Editorial/Poet on a Fuzzy Toilet Seat Cover
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Poet on a Fuzzy Toilet Seat Cover How inscrutable are the ways of history! Who ever would have imagined that someday our nation's most gifted...
...For those who want to comprehend Richard Wilbur's view of poetry and life, the most important essays in the book are "A Speech at a Ceremony," "Poetry and Happiness," and "On My Own Work...
...Flynt remains a hopelessly pathetic slob whose trashy life still finds its most precise trope in that peculiar American furnishing, the fuzzy toilet seat cover...
...Talese is serious, his problem is a colossal inability to discriminate, and it is ironic that just this inability to discriminate is what many First Amendment zealots charge against the American people...
...The stage ks alive with a mob o: plastic Darrows hollering for a plasteJ Dreiser...
...The sorry fact of the matter is that in America today those bogus civil libertarians who make the noisiest spectacle of themselves on issues of human liberty generally know little about it and could care less...
...I am grateful because Mr...
...American life...
...Thanks to Mr...
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...This doesn't mean that he is a poet without ideas, however...
...Anyone who has enjoyed his books of poems, beginning with The Beautiful Changes And Other Poems, will profit from Wilbur's reflections on poetry and life...
...He writes: "The church in our country is broken into hundreds of sorry and provincial sects...
...They exploit decent values for their own gain...
...Although Wilbur rejects the notion that one should look to poets for new philosophies or new intellectual structures, his commencement address is rich in philosophical insight...
...The hand and mind of the poet is in these prose comments on the spiritual impoverishment of our country as a result of "an incoherence aggravated by an intolerable rate of change...
...In this essay, the reader discovers what Wilbur celebrates--" the learned mind and the articulate spirit...
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...Larry C. Flynt [pronounced Flint], the driving force behind Leasure Time Products and Hustler Magazine, Inc...
...we are not really one culture...
...On the other hand he is given to pinning American flags on his leisure suits...
...In novel after novel of our times, he writes, "we have been shown this peculiarly modern form of sickness or suffering: the inability to feel, or the inability to feel other than perversely...
...Talese, "Sexuality is not divorced from the politics of government...
...Flynt for his troubles as is Mr...
...Talese this opportunity...
...But those who cannot discriminate between the condition of Andrei Sakharov and that of Mr...
...In Responses, he speaks of the poet's desire to speak to and for a nation that is a community...
...Larry Flynt are dubious judges of others' dis(continued on page 39) BOOK REVIEW Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976 Richard Wilbur / Harcourt BraceJovanovich / $3.95 Anthony Harrigan Ordinarily, it is a mistake to take the measure of a poet from his occasional prose works...
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...How much support does Mr...
...Talese--but for different reasons...
...Their feeling for order tends to dissolve in the essay form...
...Think of it, the freedom to vote, to assemble, to form political parties, and to speak out on political issues, is all of a piece with the freedom to sell marital aids...
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...There is little to say about him that is interesting or, for that matter, even uninteresting...
...In most countries there exist congeries of citizens who are threats to freedom and to culture, but in our modern era it is extremely difficult to identify them...
...Flynt the consciences of poseurs like Talese are again secreting vast charges of moral indignation...
...Soon or late his latent public-spiritedness will doubtless goad him to crusades against prostatitis, venereal disease, and some of those unmentionable kinds of cancer that so frequently vex his cosmopolitan readership...
...The sixteen essays in this book, written over a period of 25 years, are fully expressive of his sensibility...
...Yet he specifically rejects the attitude or role of the alienated writer...
...mentally unimportant matter as "sexual expression" to the level of political and intellectual freedom...
...Flynt has given them a heroic cause, and they are thankful...
...Flynt's rights is a farce waged by vicarious civil libertarians...
...Opportunities for heroism in post-Nixonian America come so infrequently...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 35...
...Flynt also publishes racist stuff like cartoons of grotesque Negroes crawling after rat traps baited with watermelon...
...And he apparently feels the stirrings of public service, for he has begun a campaign in Hustler against the smoking menace, on pages that might otherwise feature a pair of brass knuckles, a whip, or an anus...
...Talese send...
...He isn't ideological...
...Who ever would have imagined that someday our nation's most gifted intellectuals would be beholden to a dirty-necked grammar school drop-out, recently risen from grubby obscurity to become America's foremost pimp and merchandiser of marital aids...
...Assuming Mr...
...The present war for Mr...
...Think of it--an "author" whose best-seller was ghostwritten now defends a "dissident" whose dissidence makes him one of the wealthiest and freest publishers in the world...
...For the most part out vicarious civil libertarians are the same meretricious celebrities who provide razzle for the Republic's intellectualoids...
...Nevertheless, I suspect that his future is not to be so sunny, for his present sadness suggests something else about him: Mr...
...All they had to do was to sign a petition comparing the lower-court conviction of an American millionaire to the imprisonment, torture, and extermination of thousands of Soviet dissidents...
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...Plastw Darrows Now I, as a strict civil libertarian, am as grateful to Mr...
...Serious defenders of civil libertie~ would never commit the atrocity of com...
...Since April of !974 Alexander Solzhenitsyn has spent at least $360,000 on the cause of civil liberties in the Soviet Union...
...What they have done with Flynt is typical of them...
...In quality of mind and manner he is at one with the likes of Mr...
...paring a slob like Flynt to Soviet dissidents...
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...He refers to the "atomism of Anthony Harrigan, executive vice president of the United States Industrial Council, edited and contributed to the Ten Poets Anthology, a collection inc/uding early work by Richard V/ilbur...
...ture...
...Talese equates sexual freedom ("sexuality" in his highfalutin idiom) with political freedom...
...Like Robert Frost's work, Richard Wilbur's poetry is understandable and straightforward...
...He recognizes, however, that "We are not a settled and monolithic nation...
...But facts are facts, and today such high-minded adepts of la vie intellectuelle as Gay Talese and Jann Wenner are inflamed over the enormities being visited upon poor Mr...
...He condemns, for example--and in his poet's superb phrase - - " t h e blank, intransitive heart of the heroes of Albert Camus...
...He also has an exceptionally sharp sense of place NOT AVAILABLE FROM THE HOUSE OF GUCCI Baron Von Kannon is pleased to make an exclusive offer to the discriminating readers of The Alternative...
...Talese and his colleagues would be howling persecution and demanding that the agency get back to the noble work of expurgating mouthwash ads and Wonder Bread wrappers...
...Perhaps the finest expressions of Wilbur's sensibility are in the commencement address "A Speech at a Ceremony...
...At a booming time when a host of sex barons are freely publishing all ilk of prurient and perverse treasures poor Mr...
...Juan Corona, the convicted killer of 25 farm workers, though in fairness to Mr...
...It is extremely useful to have the ethical and intellectual quacks of the land displaying their hollow values and trashy achievements, for it gives serious civil libertarians a chance to identify and reflect on the country's intellectual rot...
...John Kenneth Galbraith at the height of his powers, as when he averred: "Obscenity is like the concept of sin--it defies definition...In a free society nobody should be a judge...
...He is not, he notes, "a programmatic poet...
...Flynt will always be scanty...
...As the years fall away it is ever more obvious that a vast number of liberals are more serious about their images than about true liberalism...
...They have taken one worthy principle of freedom --freedom of the press--disfigured it, and exploited it for short-term profits...
...Flynt he is more the humanist than either of the above and, as one can easily deduce from the civil libertarian catechism that he orates by rote, he is far less an authoritarian...
...This is true not only in the asinine debate over the First Amendment but also in the hyperbole of civil rights...
...And even more instructive, how many actually journeyed to the deep South to stand with Negro civil rights activists who were getting their heads kicked in during marches and voter drives ? How many speak out against the treatment accorded citizens behind the Iron Curtain...
...They were glad to do it...
...In all the pother not once have I heard any of the vicarious civil libertarians even mention that along with the infantile sex Mr...
...Suddenly, they can experience l'affaire Dreyfus, the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, the McCarthy Era, and other horrors too dispiriting to recount...
...Nothing is more revealing about today's vicarious civil libertarians than their biographies...
...In less than a decade the profits from his enterprises-profits that would be judged unconscionable were they amassed in any other business--have made him a millionaire...
...James Earl Ray and Mr...
...BARON VON KANNON P.O...
...Flynt will be scot2frec and ready for his next boorish misadven...
...How many have parted with their loose nickels and dimes to support these poor souls...
...He is thirtyfour years old, has made a lot of money from dealing in life's seedier merchandise, and recently entered holy wedlock with one Althea Leasure, a cutie whose photographs give evidence that she has a proclivity for spilling food on herself...
...Today he wriggles furiously to avoid seven to twenty-five years residence in an Ohio ~l~llTI m e I...
...They claim that free citizens are not capable of discriminating between pornography and Ulysses...
...They are either opportunists, poseurs, or ignoramuses...
...This isn't the case, however, with Richard Wilbur, one of the finest poets of the postWorld War II generation...
...colleges of Christian foundation hold classes as usual on Good Friday...
...How many defenders of Larry Flynt ever rushed out in the early 1960s to defend the Negro as he struggled in the deep South for some of the most elemental civil liberties...
...Biographical material on Mr...
...No knowledgeable observeJ doubts for a moment that a court decisiot or two from now Mr...
...Imagine how that lunatic yawp would go over with Vladimir Bukovsky and the starving prisoners of the Gulag...
...Its suppression is entwined with attempts to regulate human behavior through control of imagery...
...Nor would they raise such a funda...
...our cities bristle like quartz clusters with faceless new buildings of aluminum and glass, bare of symbolic ornament because they have nothing to say...
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...Flynt is a born loser...
...Yet, notwithstanding his mounds of money, Mr...
...Poets often are poor at explaining and analyzing...
...Flynt has gotten himself convicted of "pandering obscenity and engaging in organized crime...
...He fancies himself somewhat of a liberal and at times is capable of ratiocinations reminiscent of Dr...
...John Dean, the Mary Magdalen of Watergate turned author, is among them...
...Suggestive of their character, Mr...
...Those hinds who have monop(continued on page 34) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1977 aids that look like the instruments of a medieval torture chamber, yet if the sleuths from the Federal Trade Commission entered a complaint, Mr...
...They no longer live in the nation's backwaters, but have moved to the cities, taken over many of our cultural institutions, and learned to palm off their quackery as progressive thought and liberal behavior...
...If they continue unchallenged, there will come a time when there will be no freedom of expression nor much freedom of any other sort, for the citizenry will not know what freedom of expression is and the social tumult our quacks will have ushered in will pre-empt the respect for freedom the citizenry once had...
...Richard Wilbur has a keen sense of what modern Americans are losing...
...Flynt has given Mr...
...To quote Mr...
...Talese is grateful for the opportunity to solemnly explicate his idiotic insight into "the connection between the sexual and the political...
...If there were a serious threat to civil liberties in America, you can be sure that this pack of impostors would be over at Elaine's or another of their toney Manhattan salons, primly sipping ap6ritifs, quoting the late Paul Elmer More and eagerly awaiting the opportunity to stride forth on the pages of the New York Times as principled advocates of chaste reading and uplift...
Vol. 10 • April 1977 • No. 7
