Editorial / Andrew Young: The Black Man's Burden
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL Andrew Young: The Black Man's Burden Though our nation abounds with gifted men there is only one who President Carter believes will be remembered in history as...
...There is nothing in this picture storybook that would tax the analytic powers of Jane Fonda...
...Not only is he an American Churchill, but he is a reformer with brains: "So even if we have a Foreign Service that's extremely well trained aca-demically, there hasn't been much sensi-tivity training...
...For today's civil-rights movement, Andy is as obsolete as Marcus Garvey and Father Divine...
...Formal civil disobedience remains problematic for a UN Ambas-sador, even one of Mr...
...I would like to have been in the library of the Hartford Theo-logical Seminary when the pensive Mr...
...If it was wrong for the United States to be in Vietnam, why The American Spectator December 1977 little minimizes overt error...
...whereupon he duly sired such learned sonorities as: "I believe in neocolonialism when it's moving in the right direction," "Trying to be independent of the rest of the world is to commit suicide," and "Chaos occurs when human rights are not respected"—a useful apothegm if one will but banish from mind Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, the quietest quarter of the earth's surface...
...Henry Kissinger, of flagrant ignorance regarding racism...
...Few [of the problems we have been discussing], if any, are difficult of resolution...
...Time and again he was up against barbarians like Mr...
...Gently, the interviewer reminded Andy that as a Jew who had grown up in Hitler's Germany the former Secretary of State "surely knows something about racism...
...and remember: Health, Education and Welfare has yet to hand down a genealogical judgment on what ra-cial quota I shall be subsumed under...
...The Mahatma's canon has long been revered by activist clerics of the Rev...
...Andy was a young man, yet almost always he was dealing with his moral inferiors...
...Many of the passing comments are hit-and-run, bush league, cheap shots...
...Crime must be controlled and order restored...
...He entered Congress in 1972 and four years later was at the command post during the people's revolution that brought the Wonderboy to the White House...
...This lonely Americano was described by the New York Times as cool, intelligent, and articulate...
...Andrew Jackson Young, B.S...
...And perhaps to show that he (in contrast to those silly establishment economists) is a Man of the People, Galbraith is not above occasional cute coarseness...
...Because he is adept in moral sophistry he is given to depicting in breathcatchingly portentous tones such sheer and unredeemable imbecilities as the following, (continued on page 39) 4 The American Spectator December 1977 economic ideas and their repercussions...
...But the scripture continues to be quoted, and the following keeps following...
...Young's life has been Mr...
...Moreover, with the collapse of Jim Crow, the black man's problems became more subtle, and per-haps more intractable...
...Having earlier established that his experience in the South made him an expert on racism, he now declared that victims of racism are so traumatized by it that it deludes them...
...Instead, we are presented with bits of supposed history and sociology, pitched in both exposition and substance at the junior-high-school level, the sketches often embellished -with a generalization or aphorism to suggest learning, shrewdness, and wry dispassion...
...In the last third of the book there is no substantive mention of economists, and our only source of "ideas" —aside from a small sample of public figures—is Galbraith himself...
...Public education, for instance...
...A. The Cubans were in Angola at the invitation of...the MPL and...Q...
...His historical fiction-alizations are found throughout, for in-stance: on Smith and Ricardo, on the In-dustrial Revolution, on colonialism, on the prerequisites of economic development, on the corporation, and on banking and monetary experience (page 191, on the Federal Reserve, is a disaster area, followed by additional errors on the same subject on pages 207-208...
...But Galbraith manages to mangle much even in this coffee-table primer...
...The black man does not need the moralistic prattle and psychological pish-posh so popular with Andy and his chichi liberal friends...
...Instead, it is seemingly implied that quite satisfactory resolution of our most pressing problems requires little more than Gal-braithian sensitivity and purity—or, in-deed, little more than the instinct of the race...
...But every socially sensitive cleric must undergo it if he is to be fortified against the murderous conventionalities of middle-class life and allowed to realize his full potential as a pest and scofflaw...
...B.D...
...EDITORIAL Andrew Young: The Black Man's Burden R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...This is neither scholarship nor the reporting and synthesizing of scholarship...
...But the only person I'd be reticent about meeting with is Idi Amin...
...But such experiences do not necessarily build charall but invariably, is in confronting them...
...But the Galbraithian distinctions, alternatives, and criteria are simplistic...
...Memorable was the time he explained his charge that Presidents Nixon and Ford were racists: "They were racists not in the aggressive sense but in that they had no understanding of the problems of colored peoples anywhere....We've got to start talking about racism without putting moral categories on it so we can under-stand it...
...In baseball, a fielder who does not touch the ball cannot be charged with an error...
...He is the kind of periphras-tic maniac that even an Eisenhower might find inscrutable...
...For Andrew Young these were the bookish years, and he emerged from them with an unshakeable grasp of liberal Christianity's key tenet, namely: "Christ was a half-wit...
...Young came upon this biographical infor-mation...
...There was laid the theological foundation that would years later support his magis-terial declaration on morality: "Morality for me is thinking clearly through the alter-natives, and making a decision that is best for the largest number of people...
...The chorus of nonsense that swelled up every time Andy flum-moxed the works remains a garish mani...
...So over the years Galbraith has received more critical review and assessment than he deserves, and he has had his ears pinned back by some of the best ear-pinners in the business—Hayek, Demsetz, Friedman, Stigler...
...Why...
...Gobs of Verbiage The major intellectual influence on the Rev...
...Gandhi was something more than your average "great soul...
...He is a nincompoop, and that ritualistic liberals praise him for just those qualities he so picturesquely lacks should give all black men premonitions re-garding their retirement plans...
...Young, was not an assiduous reader, but when he hit upon a tome that impressed him he would quote from it fulsomely...
...Young's species, but the Rev...
...The difficulty, isn't it wrong for the Cubans to be in Angola...
...An even more hilarious instance of his gift for polemical auto-intoxication occurred when he de-fended the Cuban presence in Angola to a CBS interviewer: "Q...
...I really believe in meeting with anybody and everybody...
...Though our nation abounds with gifted men there is only one who President Carter believes will be remembered in history as a "great man...
...In fact, my guess is that there are hundreds, perhaps thou-sands, of words whose meanings he has only the vaguest hold on, as is suggested by the following absurd harvest culled from his public bloviations: "I demoralize racism and call it ethnocentrism...
...If I can't establish a line of trust, I'd rather not be bothered...
...Who has offered a more vivid encapsulation of the modern Christian love ethic...
...magazine, in beliefs a full professor at Antioch College who has never doubted anything ever published in the Progressive—you have just sampled the wisdom of Mr...
...While in his cocoon our present UN Ambassador studied the Christian occult at the famed Hartford Theological Seminary...
...I just can't operate on a quid pro quo basis...
...Daniel P. Moynihan, so hard to take...
...Yet Mr...
...In fact, he has revealed that during his Hartford years—years generally associated with a young man's goatish season—this future congressman actually contemplated a life of celibacy...
...His eminence tells us much about the dizzy state of racial relations today...
...A. You got me there...
...In that statement Andy has a perfect score: Everything about it is wrong...
...Today blacks need job-training, an expand-ing economy, and as few regulations bar-ring individual industry as possible...
...The Galbraithian deficiencies go beyond analytical shallowness and bad manners...
...q acter, and when Andy entered national politics in the 1970s the moral questions became more complicated...
...Andy is apparently haunted by a pro-clivity for introducing that precise line of argument most likely to blast apart his own case...
...Still, this is not so much a product of the literary world as a product of show biz—and Galbraith clearly is a prospering superstar in pro-viding the conventional wisdom demanded by the show-biz crowd...
...and Mr...
...And it is poetry—unstructured, unmetered blank verse—filled with literary grace notes in the form of sophomoric quips...
...The arrogance is understandable enough...
...Whose mellow wisdom is this...
...The hauteur wafting from this last botch is characteris-tic, for Andy is the victim of a grandiose and stultifying arrogance...
...Lelyveld has a conspicuously stunted capacity for irony...
...What could more effectively ingratiate our diplo-matic corps to the foreign ministries of the world than the squirrelly look of Esalentrained me-freaks...
...The lay reader receives hardly a sugges-tion of the complexities of the issues...
...Normally, first-rate scholars do not bother to debunk simple foolishness...
...There he is asked all manner of question and with the pluck worthy of a Rotary boomer from Dubuque he has at them...
...He is a popinjay of nigh unto constant fluency, and when he speaks it is as though the contents of Webster's Third have gone on a rampage...
...for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so...
...For years his favorite was Constipation and Our Civilization, a book whose value time has somehow obscured, but a book often pressed upon incredulous visitors to the Mahatma's Sevagram hermitage...
...our eloquent and enlightened UN Ambassador...
...We were in Vietnam at the invitation of a series of governments—South Vietnamese...
...Unfortunately, Galbraith is not enough to explain the twentieth century...
...During all those years of fighting the South's Jim Crow laws Andy was in a morally unassailable position...
...rather he emits enormous gobs of verbiage, all affixed precari-ously to those puny rays of intellection that, at asylums like the Hartford Theo-logical Seminary, pass for ideas...
...Often difficult matters of policy are best handled by un-cluttered, general, non-discretionary pro-cedures...
...Whereupon Andy promptly ambushed himself...
...This phe-nomenon of praising a black man for inca-pacities that would not be tolerated in a white man makes even me apprehensive about the future of racial harmony in the Great Republic...
...Re-flect on his attainments and learn from his words...
...Well, this is a pretty book—good binding, big print, lots of pictures...
...Gandhi, like Mr...
...On national tele-vision, "you got me there" ! Not even Warren Gamaliel Harding suffered through such a moment...
...Finally, Galbraith is discouraging in the realm of policy prescription...
...We know what needs to be done...
...What other residues remain from his Gandhian immersion are subject to speculation...
...His favored medium is the interview...
...Abso-lutely no question is beyond his ken...
...He is often a misleading and distracting mentor...
...The glow is unmistakable: in mind a precocious seven-year-old, in emotions a feature writer for Ms...
...Perhaps to his surprise, if Galbraith takes seriously his own comedy routine, the market works...
...Their ill-conceived premises aside, Andy's raucous and boozy homilies on racism are simply irrelevant to the civil-rights movement today...
...There too he studied the Great Books and got a 2,000-volt charge of social conscious-ness...
...How the jolt is administered remains concealed amongst the arcana of the liberal theologians...
...Young's audacity, and his public statements are refreshingly vacant of those pedagogical references that made his predecessor, Mr...
...Black problems there only sym-bolize the fact that the whole system never has made the adjustment to a modern, urban America...
...In point of fact, rarely did there pass a day when the Mahatma failed to query his comely female attendants as to the comparative merits of their morning bowel movements...
...He moved into civil rights, then politics...
...Young is always at pains to remind interviewers of his debt to the Mahatma, and perhaps it is not beyond the borders of our present meditation to recall that during his public life Mr...
...Last winter he had hardly delivered his first lecture against "knee-jerk anti-communism" or discovered his first racist under the bed, when ritualistic liberals began elbowing each other aside and issuing laudations to his eloquence and intelligence...
...Following his treatment of the classicists and the Marxist types, there is only Keynes and a bow to Fisher...
...Proper identification and effective confrontation of vexing difficulties in this vale of tears are not likely to be advanced by such posturings of moral and intellectual superiority...
...There you are, sensitivity sessions in the State Department...
...There he administered to the athletic programs, the media programs, and every other area of spiritual exigency...
...Rarely does he speak in phrases or even sentences...
...He is the greatest moment in American diplomacy, greater even than Woodrow of the Fourteen Points...
...For Andy these were times of worldly whirl, yet how au courant he remained with modern theological developments can be seen in his rigorously thought out ukase for the heathens at Playboy: "My faith is that all men can be saved, but I didn't want Hitler to be saved, and I don't want Idi Amin to be saved...
...He assaults them all by summoning up some clever platitude only to lose it in a morass of utterly meaningless elaboration or to have it trampled by his own brutal contra-diction...
...Eugene ("Bull") Connor...
...he took a position at the head-quarters of the National Council of Churches...
...Even President Carter must have laughed aloud when, during the famed Playboy interview, Andy accused one of his favorite targets, Mr...
...Young is a cool and prag-matic politician with a far-flung network of contacts and a quarterback's sense of timing," intoned Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Times Magazine...
...Constipation has never been one of Andy's problems...
...But the Devil seductively quotes scripture, and Galbraith, too, has a following...
...Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian luminary whose spinning wheels and communal principles have brought such remarkable progress, vigor, and personal liberty to the vast sub-continent...
...He is a moral shout heard through an immoral night...
...Soon he was awarded a collar from the United Church of Christ, Inc., and thither he advanced into a life of Christian endeavor...
...Even his victualizing fell under the Mahatma's influence, and to this day he follows, albeit loosely, the dietary precepts of Addle Davis, the Hoosier nutritionist now de-ceased...
...Young's infatuation appears to have been particu-larly intense...
...in scholarship, an author who says EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) which is best read with timpani rumbling just offstage: "The problems blacks face today are the problems whites will face in a couple of years...
...If only we depose, and dispose of, those grubby, devious, nefarious wielders of power, who so rejoice in the miseries of downtrodden mankind, and replace them with Galbraithians...
...What is more, Andy has no sense that words have meanings defined by authori-ties other than himself...
...He prescribed and administered enemas...
...The inner city must be able to offer today's immigrants the same opportunities open to immigrants in the past...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
