Editorial / A Prophet in Exile
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. A former Georgia Governor--a Biblepounding Baptist--is President of the Great Republic. A Boston Irishman is Speaker of the House of Representatives. A...
...Overnight, crazy Charlie was the new Plato...
...At one time this book was more intensely talked about than the Bible or any sex manual ever written...
...Natl...
...Witty, highly informative, thoroughly documented, caustic...demolishes the myths, distortions and outright falsehoods of the anti-nuclear crowd...
...I believe he is being given it because the very boldness and breadth of his last book were simply too much for the culturati...
...I remember this as a time of incredible excitement and discovery, of opening up to unknown realms and corridors, lights and colors, undreamed-of places in the mind and the feelings...
...Thus, after a decade of prophecy and prayer, we enter the New Age, the New Politics, the New Consciousness...at last the Change so fervently spoken of throughout the last decade...
...I believe Charlie is being given the old snub...
...Nationally syndicated columnist John Lofton Shows, in great detail, that nuclear energy is significantly safer than any alternative source of energy--including those we are using now...
...Never mind that family stability probably is identical with civilization, as Freud thought...
...Remember if you can those dizzy transients of yore...
...Raised in Manhattan's toney East Eighties by a father and mother who adored the New Deal, Charlie was given his foundation in New Class philosophy at Oberlin...
...National Review The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear BY PETR BECKMANN (University of Colorado) [] Fellow of the IEEE Editor and Publisher of Access to Energy 190pp., ill...
...It actually keeps connoisseurs like Dr...
...A higher conception of equality requires an understanding of what people ought to be as well as efforts to make them so, even if those efforts mean acknowledging existing differences...
...Charlie is the paradigmatic member of the New Class...
...Now forecasts of social change generally fetch the culturati even if the forecaster is a has-been...
...Furthermore, as Charlie's career richly suggests, they fall for their own hocus pocus, and it foozles them beyond repair...
...80302 Rush . . . . hardbacks . . . . paperbacks of The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear to the address below...
...College boys read him, and a squadron of butterflies took off in their tummies...
...I saw it more deeply at Yale, 1967-70...
...It is in his conception of equality that Moynihan differs from and is superior to Herbert Gutman...
...6 by 9; $5.95 softb., $10.95 hardb...
...Our era abounds with such overnight luminaries momentarily cashing in on visions of apocalypse and tales of unsurpassed iniquity...
...Such sentiments...
...Through all these years he gained no sympathy at all for the scarcity of economic goods, the fragility of political liberty, or the importance of lives led outside the public sector...
...Not only that, he scared hell out of them...
...There are no women in the Senate...
...What The Enemy could do to the liberal endeavor if they ever drew this connection...
...It is George McGovern on the floor of the U.S...
...Today one has a better chance of finding good sense and generous sentiment in the corner barbershop than at practically any cultural redoubt...
...It changed me and changed my life...
...And so poor Charlie is to be entombed in a conspiracy of silence, a quack undone not only by his own quackery but also by the cowardliness of his erstwhile press agents...
...Ringling's Big Top, today he is trumpeted by the great publishing houses and invited to tour the cultural Chautauqua circuit from Harvard to Cucamonga, California...
...Therefore I want to bring down this system, and replace it with one responsive to human needs...
...One of the New Age's most celebrated prophets spotted the stirrings of this historic change early, and he has meticulously chronicled the whole gorgeous process: "I saw new consciousness first in Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1967...
...Old ways of thinking had become entrenched, obsolete, and finally desrructive...
...Science News At once a useful handbook of nuclear basics and a biting refutation of the Naderites...An instructive, entertaining book that deserves the widest possible audience...
...by the late 1960s it became apparent to all that the experience had idiotized him...
...But it is only by denying the validity of applying external tests to black culture that he can claim that the black family was not damaged by slavery...
...Then Charlie sank from sight and from mind...
...Senate...
...He wrote Greening, and gained wide fame...
...I have enclosed $10.95 per hardback, $5.95 per paperback...
...Later he practiced with Arnold, Fortas & Porter, the prestigious Washington law bordello...
...Daniel Ellsberg, and the gifted Berrigans...
...His every word was quoted...
...This is pretty poor stuff...
...To: THE GOLEM PRESS Box 1342-T, Boulder, Colo...
...Even weaker is Gutman's insistence, based on plantation records, that slave children were often named after their grandparents, and that this phenomenon showed the strength, resilience, and autonomy of slave families and culture...
...Ringling's Big Top Perhaps there was a time when the average Americano was indeed a poltroon and a sap for any fabulist intent on working him over, but times have changed...
...One way to achieve equality is to discard standards, in the absence of which all men are necessarily equal...
...Mein Gott...
...Ralph de Toledano Technically informed, lively and polemical analysis compares the risks of nuclear power to those of its alternatives, concluding that it is safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented...
...He acknowledges that "Antislavery critics had many good reasons to complain that as a social system, slavery weakened the slave household...
...More than one Jaycee gave up the pursuit of Mammon to follow him, and his prognostications of pandemic whoopee were even entered into the Congressional Record...
...Never mind that people were criticizing the family lives of English workers and Irish immigrants for exactly the same weaknesses perceived in black families...
...So speaks Professor Charles Reich today, seven years after writing his memorable monograph, The Greening ofAme~'aa, a modern classic in cultural forecasting...
...synd...
...I even doubt that his latest confessions to a life of pederasty, a belief in magic, and a passion for "cookies and milk," brought him into his present low estate_ Such passions are common amongst the culturati, though most of its members were initiated into them in a different sequence than poor Charlie, who admits in his latest work never to have experienced any sort of coition until the grey age of 44--two years after the publishing of Greening!--and then only with a "male model" who charged him $25 and took a $10 gratui W. Women's delights he savored two years later...
...The Profs underlined...
...They could grow by expanding their minds and opening up to new ways of thinking...
...But equal to what...
...In the midst of the most lunatic discourse he would suddenly gain his composure, clear his throat, and launch a pious declaration along the lines of the following from The Sorcerer, (page 244 for the scholarly disposed): "The major goal of my own work is fundamental, political change...
...In it he prophesies even vaster revolutions for America, and he includes helpful hints on how the reader can prepare for life in the forthcoming era...
...Moynihan and Gutman do not differ on their facts...
...College girls read him and wept...
...As a cultural phenomenon Charles Reich has assumed room temperature...
...Such talk was "elitist" and reflected "ideological currents that assigned inferior status to nineteenth century blacks, women and working class men...
...When Charlie did that he mortified a large number of America's cultural entrepreneurs...
...Surely he is not being ignored because his early celebration of hedonism slipped so rapidly into the narcissism inhering throughout The Sorcerer...
...Colorado residents please add tax...
...Worse still he had a rhetorical quirk that was especially horrifying...
...And those words were not only idiotic, they were pristine ritualistic liberalism...
...He does wish to show that slaves had a culture of their own...
...I do not want to live in a country where there is such pervasive cynicism, corruption, and betrayal of its own dignity...
...Full of zeal for reform and (continued on page 33) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 by Gutman that on plantations from which slave family members were not sold away, slave women often had all their children by one man...
...Most accept a politics that grafts the idealism of Mao Tse-tung to the realism of Eleanor Roosevelt, and most desire that our foreign policy be based on the programs of the New York City Department of Public Welfare...
...It is an editorial writer for The Nation saying his morning prayers...
...It had the power of a primal event which had to be accepted with wonder and awe...
...I cannot in good conscience live in a country that imprisons people, humiliates them, degrades them, or ignores their basic humanity...
...Such midnineteenth century cla.~ and sexual beliefs reinforced racial beliefs about Afro-Americans...
...In short and in sum, Charlie had access to practically all the benefits chic liberalism could shower on a young man--an elite education, access to elite institutions, power, ease, and the New York Times with breakfast...
...His perfumed and voluptuous visions were not long missed, however, for A Prophet in Exile American culture is colossally fecund nowadays...
...One day Charlie would harangue on behalf o f " t h e kids," the next day he might air his obsession with Brooks Brothers, whose suits were "scratchy" and "interfered with the free movement of my mind...
...The fact that slaves knew the names of their parents tells us very little about the virtues and vices of slave family life...
...Most of the cuhurati are chic liberals who devoutly believe in Charlie's personal philosophy of hedonism, selfabsorption and juvenescence...
...Now he has published his sequel, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef, and attracted not a peep oflaudation, though this book is even more thunderingly moronic than Greening...
...This is not to say that there are not civilized people to be found amongst the culturati, but such people are assuredly the exceF21,n...
...It is Senator Edward Kennedy...
...Perhaps its lucubrations never jolted the unlettered, but Greening was learnedly dissected on all the talk-shows and even Rotarians heard tell of its prophecies...
...Natl...
...But by Gutman's statement, the possibility, not the actuality of separation precluded stable family life...
...He cites an 1870 editorial in The Nation and sniffs that "' The Nation identifies sexual restraint, civil marriage and family 'stability' with civilization itself...
...Garry Wills and Gore Vidal on retainer for the sole purpose of whooping it up everytime a travesty like The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef comes along...
...On the face of it there seems to me to be evidence of a curious conspiracy against Charlie...
...No doubt Gutman believes that he is serving the cause of equality by declining to use his data to judge black families...
...Yet the culturati tire, and poor Charlie was soon left high, dry, and ranting...
...Timothy Leary, Dr...
...A Southerner and former Ku Kluxian reigns supreme as Senate Majority Leader...
...I am unwilling to overlook injustice, cruelty, and oppression...
...Having done that, he will argue that slave culture and families were not "weaker" than their white counterparts, and that such judgments are the result of the racist application of white standards to black creations...
...M. Stanton Evans Dr...
...There ~as a sense of dawn, of daybreak over the land...
...A PROPHET IN EXILE (continued from page 4) a hunger for power, Charlie went to study law at Yale and clerked for Hugo Black...
...Beckmann's lucid and readable book should be in the hands of every concerned American...
...Notwithstanding the fact that the Republic's more knowledgeable reviewers greeted it with a general roll-of-the-eyes, university professors from diverse disciplines made it essential reading in their classes...
...Today at least as many frauds ply their trade as ever ministered to the boobs of the 1920s, and their snake oil is infinitely more amusing and edifying for they labor amongst the tin-pot intelligentsia...
...Nor is he being passed over because of his metaphysical maunderings over rock music, dope, and John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State, a book which apparently influenced him as deeply as I'm OK, You're OK...
...I want nothing to do with a country that oppresses the people of any other country...
...I cannot accept living in a country where people feel powerless to affect their lives...
...Spontaneously, almost accidentally, a large number of people discovered that they could change...
...This is no mere cultural quack...
...But that is all beside the point for Gutman...
...but few would be so artless or so reckless as to harangue for all of it in one book...
...He became a friend and disciple of William O. Douglas, whom he calls "the Sun God himself...
...Those who compose the rule are overwhelmingly ignoramuses adept in the most preposterous hysteria...
...If ever the forces of reaction heard such noble statements issuing from our Charlie they would have ammunition enough to destroy the Army of Decency forever...
...They fail for tales of terror and images of utopia, and whereas in an earlier era our Charlie would have been given an animal bladder and sent to perform under Mr...
...Ship to: The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 33...
...Not even reviewed in T/se New York Review of Books...
...synd...
...This deserves scrutiny...
...Yet not even The New York Review of Books has given Charlie a nod--an unusual event that, for this famous review is given to celebrating worthies like Charlie regardless of their future prospects...
...In the 1960s he began teaching law at Yale...
...God knows it was potent stuff in Winnetka, Illinois, and how it did invade the universities...
...Charlie was one of the most formidable quacks ever loosed in those purlieus...
...There are fewer women in the Ninety-fifth Congress than in the Ninety-fourth...
...How has such a prodigious metamorphosis occurred...
...The Sorcerer is an autobiographical account of Charlie's discovery of Consciousness III, the sudden awareness that finished off bourgeois America...
Vol. 10 • March 1977 • No. 6
