Spectator's Journal
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL Amid the Alien Corn There... right beside those dispassionate reference volumes, Nixon, the Fifth Year of His Presidency and Watergate: Chronology of a Crisis... there leaps to...
...And while the car can be indicted for safety levels below most forms of mass transit (excluding subway muggings, of course), it is far from being the mobile execution chamber Nader and his cronies would have you believe...
...Why, then, this manic Washington campaign to end the "love affair...
...So noble is this mutual delicacy, so admirably suited to simplify the politician's Great Soviet Encyclopedia, A.M...
...1966...
...In the words of one of the most respected independent automobile engineering researchers in the nation, William Millikan of Calspan Laboratories, "Americans perceive traveling in an automobile as an acceptable risk...
...Why would the Vice President recently pledge $50 billion more to be heaved down the Conrail rathole while environmentalists and government poltroons delay the opening of much-needed inner city arterial highways in Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere...
...It is a good and auspicious mark of our civilization that the two world superpowers, the USSR and the U.S.A., converge so in historiography...
...IPor favor, ayudame...
...KO 'L EDITORIAL (continued from page 5) the fastest, cheapest, most convenient, most mobile, most flexible, and most private form of transportation known to humanity...
...No sense in quarreling with Brahmin hierarchies...
...Tis massive, this omnium gatherum of rock-ribbed lore...
...Massachusetts invented learning in this Republic...
...What," says Felix, "is such a curious tome as this doin' here, amid the alien and barbaric corn of Fairfax, Virginia?* Surely, Massachusetts is at least six states up the East Coast corridor of enlightenment from us, and light years above us in humane letters and historiography...
...Kennedy campaigning: the system and the style as practiced by Senator Edward Moore Kennedy...
...Virginia Historical Index...
...2 volumes...
...The automobile has no place in their visions...
...1934-1936...
...Of course, the anti-car crowd talks about conservation and efficiency, but in so doing their attacks on the automobile become so fanatical that one is left to wonder if their animosity lies deeper than a simple, if rather perverted, vision of a better transportation mix...
...A nation of automobiles averaging 27.5 miles per gallon (as required by 1985) would be 15 percent more energy-efficient than BART...
...John Hall Goodman, 1878, all of 19 pages...
...People, according to such reasoning, should travel in orderly groups, where their movements can be neatly monitored, timed, and coordinated...
...Again the DC1 is tapped for its sapient journalism, this time from the August 1974 issues, giving us Gladys Pease Reid's "Tom's Neck Farm," 15 pages of what the ever-helpful * * In American Reference Books Annual-1977, entry #391, Lee Steinberg says: "The adequately detailed index includes extinct locations and place names...
...313 pages...
...Its qualities and quantities are dependent on relatively free market forces...
...Felix avers: "Why, our own benighted, pellagra-shot, racist-haunted collection has the following opera-not deemed worthy of admission to this high-level NEH-slushed bibliography -to wit: Levin, Murray Burton...
...The next two works, #'s 7625 and 7626, are the pride of Buzzards Bay's fourth estate: Mr...
...Moreover, the car is such a viable device that all the roads in America could be plowed under and all the gasoline stations turned over to the Sierra Club and it would still persist...
...This massive index covers only some few serial publications, and is, obviously, totally lacking in bibliography post-1936...
...281 pages...
...Yet the fevered campaign continues in the face of hard numbers and the rigid sentiments of the body politic...
...So far 15 volumes of detented English have appeared...
...Olsen, Jack...
...Why would that blathering popinjay, the gratefully-departed Secretary of Transportation, Brock Adams, be heard yelping for a government/industry consortium to "reinvent the automobile...
...Reference #2237 turns out to be the learned Henry Franklin Norton's Martha's Vineyard, 1923, 94 pages...
...editor of Massachusetts: A Bibliography of its History annotates for us as the "social life and customs on Chappaquidic Island...
...Enrolled him down at U. Va...
...Here is the Preface which tells us: It [the Bibliography] includes works of political, economic, social and intellectual history...
...They are essentially anti-business and advocate high levels of government regulation and services...
...Quite simply, it is statistically supportable that small, light, Honda-type automobiles, operating on sophisticated highway networks, in concert with buses, form the most cost-effective, energy-efficient transportation mix conceivable...
...It is that simple...
...They are the scientists, professors, think-tank residents, social engineers, and career bureaucrats who have risen out of the post-industrial knowledge explosion to postulate and plan a golden future for all of us...
...Felix Australis (a preconciliar contact informs me the sobriquet means "Happy or Bless't Southrun") is a habitue of George Mason University's Fenwick Library and a sometime chess organizer, who has been known to commit schedi-asms and heuristic practices, Swem, Earl Gregg, ed...
...Moving on to the next citation, we behold #7624, An Historical Discourse on May hew Church by Mr...
...Contract law, tallied votes, Hallowed halls, quotes unquotes...
...The bridge at Chappa-quiddick...
...They are so passive, so obedient, in comparison to the raucous, zany, unpredictable automobile...
...It is an anarchistic device...
...Onward Felix roves his corn-likkered eye to #7628, the penultimate entry in this treasure trove of Massachusetts-iana...
...Thus encouraged, Felix runs the leathery finger of a redneck back to the index** and...C, CH, CHA, CHAP, there: CHAPPAQUIDDICK see EDGARTOWN...
...1973...
...a total of 12 pages as they appeared in the Dukes County Intelligencer in 1974 and 1975, edited by Gale Huntington...
...and the new Washington METRO is being subsidized at the rate of $22 per ride-enough to buy each traveler a new automobile each year...
...We await with confidence its inevitable finding that it was really radioactive waste from California's nuclear power plants that so deranged the poor beasts as to drive them to their death...
...In fact, if we remove pedestrian deaths and the influence of alcohol in half the fatal traffic accidents (a gruesome menace the govejrjpment-xhooses to sidestep), the chance of the average citizen being one of the 50,000 killed annually in automobile accidents becomes about as likely as slipping in the bathtub...
...1st ed.] 1970...
...There are a total of seven (7) citations to EDGARTOWN, that center of forensic medicine and Puritan jurisprudence for Dukes County, Mass...
...Felix turns to the last entry for Edgartown/ Chappaquiddick, #7629-- in 12 point all caps-"NO ENTRY...
...We have the roadways already in place (with only relatively minor additions necessary) and the technology for truly efficient automobiles-powered from a variety of sources-readily available...
...there leaps to the browse-meister's eye a gem-like work of yanqui bibliography, the Committee for a New England Bibliography's Massachusetts: A Bibliography of its History, all thirty dollars' worth and more...
...biography, indeed the statesman's memoirs, that Felix is impelled by the tenth Muse, Sejanus, to: Envoi Keep in mind, store in soul Obvious fact from latest poll...
...Our faith in Greenpeace's ingenuity, however, remains unshaken...
...275 pages...
...The explanation has an almost irresistible symbolic force, mitigated only by the fact that there isn't a trace of an oil spill anywhere in the affected area...
...Well...
...It can prompt population shifts that defy the most intricate urban master plans...
...Here's the Potosi Felix hasibeen looking for...
...The source of this advocacy lies within that loose collection of elitists that is often described as the "New Class...
...Given reasonably hospitable terrain and sufficient fuel, it can be operated at any time of the day or night, in any weather, by all but the most severely handicapped...
...Teddy bare, the last of the Kennedy clan...
...And well they should...
...199-200...
...Nearer God than Lodge's daughter, ' 'Elfin-grin-that-walks-on-water.'' -R.B.O'Keeffe The Great White Lie The whale-watching environmentalist group, Greenpeace, has been investigating the mysterious selfdestruction of 41 sperm whales that beached themselves and died on the California coast last summer, and has now suggested that an oil spill 4'may" have been the cause of this suicidal behavior...
...as the sun sinks slowly in the western waters, casting the merciful shadows of oblivion on the work of cod, scrod, and God...
...It is the one mechanical device that places massive, uncontrollable social power into the hands of the citizenry, and that is why it is anathema to Washington and its handmaiden "New Class...
...To be sure, it would be a mutation, capable of four-wheeldrive, off-road operation, and propulsion by some obscure fuel, but it would be an automobile embodying all the advantages such a vehicle has Dver the most lush, perfectly-scheduled railroad train in the world...
...Ah, very likely the library Staff member who ordered this intends to provide us a model of what a state historical bibliography should be, lo these many years since Swem filed his last 3x5 card, " Besides being a good ole boy, Felix is mean and sometimes inquisitive...
...Their notion of Utopia lies more within the confines of Bauhaus collectives than within the scatter-shot spread of suburbia...
...Rust, Zad...
...Over 13,000 bibliographical references...
...Why this headlong campaign to get people out of their cars and into trains and buses...
...Hold, hold fast, impatient Republic of Letters: #7627 divulges "Excerpts .from Jeremiah Pease's Diary,'' kept between 1819 and 1820...
...Consider as well that in Europe, where the rail system is superb, mass transit usage has declined while auto usage has increased with rising prosperity...
...Advocates of rail mass transit choose to ignore several salient facts: Although it is cheaper for the riders, its overall costs in terms of construction, operation, and maintenance are astronomical...
...The work is a literal, exact translation of the 3rd edition of the Eo Vshaia Sovietskaia Entsiklopedia...
...The San Francisco BART system will have to operate for at least 168 years 'before it begins to produce a net energy savings...
...Given the choice, people will consistently opt for the private automobile over the public railroad car...
...Trains and buses and airplanes all operate in such polite order...
...Its mobility is practically infinite...
...The answer of Massachusetts, the cultural heartland of America, to the sensitivity the venerable editors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia displayed in not biographizing Beria, Bukharin, et al., is the touching and delicately nuanced amaurosis hyan-nisportus of Massachusetts: A Bibliography of its History...
...Now, here's the rich Peru...
...It certainly cannot be justified on the basis of the wonders of choo-choo trains...
...Henry Beetle Hough's Country Editor, 1940, 325 pages, and his Once More the Thunderer, 1950, 316 more pages of enlightenment on the biota and moralia of the lovely environs of Edgartown...
...December 1972 was established as the terminal date for making entries, but it has been possible to include a number of titles published since then...
...1971...
...Prok-horov, editor-in-chief...
...The question is, how many years and how many billions of dollars have to be wasted before the "New Class" accepts that reality...
Vol. 12 • October 1979 • No. 10
