The Case Against the Reckless Congress
Kannon, Baron Von
BOOK REVIEW i Viva Vivas.t Edited by Henry Regnery / Liberty Press / $7.95 A. James McAdams Eliseo Vivas, educator, philosopher, and literary critic, is celebrating his seventyfifth birthday...
...In the face of proposals for national health insurance, he praises our present system for its success in keeping America healthy at a relatively low cost, and urges Americans to examine the deterioration of health care in Great Britain since that country adopted its National Health Service...
...On the one hand the reader encounters personal impressions of Vivas, on the other an assortment of learned essays--a discourse on Schopenhauer, a critique of Kantian aesthetics, a Joycean analysis of language...
...As one of America's leading conservative intellectuals, Vivas has taught at some of the finest colleges in the country, including the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin...
...Lawrence: The Failure and Triumph of Art, and Contra Marcuse...
...For Vivas, and for most of the contributors to this Festsebrift, our only alternative to this outlook would be a blind and impotent positivism which would negate the very ethical purpose of the business of philosophy...
...The book's weaknesses are those common to most collections of essays...
...And issues of varying importance are treated equally: questions of energy policy and civil service reform, for exampie, are each given one chapter...
...That this philistine is the candidate espoused by the New York Review of Books and promoted by all the modern sophisticates is the most amusing spectacle since the Catholics discovered JFK's randiness...
...He has no more capacity for the higher intellection than for baking soufflds...
...and that is the whole of him...
...There are those--including this reviewer--who are inclined to think that its shortcomings are manifold...
...This book of essays contains an additional weakness: it is written by politicians, who by nature tend to strut...
...BOOK REVIEW i Viva Vivas.t Edited by Henry Regnery / Liberty Press / $7.95 A. James McAdams Eliseo Vivas, educator, philosopher, and literary critic, is celebrating his seventyfifth birthday this year...
...Our Jimmy is a case to be inoculated against...
...Bloomington, Indiana The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 33...
...He analyzes the defects of our current tax policy, and discusses his proposed Jobs Creation Act which is aimed Baron Von Kannon is publisher of The Alternative and Kapellmeister of the Saturday Evening Club...
...Congressman Floyd Spence's concluding essay on defense is an exceptionally good summary of the pro-defense point of view...
...The essential Jimmy is the automaton who criss-crosses America serving up his laodicean banalities in a set discourse that is unique to all American political rhetoric...
...He has been remarkably prolific, publishing widely on such diverse topics as ethics, literature, and the philosophy of aesthetics, and has received welldeserved acclaim for his seminal works, The Moral Life and the Ethioal Life, D.H...
...But it does treat serious issues which concern most people: taxes, energy, inflation, foreign policy, government regulation, education, welfare, the environment, and so on...
...Ford plans to continue his attack on Congress, he would do well to read The Case Against the Reckless Congress, a book of essays by nineteen conservative Republican Congressmen, covering a wide range of public policy questions...
...He is the Democrats' Nixon, a ruthless, relentless pursuer of power...
...Agreed, it is revolting to listen to that limp, desiccated rhetoric and to witness his bald position-taking, but it is amusing to observe such moderns as Norman Mailer as they fabricate from mere nothingness an interesting, decent, pleasant man, a Protestant JFK...
...LBJ was a cauldron of passions, Henry Kissinger breaks from diplomacy to visit the Jeu de Paume, even the hellish Nixon battered Chopin on his piano...
...As I see it, they are attempting to turn swine flu into an aphrodisiac...
...Congressman Philip Crane's views on health care are especially timely...
...To the extent that Vivas has succeeded in hindering the onslaught of today's barbarians, our debt to him is immense, i Viva Vivas...
...So they will hold their noses and spout for Jimmy...
...111 Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...The book argues that many of America's problems were caused by reckless and foolish action (and occasional inaction) on the part of Congress...
...THE WONDERBOY AT MIDPASSAGE (continued from page 4) goody-goody, and speed reading...
...While most of the essays are useful, three stand above the rest...
...There,s opportunit y "America...
...BOOK REVIEW The Case Against the Reckless Congress Edited by Congresswoman Marjorie Holt / Green Hill / $1.95 Baron Von Kannon In the first of the three scheduled debates with Jimmy Carter, President Ford displayed a new eagerness to attack the Democratic Congress...
...In light of Vivas' great accomplishment, therefore, it is fitting that Henry Regnery and a host of well-known scholars, including Erich Heller, William Couch, Hugh Kenner, and A. James McAdams is a graduate student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley...
...If Mr...
...t is a difficult book to describe, because much like the works of the man it honors, it covers a vast array of subjects., the virtual gamut of the scholarly enterprise...
...He has taken values and modern culture seriously and, in doing so, has lived up to his own description of the truly humanist teacher, he who conceives "the fundamental problem today, yesterday and always to stave off the snarling beasts of barbarism that are always and everywhere on the alert to get out of their inward cages into which culture drives them...
...Neglected are those topics which seem to fascinate the intellectualoids...
...The writing is a bit uneven...
...Unlike other theorists, he has sought not to change the world, but rather to understand it...
...But even withstanding philosophical controversy, one cannot deny the enormous contributions which Vivas has made...
...Against the social theories of those grands simplificateurs who would champion science and psychology over culture and morality, Vivas has tendered the pursuit of the "sustaining intellectual and moral structures of civilization...
...His has been, without a doubt, a distinguished career...
...It is, in short, a book of useful campaign rhetoric...
...Power to gratify a ravenous and ridiculous ego is the moderns' most holy sacrament, indeed their only one...
...Murray Krieger, have compiled the Festschrift, /Viva Vivas...
...It is filled with statistics, shocking examples of flagrant waste, cute examples of frivolous waste, voting records, and a set of what Republicans like to call "constructive alternatives" to the Democrats' proposals...
...Whether ontological realism is a philosophically sound position is a matter of debate...
...Think of it...
...It includes nothing about Daniel Schorr, for example, or the CIA, or the pardon of the Incumbent's Hated Predecessor...
...t i Viva Vivas...
...Now this does not mean that the book deals with all of the issues...
...If we are to solve these problems, Congress must act to balance the budget, get the regulators off the backs of business, maintain a strong defense posture, allow the free market to operate, and--perhaps most important-allow citizens to make more decisions for themselves...
...Values are peculiar kinds of facts which undergird the civilized society, and all of our acts, whether cultural, political, or artistic, are perforce subject to such standards...
...The book is a useful tool for both junior and senior politicoes and it deserves wide readership...
...Above all, he has been a staunch and defiant defender of traditionalist values and standards of judgment, and a consistent and capable opponent of the liberal reformist and quasi-Marxist world views which currently infest the American landscape...
...It is a useful source of information for political activists and others who want to understand a responsible conservative perspective on major political questions...
...Thus, the most highly visible components of a nation's military strength may never be used, and may thus come ultimately to be taken for granted...
...But enough criticism...
...Today the deterrence of war is as important a function of military strength as the capacity to fight wars and win them," Spence writes...
...If ever one needed evidence that mere power is the moderns' only serious value, their endorsement of the Wonderboy provides evidence in profusion...
...32 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 at decreasing unemployment, increasing capital formation, and stabilizing prices...
...In response to a question concerning the anti-Washington mood of the country, Ford insisted that the Democrats in Congress are Washington's major problem and he urged his own reelection in order to "check their excesses with my vetoes...
...Even an American politician has his limits...
...Though hailed as the political marvel of the hour, not one pol has aped his appallingly insipid sermonic, and my guess is that not one will...
...Congressman Jack Kemp's ideas on tax reform are imaginative and, as the Wall Street Journal has noted recently, deserve consideration...
...There is some repetition...
...But the spectacle of it also illuminates the barrenness of our era...
...Notifications that Jimmy immerses himself in Niebuhr, Wagner, and Dylan Thomas are so much claptrap...
...Some of the chapters are marred by the constant use of the first person singular, and one Congressman-essayist got so carried away that he labeled some banal and wordy paragraph "Steiger's Law...
...The morality-and-enlightenment claque, the fastidious moralists who banished Nixon, have taken as their own a second-generation Babbitt, dismissing from their formidable consciences the blatancy of his fibs and the tedious philistinism of his hollow character...
...Ford is not the only person who would benefit from this book...
...And his philosophical tool in this quest has been that of ontological realism, that position which maintains that "values are real or antecedent to our discovery of them...
...Yet there is a strain of thought common to the essays in this collection, and that is their celebration of Vivas' insatiable"quest for certainty" and his uncompromising disdain for epistemological relativism...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
