The Bootblack Stand
Plunkitt, George Washington
"The Bootblack Stand" - eloquent, but not more honest; Caputo was there. A Rumor of War is a book for Vietnam veterans and their loved ones—perhaps especially for the veterans. In the end, the clash of emotions doesn't...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, has accepted a staff position with the House Ethics Committee, but he has graciously consented to continue advising American statesmen in these times of trouble...
...I can tell you I am some kind of runner...
...Never does he pick up a pen without writing turgid bile chastising a man for being too successful or for being a failure, or making some other idiotic point...
...Please renew my subscription for one year ($10.00...
...Important: allow six weeks for address change...
...Sincerely yours, Bella Abzug Dear Ms...
...Violent disagreement from the audience.] Don't ever jog and for God's sake avoid sex...
...Changing Your Address...
...And look what it does to the mind...
...Print your new address and mail this form to...
...George Will—who wanted to be here this evening, but he is a jogger and, this is the truth, he has pneumonia—will likewise protest...
...We are the neo-intelligent of the party of liberty...
...What can we do to get youth interested in Jimmy...
...The map was on the wall...
...When writing to us about your subscription, always attach your address label or print your name and address exactly as they appear on your address label...
...Powell: How about getting Jimmy busted for smoking dope...
...There is not a pharmaceutical company in the country I am unfamiliar with...
...The fact looms large...
...Significantly, Caputo dedicates his book to two of his comrades, an enlisted man and an officer who both fell in Vietnam...
...I suggest you make your campaign more relevant...
...Abzug: Cut the ordure...
...avant-garde culture—what's dreadful is instructive...
...Carter, the Warren Gamaliel Harding of the Post-Watergate Morality...
...Through this idiotic decade we have seen more tawdry fads flame out than in any period in our history: sexual revolution proclaimed by grim quacks, solemnly promising a pure heart, a serene pysche, and a sparklingly clean prostate gland through coitus perpetuus...
...He was a model Republican until sometime in 1969 when he fell into the arms of an intellectual cutie from Haight Ashbury and juvenesced until, by 1973, I could never read the classified section of the New York Review of Books without thinking of him...
...Sure, I have the heart of a bull elephant, but it pumps blood into an anatomical wasteland...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The American Spectator...
...We all could do worse...
...Whatever his later sympathy for Joan Baez, she isn't mentioned...
...THE BOOTBLACK STAND Dr...
...Consider Garry Wills...
...Plunkitt: Like millions of other Americans determined to realize their potential as human beings, I have taken up jogging...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Circulation Department P.O...
...With Wills exegesis is always difficult...
...We walk arm in arm with the gods...
...Neo-conservatism...
...Payment enclosed ^ Please bill me (please print) Name Address City State Zip Date of change X71 38 The American Spectator February 1978...
...Now his transmigration is complete...
...I am a lifelong athlete, and I spend more time with doctors than with my wife...
...I thank Judy, my wife...
...so is Bob Nisbet) were ever to give up that tobacco cloud that hovers over him, his life would be thrown into immediate peril...
...It is an enduring lesson that, on thebattlefield, all wars are the same...
...I thank Ron Burr...
...Rudolph Hitler and a lifelong proponent of staunch lederhosen...
...They made more money but we had more fun—and we did more good...
...We have had an opportunity to maintain a forum that, along with the other publications represented here tonight, presents the most accurate analysis of world conditions today, the most thoughtful cultural criticism, and the most promising solutions to our present malaise...
...Yet the male-dominated capitalist system continues to oppress me and my sisters...
...To hell with that...
...I am in a constant state of ill health, and am known to every mortician in Bloomington...
...I am a physical disaster zone...
...The tedious finger-wagging aside, it is the timeless nobility of brave men that Caputo admires...
...The American Spectator is the only journal of ideas in America with its own practicing physician on the premises at all times...
...S'arkes Tarzian Inc...
...Cordially yours, Jody Powell Dear Mr...
...Hardly a day has gone by in the past 25 years during which I did not swim one to five miles...
...In the end, the clash of emotions doesn't work...
...Old liberalism...
...Now this is perhaps a digression, but it needs to be said...
...A young Christian Democrat called him "the brother of Dr...
...If we learned nothing else from the 1960s, it was that the onlycities ever improved by the U.S...
...Look at Bob Nisbet...
...He looks like a man of mid-40s—and in truth he was 92 years old last Saturday...
...We are not responsible...
...Box 877 Bloomington, Indiana 47401 (Please attach address label here...
...According to the German press, one young man claimed he was the designer of the Bauhaus chair and the "greatest dancer of his day...
...Biting the heads off chickens on the White House portico...
...I am seeking the Democratic nomination for Ed Koch's old congressional seat...
...Now I know the following revelations will be put down as controversial...
...women's liberation, homosexual liberation, and now animal liberation...
...We have run through an obsession with Eastern mysticism, encounter sessions, est, organic foods, vitamin binges, and so forth...
...Bloomington, Indiana The American Spectator February 1978 37 Dear Dr...
...Last week ittook me 20 minutes to convince one dumb cop that I was not an "overloaded dump truck...
...There are a whole range of gimmicks one might use...
...the indecisive moralizing by the former English major doesn't mesh with the terse descriptions of fear and courage in the ricepaddies and the crude field hospitals...
...A sex change operation...
...It is the intensely sad, wholly humane quality of the book that makes it worthwhile...
...More violent disagreement.] Theeffects it can have on your heart and lower spinal column can be irreversible...
...What brings us together...
...GWP REFLECTIONS ON A MERRY STATE (continued from page 4) and all the parallels have been drawn, it is enough to say that we are left with Jimmy Carter, a chaste and forward-looking Harding...
...Why not fight for an end to the war in Vietnam or for the immediate impeachment of Richard Nixon...
...Who would have believed it possible...
...All this is a direct result of vigorous physical exercise which, along with the claptrap about the urgency of a good sex life, is the modern equivalent of the 1920s fad of taking "an apple a day to keep the doctor away...
...The value of Caputo's work is in the descriptions of young men risking death to rescue wounded buddies, which happened as often as the incidents of cowardice and cruelty of which we are constantly reminded...
...He's in the pink...
...Practically every time I set out on FDR Drive I am pulled over by some stupid cop, complaining that state law requires that I affix a "slow moving vehicle emblem" to my "bumper...
...We are a growing force in America today and we are enjoying our work—who could ask for anything more...
...Government were Hamburg and Dresden, and neither HEW nor HUD had any role there whatsoever...
...Neo-intelligence according to Arnold Beichman and to that I agree...
...Bill Buckley will protest and ask for my citations...
...This worries us, for, as the saying goes, youth is America's proverbial future...
...Marx and Lenin have been undone by the promise of California...
...now I play two hours of handball, lift weights, and run...
...Conservatism...
...But I grow thirsty...
...The American Spectator...
...He tells me he has never spent an hour exercising...
...My joints creak, my limbs ache, and food makes me nauseous...
...If Irving Kristol (who is about to light up a cigarette...
...GWP There is opportunity In America...
...Such ignorance of a man who has done so much for world agriculture is worrisome in the extreme, causing us fellows at the White House to poll American teens about Jimmy...
...So only allow me to say that our job has been easy...
...Twelve percent identified him as Billy Carter's twin brother...
...Dear Dr...
...What about having him join a rock group...
...I have already gone through five pairs of Adidas Superstars...
...My neurologist is with me tonight, and as soon as this talk is over I intend to apprise him of a numbness that is gently climbing northward from my left foot...
...And, as I shouted at my press conference, I intend to fight for a "real" federal urban policy...
...In the South Bronx, admittedly, the government has accomplished half of what it accomplished in Dresden, but it is unlikely that the inhabitants will ever recover, for there is no sign the government will ever let up...
...He stopped writing English around 1975—but what a salubrious sex life...
...I thank the Baron for putting this together despite ailments even beyond my own, and I thank you all, and charge you to take on the most gifted bartenders we could find in all New York City...
...Let me say it here and now—all these simpletons jogging towards eternal youth, jogging from the bony grasp of the reaper —they are shortening their lives with every step...
...LSD and other chiliastic movements vouchsafed only by illicit science...
...Be sure to include the line of information above your name...
...Plunkitt: Recent German studies claim that an immense number of German teenagers are ignorant of Adolf Hitler...
...the intellectual curiosity of our youth is amazing...
...To one young person he was "the oddball of the Carter family...
...A sizable percentage thought he was President Nixon's appointee, while others identified him as "Larry Flynt's brother-in-law," "the Perry Como of country music," and "the winner of the Kentucky Derby...
...Please attach the address label from the most recent issue of your American Spectator in the space below...
...Idiots and rascals set themselves up for the pasting they have gotten...
...What we discovered was not good...
...Thanks to the eerie conditions of the last decade different strains of intellect are here tonight...
...Even the peace movement looks today, upon reflection, as nothing more than a suburban fad, and the kids have moved from marching to jogging...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
