Aspen: The New Rome
Nollson, John
"Aspen: The New Rome" attempt was made to nominate him for vice president even though he was seven years too young for the job. But he was on television briefly and everyone remarked how boyish and clean-limbed he was....
...In truth, the Executive Secretary had not been a creative economist...
...ASFO, as the armed component was known, soon numbered more than 800,000, including naval and air elements...
...Throughout the world, people are coming to comprehend the connectedness of things...
...What, I wonder, does David Broder of the Washington Post make of it...
...Meantime, it became necessary to create Aspen Security Forces to protect The Institute's worldwide chain of facilities...
...What began as a simple request by The Institute to purchase the subscription list of Smithsonian magazine erupted into bloody battle...
...That was the huge commotion caused by the leaking of The Institute's famous ten-year plan, The Protocols of the Elders of Aspen...
...But it never got deeply enough into foreign policy and, like the dinosaurs, its brain got too small for its body...
...It was managed with consummate skill...
...John Nollson Aspen: The New Rome Iremember well how our current condition of peace, prosperity, and happiness originated in the political malaise of 1978...
...This very week, we're celebrating another anniversary of our Fundamental Statute which, not a moment too soon, vested all legislative, executive, and judicial power in the Executive Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies...
...Was there a major corporate executive who had not been ferried in his Lear jet to delve into the necessary nexus between commerce and theologies...
...They are united in genuine awe of human intellectual and material achievement...
...But I didn't panic...
...Now, of course, we know better...
...Together, they became the most powerful currency manipulators of the twentieth century...
...Who had not heard that Pascal's Wager had become the Planetary Bargain...
...It strikes me that Bond possibly believes the human-rights rhetoric and so has a vision of black Washington consisting of tired, hungry, yearning masses, huddled on doorsteps, straining for a first glimpse of their new leader—who will be none other than Bond himself...
...Everyone who was anyone came to our place in the mountains...
...Then we bought some seaside villas and they came there...
...But it was the Humanist-General whose earnest glance showed depth and passion...
...You see," said the Humanist-General, "I knew what I was doing...
...Maybe our plans seemed a little advanced for their day, but it surely has worked out all right...
...A "New South" governor in Florida...
...In any event, there is no doubt that a fuller account of the Bond-Carter story would make for entertaining reading...
...he maintained tax shelters in New Hebrides and Barbados...
...Well they might have...
...he subscribed to Le Monde...
...She says that Carter believes Bond did not approve of his candidacy because he, Bond, wanted to be vice president, but realized that an all-Georgia ticket was untenable...
...The Gnomes of Zurich (actually the collateral branch of the famous family led by Herman and Isidore Gnome) were also drawn into The Institute's orbit...
...New first course: Roast Bond...
...With this extensive network of listening posts, he gathered startlingly accurate intelligence...
...The key to it was my strategy of unite and conquer...
...None had suspected that this would become the basis for the notorious Aspen Dossiers...
...Well, it is not too difficult to visualize the next scene...
...we made records for the blind and movies for the deaf...
...The future of structural humanism seemed to hang in the balance...
...Besides, everyone knew—or should have known—what we 22 The American Spectator November 1978 were doing...
...On the contrary, a study of newsmedia reports in 1976 reveals that Bond actually used his Quote Circuit authority to predict that Carter was going nowhere, and so was in fact partially responsible for the news media's early disinclination to believe that Carter was a serious candidate...
...You know," he said to Miss Walters, "sometimes up in the mountains, after a hard day of grappling with the complex issues of our variegated culture, it's nice to sit around the campfire, relax, and maybe even sing a song or two...
...Even hardheaded wargamers had overlooked the growing influence of The Institute, especially after its famous seminar, "Creative Necrology and Preemptive Bioethics," had opened sectarian fissures...
...Then—and this was a masterstroke—I arranged for the Smithsonian Institution to absorb the surviving remnants, thereby creating a new organization, Smithbrook American...
...Against all odds, he succeeded...
...I secured the merger of the Brookings Institution with the American Enterprise Institute, thereby allowing two potential rivals to bore each other to death...
...But the outcome was never in doubt...
...It was Mortimer Adler...
...In the end, they collapsed completely...
...The Humanist-General made mincemeat of the Curator-General...
...I knew it was much more than the bag of old dinosaur bones it pretended to be...
...Whose aesthetic sense had not been refined after hearing The Institute's own musicians perform eight-, ten-, twelve-, and fourteen-tone music...
...An editor in New York would need a quote from an authority in the South, and Bond became everyone's authority, his name reliably appearing on every reporter's Rolodex...
...Thereafter he became a member in good standing of the Quote Circuit...
...And he gestured to the enormous oil portrait on the wall of his study...
...we had our own airstrip to receive visitors...
...Premature disclosure could have wiped out thirty years of hard work...
...I never had any doubts," the Executive Secretary said when he announced that he would rule with the title of Humanist-General...
...How had it happened...
...They have come together...
...we spoke on National Public Radio...
...We didn't need a turgid text...
...And now, just before the first course is brought in from the kitchen, fresh-faced, clean-limbed Bond appears in the doorway and cries out: "Huddled masses...
...No matter...
...In those days, we didn't understand the sources of our discontent...
...He established affiliates in all the great capitals of Europe and Asia...
...In 1975 Broder visited 12 states, not including Georgia, in search of probable presidential candidates...
...he proclaimed, adding that he was now giving serious consideration to moving to D.C...
...then they trembled...
...One is inclined to believe from this episode that Bond must be uncommonly stupid, politically speaking, but Elizabeth Drew, in her book on the 1976 campaign, offers an alternative explanation...
...I had been against drawing up the Protocols from the beginning," continued the Humanist-General with an ever-soslight Colorado drawl...
...The document was nothing less than a detailed blueprint for the seizure of world power, for the establishment of a new super-government on the ruins of the world system...
...no one ever named a station wagon after them...
...Fortunes were made and lost on the basis of information he provided...
...It had been a startling development, quite unexpected...
...In a brilliant coup de main, he obtained observer status for The Institute at the United Nations General Assembly—which then adopted by a vote of 116-9 (12 abstentions, 11 missing-inaction) a resolution declaring The Institute "the sole legitimate representative of struggling optimists, rationalists, monetarists, and other oppressed peoples...
...Now you would have thought that Bond, a black politician from Carter's state, would somehow have been able to capitalize on this achievement, and that having done so he would today be rivalling Andrew Young himself in the prominence and virulence of his denunciations of America...
...The Aspen-rand, as the coin came to be known, wasbacked by the staggering silver lode of The Institute's Colorado mines...
...0 The American Spectator November 1978 23...
...he opened wholly-owned subsidiaries throughout Africa and Latin America...
...The vision of the Elders of Aspen has become a living reality...
...Then The Institute began to coin its own money by special arrangement with the Franklin Mint of Philadelphia...
...A characteristic understatement about the epic struggle between The Institute and Smithbrook American for control of the Northern Hemisphere...
...ASFO just rounded them up, and that was that...
...It was a trying period, the greatest challenge to our doctrine of creative non-momentous philology...
...The Colorado Coup, as it came to be known, was really an anti-climactic letdown after all those years of combat...
...But it made the mistake of renting The Institute's lodge for the occasion...
...Follow me to the bright new city on the Hill...
...Instead, his forte was foreign policy, which allowed his imaginative genius free rein...
...Then they shuddered...
...then they began to shake uncontrollably...
...voting-rights amendment approved at last on Capitol Hill, Julian Bond displayed both his opportunism and his characteristic lack of political acumen...
...I, for one, had never underestimated the Smithsonian...
...so that he could qualify as a resident...
...Does one see here the invisible hand of Bond...
...The Executive Secretary was a retiring man who had begun with skimpy resources: two bamboo ski poles, somefrayed bindings, a pair of shabby boots, a rickety chairlift, a small A-frame in Colorado—small, yet well-stocked with the Great Books of the Western (and the Eastern and Southern and Northern and Under) World...
...It was only a matter of time until all segments of American society would be educated, organized, and directed by The Institute...
...I shall lead you to victory...
...Anyone who has read up on the Portrait Gallery Crisis can hardly deny it...
...It was on the move...
...Frankly, I never did have much respect for the Trilaterals...
...He set forth on the lecture circuit and so increased his fame—and wealth...
...The Trilateral Commission, already a quadralateral one in everything but name, had decided to skip stage five, and move directly toward its first Hexagonal Conference...
...Initially famous for being on TV, Bond maintained his fame by being quoted...
...And they will make the critical choices...
...That's my first seminarist painted on the wall, looking as if he were alive...
...His predictions of earthquakes and oil prices were uncanny...
...We had open meetings...
...But he had vision and unshakeable self-confidence...
...Inevitably, the Aspenrand became a rock of stability in an era of wild monetary fluctuation...
...The neutralization of The Institute's real rivals for global hegemony had required a series of dazzling maneuvers...
...Even bitter-enders who resisted the ascendancy of The Institute are now among the first to acknowledge that he was right from the start, and not a bit fuzzy on the issues...
...With the D.C...
...I have always wanted to be a U.S.senator...
...And then there were the diplomats and financiers, politicians and professors, who had willingly confided the most intimate details of their lives to the Aspen Institute Oral History Project...
...Singularly naive of them to think we would honor a flag of truce so that they might have their triennial septagonal seminar," chuckled the Humanist-General...
...All the more remarkable, then, was The Institute's continued rise to its position of preeminent World Power...
...He said this during his first televised interview with Barbara Walters, and he made known his resolve to use his extraordinary powers with dignity, grace, and restraint...
...And with that, he reached for his guitar, and sang his now-legendary theme song, with its haunting refrain: (To the tune of "Rocky Mountain High") In the Colorado Rockies bye and bye On pungent globalism we'll get high We'll teach you how things came to be So you'll never have to wonder why Aspen's mountain high In the Colorado Rockies it's no lie We've seen it raining insights from the sky Where things are just as plain as day So the CIA need never spy Aspen's mountain high The past years have shown him as good as his word...
...Written in Esperanto and containing a preface signed in a near-illegible scrawl (thoughtto be that of Wendell Willkie), the Protocols created a near panic...
...The country was in a parlous state, Bond opined for the benefit of students...
...The Humanist-General triumphed and he has since created a sense of order, serenity, and well-being unknown since the Era of Good Feeling...
...Finally, we were where we wanted to be," the victor would later say, "mano y mano with the Trilateral Commission, just the two of us, eyeball to eyeball, in the great game for all the marbles—and they blinked...
...Will' t please you to sit and look at him ?" he would say to all first-time visitors...
...The Thirty Years' War was a toddler's scuffle by comparison...
...Later on, the Humanist-General could talk calmly of the sensational scandal that had almost sidetracked him...
...What Bond doesn't seem to fealize is that Washington already has plenty of black leaders, and they are already sitting around the banquet table, napkins tucked under their chins, knives and forks gripped firmly in each hand, awaiting with slavering impatience the feast (Senate seats, House seats or seat) that is about to be placed in front of them...
...If Bond does indeed come to Washington, there will be a slight alteration in the menu, that's all...
...Then came Jimmy Carter, a former governor who decided that he would like to be President...
...I recall that I was chairing our international seminar on the life of Paramahansa Yogananda and its implications for landscape architecture when the story broke...
...Governments urged him to take over management of their dwindling foreign exchange holdings...
...Then they came to our townhouses, our campgrounds, our trailer parks, and our houseboats...
...For who among the leading journalists and commentators had not been present at one or another Aspen seminar, high in the mountains...
...The authoritative Institute of Strategic Studies in London reported that ASFO had become the fourth-largest standing military force in the world...
...Thus he attempted to undermine Carter's campaign...
...Was there a riot in Birmingham...
...Naturally, we had to denounce it as a forgery and launch a massive public relations counterattack...
Vol. 11 • November 1978 • No. 11
