Spectator's Journal
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL First and Goal To Go A new movie has come along to cater to die masturbatory fantasies of the masochistic Left. Called North Dallas Forty, it purports to be an "expose" of...
...To the so-called liberal this means war...
...inflation is at 13 percent annually...
...No government in recorded history has reached the Pandolfo Point and survived...
...Not so many years ago North Dallas Forty would have been recog nized for the crudely-plotted essay in "socialist realism" that it is...
...As our symposium this month [see page 10] should make clear, there is another generation of neoconservatives coming along, assuring that the concerns of older writers like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz will be around for a long time...
...He has, it is true, established Pandolfo Associates and a new subsidiary thereof called Pandolfo Resources (trading over the counter), but we all have to eat...
...But the crowd advanced and took out its wrath upon him...
...So much for the reformers' pretensions to democratic fervor...
...Perhaps this is why he is in such a lather over the rise of the neo-conservatives...
...The liberal is no longer a liberal...
...Today it is merely mainstream liberalism...
...The inflation/popularity ratio, which can take decades to reach 1:1, thus quickly becomes 2:1...
...His strong point is character...
...And so, high on oath and full of duty they clap on their armor, pull their wash basins over their cocos, call their Sancho Panzas to arms, and resolutely advance on the enemy...
...Clearly, it will be but a few months before the Point is reached...
...this we have from his two most distinguished intellectual supporters, James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...If instead he is an intelligent, principled nonconformist (wide receiver Phil Elliott) or black, he will be exploited and/ or destroyed...
...Needless to say, it has received ecstatic reviews in the nation's press...
...Indeed, a startling but inevitable mathematical development follows reaching the Point: The popularity rating immediately drops by half while inflation doubles...
...The coaches are heartless and brutal, the owners simply monstrous...
...There is but one recorded instance in which the Pandolfo Ratio exceeded 100:1...
...Though these younger writers differ on some particulars, they are pretty much in accord that freedom, prosperity, and Western values are good things...
...Even the will of the people no longer receives his support...
...The players are the proletariat, the coaches and chaplain are the foremen, the owners are, well, the owners...
...Elliott Abrams unelected bureaucracies and to the courts...
...But let us be clear that the Pandolfo Ratio is by itself no guarantee of popularity...
...Onward they slog full of weird declarations and fortified by illogic...
...The Point is reached when a leader's approval rating crosses the rate of inflation...
...And what an amusing spectacle the 1980s will present, when the so-called liberals strike out from their redoubts in the bureaucracy and the judiciary to thwart the taxpaying Americano and his neoconservative publicist...
...Contrary to the denigratory howls of the so-called liberals, the neoconservatives are neither misanthropes nor elitists...
...Pandolfo has donated his discovery to his fellow men...
...Hoover began with 1 percent inflation and 62 percent popularity, for a ratio of 1:62...
...Particularly striking is the team chaplain: A mon-signor of the Roman Catholic Church, he is the most contemptible religious figure to appear on the screen since the bloodthirsty priest in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky...
...Thus we find the first qualification to the Pandolfo Rule: It only works when inflation exceeds 5 percent...
...What it unmistakably is at its deepest level is an "expose" of capitalism...
...There is not the slightest hint or glimmer of humanity in any of the latter two groups...
...Players' minds are diverted from the desperation of their state by drugs, drink, and wild sex...
...Demons rise up...
...When the farmers rose against him, he cried out, "My ratio is 1:3, better than Charlemagne's...
...The neoconservatives favor the old liberal values, and do not ignore new threats to those values...
...He no longer speaks for personal liberty, reasoned debate, fairness, expanded opportunities...
...Today, we are perilously close to reaching the Pandolfo Point...
...For the sake of brevity, this moment is known as the Pandolfo Point...
...At 4:1, his ancestral home is burned...
...Their war against meaning has been a success...
...Carter's approval rating stands, according to the latest polls, at 19 percent...
...Yet things have changed...
...President Kennedy, with 5 percent inflation and 54 percent popularity, had a ratio of 1:11...
...This is the origin of our term "expiingement...
...This is the origin of our term "mangle...
...Thus, looking back over the last two decades, it appears that the so-called liberals have had many victories over which to purr and to lick their paws...
...Conspiracies multiply...
...KO'L The Pandolfo Point Only a few times in a century do we discover a truly great sociological tool...
...Contrary to the sp-called liberals' denigrations, the neoconservatives are not an intellectual movement isolated by age...
...To the so-called liberals nothing ever really changes...
...And so here we are, once again led by a liberal patrician struggling against malefactors of great wealth...
...Teddy Kennedy, who has told the New York Times' Adam Clymer that his economic policies differ little from those of Jimmy, will be their presidential candidate if the economy does not improve...
...Rather, they are political descendants of James Madison...
...Among ancient Hittite tribes, at 5:1 the entire family of the former leader was exiled in perpetuity...
...But of course that's not really what the movie is about...
...In their struggle against privilege they add the blacks, the browns, the women, the homosexuals, the handicapped...
...These days he devotes himself to his life's work, which is to discover the relationship between the budget deficit and the number of Jane Fonda movies in any given year...
...Thus, for the foreseeable future it will be most helpful,) The 5 percent rule was first demonstrated in Warsaw in 1318, when Prince Stanislaw Manglowicz had on his hands a depression so severe that inflation was but 1 percent and his popularity was 3 percent...
...The threats may come from abroad, or they may come from within the United States...
...Soon his approval rating was down to 26 percent, but low inflation meant that his Pandolfo Ratio remained high...
...To take a brief historical excursion, President Eisenhower had an average Pandolfo Ratio of 1:24, with 3 percent inflation and 72 percent popularity...
...Yet everywhere they perceive new threats to their reigning vacuities...
...Wherever they have come from the neoconservatives have been vigorous and vigilant in facing up to these threats...
...Arthur tells us that Chappaquiddick improved Teddy just as polio improved FDR...
...I am therefore delighted to make known to the world the discovery of my dear friend Aldo Pandolfo, which reveals when a government will self-destruct...
...The neoconservatives are an important new American force, a force made all the more important because of the gross failure of the so-called liberals of the 1960s and 1970s...
...And so on...
...Called North Dallas Forty, it purports to be an "expose" of professional football...
...At that level its message is that a player has to be either a cynical sellout (e.g., the quarterback) or a stupid hunk of beef (practically everybody else on the team) in order to survive...
...Though highly intellectual and cosmopolitan, they seem far more in harmony with the Gallup polls than do the so-called liberals...
...Further, they feel that meaning matters...
...Still, the world remains pretty much as FDR left it-or, if one is in a more radical humor, as the Wobblies left it...
...Sportsmanship is nonexistent-if necessary, to protect your quarterback you deliberately break the leg of an opposing lineman...
...Then let us hear the so-called liberal wail over the "deadlock of democracy...
...In that example, which occurred among the Pung of Borneo, the former leader became the object of a devil-worshipping cult and all his followers and their families were banished from their village and from the oral history of the Pung-men...
...His characterization in the film is thus a commentary not only on religion in general but specifically on the Catholic Church as an organization...
...Note, too, that he is not just a dumb kid fresh out of seminary but a middle-aged mon-signor...
...The team chaplain is a loathsome hypocrite...
...History teaches that when the ratio, which I have taken to calling the Pandolfo Ratio, reaches 3:1 the former leader is invariably decapitated...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
