauty queen was ever more munificently endowed for her role than Madame Abzug is for hers...
...she is also the most seasoned rabble rouser since Father Charles E. Coughlin...
...Her ample jowls are made for sneering...
...Thank God he lives, and he lives forever...
...Is There a Gene McCarthy ? We take pleasure in answering the touching communication below and are indeed grateful that its author is among our readers: Dear Editor: I am 22 years old...
...Thinking isn't enough...
...You might get your social psych prof to hire graduate assistants to watch all the television election-eve new coverage to catch Gene McCarthy, but even if they did not see Gene McCarthy receiving any votes, what would that prove...
...I am at a loss to conclude anything else...
...Scowls come to her as easily as perspiration...
...Paul P. .S'ome~w...
...You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what make the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the citizens who ever voted, could tear apart...
...Every year it thwarts millions of noble aspirations, jails thousands of noble aspirants, and poisons one of the Great Lakes...
...She may now take long swims in the natatorium of the United States Congress, floating placidly on the only set of water wings ever seen in those distinguished parts, but she cannot get the Village out of her head...
...As Madame Abzug sees it The Federalist Papers will forever remain deficient because they never mentioned the positive aspects of what she sees as the key to political action, hate...
...For her to get away with appropriating the label liberal is to make a mockery of the Truth-in-Advertising Act...
...They have been affected by the cynicism of a skeptical age...
...How violent she is in her denunciations of the abominations committed by Chilean misanthropes and South African racists, but has she ever entered a dissenting opinion against the Communist thugs, the thugs whose bully clubs are sovereign over 38 percent of the world...
...Thieu, and the even later regime of Mr...
...That is neither here nor there, and proves nothing one way or the other...
...That Madame Abzug has flourished and not even attracted a frail tweet is disquieting and renders her iess amusing than would otherwise have been the case...
...And what of her style of dress...
...The eternal light with which childhood fills the world wou~d be extinguished...
...How can the same man have written both these passages...
...At any rate the Captive Nations speech is always a particularly painful occasion for her, given the identity of the Captor, but this time she outdid herself...
...Here everyone is treated equally...
...Blood-Curdling Yell Hate is her afflatus...
...And she has never had to face up to the truth that her panaceas are not only not progressive, but they are also not democratic, not egalitarian, and not humane...
...Martin Abzug...
...I can still savor the joy I used to derive from the fact that while doing dull, repetitive work on the waterfront, I could talk with my partners and compose sentences in the back of my mind, all at the same time...
...Informed by the quackery of the more freakish areas of New York, inflamed by a hatred of reality, and yearning for the tidiness of some Marxist paradise, she is shouting her way into a uniqae respectability...
...Here a belief in the positive uses of hate is simply not enough...
...Some of my little friends say there is no Gene McCarthy...
...She is a straightforward totalitarian, susceptible to every quibble the Marxist has with a free society, eager for every statist intrusion into the lives of private citizens, and utterly indifferent to the spreading dark age of tyranny that now stalks every continent...
...perhaps sooner...
...The constantly shifting eyes lurking beneath a forehead of Maginot Line-like concrete, the iron jaw, the thick arms bashing at the air...
...There's no sign of the hard-edged Hoffer style or of the subtle mind behind that style...
...Present to her the defense budget, and her ears fill with the long-dead diatribe of some lunatic sage from Washington Square...
...But Hoffer knows what he is doing...
...What is needed is Eric Hoffer, the real Eric Hoffer, the lone gun of American intellectual life...
...As she trundles down the halls of the Capitol she dreams of vast war protests, but there is no war...
...If you follow the gutters of New York's Fifth Avenue to the south, past the fashionable shops, past Saint Patrick's Cathedral, down past the old Flatiron Building, and beyond, eventually you will come upon a neighborhood where it makes no difference if you are crawling along the gutter or walking upright on the sidewalk...
...It is to be expected that Madame Abzug's understanding of the Republic is not very thoughtful, but her performance as an activist is all the better for her ignorance...
...Capitalism has led to a widespread malaise that is suspiciously akin to mental illness...
...but again they miss the mark, for her dress harmonizes exquisitely with the ugliness of her message...
...Salinger...
...The Eastern Europeans are policed and hounded...
...From the turn of her ankles to the rasp in her voice, she is the most perfectly produced demagogue ever imagined...
...All such rogues imperiled our liberties, and the pundits were quick to blow tile whistle on them...
...This is the kind of thing a speechwriter might crank out for his boss to use when he addresses the Girl Scouts convention...
...Only faith, elitism, poetry, and masochism can push aside that curtain and perforate the temporal punch card to the eternal glory beyond...
...In "Rebirth," however, Hoffer takes up the question of the state of the nation, a question that begs for an "answer...
...how dreary the world would be if there were no Gene McCarthy...
...For instance not only does she favor abortion, she is positively in love with it...
...Thought corrupts the serious activist...
...but there is no such army, no such province, and no such injustice...
...This is Hoffer at his best...
...is in the department of Amelvcan thought andlanguage at Michigan 5'tal~" University...
...She envisions long lines of starving Americans, but there are no such lines...
...No, Hoffer merely strolls around the subject of dull work, and points out things that most of us have never seen...
...Here we have the Hoffer who became a celebrity in the 1960s after his television appearances with Eric Sevareid...
...Fundamentally, Madame Abzug is a hater...
...On its roiled waters she pondered human nature and at length became "an activist," by which she means a special kind of politico: one who combines the cofffeehouse existentialist's virtues of being "agonized" and "emotional" with the traditional pol's virtues of duplicity, avarice, and sagacity in the ways of fleecing the public...
...They do not believe what they cannot see...
...He exists as certainly as pride and egotism and the desire.to lose exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy...
...How absurd and dysfunctional it would be for her to bellow out her rage attired as Jacqueline Onassis or Nancy Reagan...
...What intellection she devotes to understanding America is based on the old leftist dogma that lives led in insane asylums are not very different from lives led in Omaha...
...But during fifty years as a workingman, I have found dull routine compatible with an active mind...
...The second quotation is taken from a chapter entitled "Rebirth": " I f we accept the challenge, the common effort and the common vision will unite us as never before, and America will again become a land of hope as a whole nation watches the gradual cleaning up of a continent and the progress made in the laboratories...
...Madame Abzug is not only the most gifted orchestrator of hate at large in the Republic today...
...According to this perspective the average Americano is probably a thief, his son a wistful homosexual, his daughter a neurotic, and his wife a seething victim of four thousand years of inexplicable and impregnable oppression...
...Not bad for five senWilliam F. Gavin, author o f Street Corner Conservative, is a speechwriter for Senator James Buckley...
...Madame Abzug has exploited all of her swell gifts so successfully since entering Congress six years ago that she has never once had to do anything but roar...
...I think it might be explained by the fact that the first quotation, about work, appeared in a chapter in which Hoffer is analyzing, dissecting, brooding over his subject...
...Are American pundits so far gone in their selfloathing that they can no Ior.,ge_r iemonstrate against a hater who would repress their basic freedoms and extirpate their saucy way of life...
...Bohemian Backwaters Only in such bohemian backwaters as Madame Abzug has inhabited and now represents do such excesses go unremarked...
...lage...
...Or has she ever spoken up as democracy is snuffed out by the tin-pot generalissimos of the Third World...
...from it one gains the profound conviction that Congresswoman Abzug is a bombastic crank and a threat to civil liberties...
...We should have no enjoyment, except in winning and achieving...
...hate energizes, focuses, and improves him...
...Mention the Chamber of Commerce, and she pulls a Molotov cocktail from her purse...
...She has never had to provide evidence for her canards about American enormities...
...It has been Hoffer's misfortune to have been admired by those incapable of The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 35...
...Af,'er a!l, America is not new to beiiicose wowsei...
...It wasn't a very pleasant voice, but it was his own and he didn't use it to please us, either by fashionably-acceptable denunciation or by flag-waving...
Vol. 10 • October 1976 • No. 1
