Editorial / The Mullah Brown
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial The Mullah Brown R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. No dictum snatched from the vaults of American thought more wondrously illuminates the character and promise of the Rt. Hon. Edmund...
...Actually one does not have to look back very far...
...Study his record...
...No dictum snatched from the vaults of American thought more wondrously illuminates the character and promise of the Rt...
...El Copyright 9 1979 R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Here is a modern Cotton Mather, one who sleeps in his underwear and does not often change it...
...Few guffaws are heard...
...He is all restless ambition...
...Obviously the American people have forsaken civics for a good show...
...One of the ineluctable lessons of the 1960s and 1970s is that once one has opened the public schools to meetings of the Huey NewtonEldridge Cleaver Defense Committee, or lowered state flags for the Kent State Four, the Left's passion for "fundamental change" is generally satisfied...
...Still, is there anything to such pronunciamentoes...
...And what has either of them ever accomplished with a legislature...
...He commenced with his new rhetoric as easily as though it were a catchy new tune for promoting soap...
...on the other, he has scant sympathy for a con...
...As he struts through the land he trails these beauties behind him, and there is a certain kind of Americano, particularly numerous in the press corps, who hears this gibbering and swoons...
...He perseveres in a constant "philosophical dialogue" which, while never certain in its results, is progressive because "day by day" it overcomes the more egregious mistakes and sophistries of our times...
...All of these essays, spanning more than a dozen years of Aron's career, take their bearings in part from his opposition to Marxism...
...That no past attempt to discover ultimate values, political or philosophical, has survived in the marketplace of ideas is the usual and obvious evidence for this position...
...Who doubts that were he upright and active in the 1920s he would have been an earnest confederate of the Anti-Saloon League...
...I urge him to strike out for it...
...continued on page 36) 4 T h e American Spectator May 1979 Raymond Aron's approach to politics is consistently commonsensical...
...As Miss Stein observed, her eyes full of the sheer concrete of the place, "There's no there there...
...Aron points out that, in an effort at "scientific" forecasting, we have tended to think in terms of quantifiable factors at the expense of wider theoretical and historical considerations...
...Now, of course, this observation is not to be taken literally...
...So is culture...
...Will public flush toilets be next to go...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) During his tenure in Sacramento there have been prayer breakfasts featuring meditations on "peyote, snakes, and pregnant goats...
...Editorial The Mullah Brown R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The most important matters to us are not intelligible per se...
...Before meeting Hitler, Mussolini sounded a little like this, but such oratorical colossuses are relatively new to our shores, and even the late Italian's effusions never contained Brown's telltale traces of Valium and hallucination...
...Administrators of the fabled hot lunch program live in terror of imminent extinction...
...Jerry is for the poor and the minorities, and so is Jimmy...
...Moreover, vast hordes of semi-educated blanks have been graduated from the universities in the last decade, and they share the Mullah Brown's pretensions...
...Obviously ideas and philosophies do not bite very deeply into this "philosopherprince's" cerebrum, and so he proudly confects such asseverations as, "I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen...
...servatism constantly fighting to return to the past...
...Yet apart from passing appeals to the authority of Kant and Max Weber, Aron's solution only amounts to metaphysical, or at any rate rhetorical, sleight of hand...
...Jimmy is for balanced budgets, and Jerry is too...
...Indeed, some may even be fetched by them...
...Avoiding final answers, Aron avoids fanaticism...
...Jimmy and Jerry--aside from superficial differences they are indistinguishable and what differences there are can be laid to their points of origin...
...Brown leapt to the Right with no apologies or explanations whatsoever...
...We cannot simply reason--or have revelations--to determine values in some kind of timelessly true fashion...
...When he speaks in his argot of progress and mystical pishposh, they open their hearts to him...
...El knows a whit about foreign policy, but both bring to it moral superiority and Wilsonian goody-goodyism...
...Consider Jimmy's fabled moralism, his personal spirituality, his claims to braininess...
...Alas, he is mostly empty space...
...My guess is no...
...Both are loners, both have made a virtue of vagueness, andboth stand for the environment, the consumer, the little guy...
...He is aware that if he does not do so, his commitment has no ultimate basis...
...In all the hagiographic books that have been written about him never is there a suggestion of a genial moment, a convivial lapse...
...as a committed actor in political life, he must solve it...
...His incoherence about the basis of that moral commitment, however, is unenlightening...
...That the Governor is always coy about revealing the identities of the "vested interests" has long been noted...
...Moreover, the heinous dangers of the flush toilet are now known by every thinking citizen thanks to the Governor's Office of Appropriate Technology, and the shortsightedness of the state's numerous plumbers has been exposed for all to see...
...Their budgets have been squeezed, and today they long for the profligate days of Reagan...
...Rather, he subscribes to an "atheistic humanism" which considers moral values to be relative to history, because they change through time...
...But Aron also has a positive philosophy, and the purpose of this collection of essays is to give his English-speaking audience a coherent introduction to it...
...Life is many seasons...
...I speak of the brightest young nuclear physicist ever to pull a teat in Plains, Georgia, the foreign policy wizard who has done so much to make hair stand on end in the foreign ministries of the world, the President of the United States of America...
...Accordingly, Aron offers the reader a definite political attitude which he labels "progressivism...
...This bachelor governor, living in a rented flat, sleeping on floors, cooking vegetables macrobiotically, and travelling hither and yon, not in a gubernatorial limousine, but in a 1974 Plymouth Satellite, puts on a swell show...
...The Mullah Brown thinks of everything...
...Life is many themes...
...blood pressures rise, sweat bursts forth from the brow, and the members of the constituency of conscience hurl down their frisbees and prepare to march with him against the "vested interests...
...As he puts it: "Man, as we know, is a rational being, but what about men...
...Instead he prefers moderate V/alter Lammi is assistant editor of the Public Interest...
...By what criteria, then, can we make "good" or "bad" choices ? As a philosopher, Aron is naturally disturbed by this problem...
...To him has accrued a smudge of Bay Area bizarrerie, but what little else there is to him is mere wowser: a stern prig, scowling at the voluptuaries of this world and intent on putting them under his thumb...
...Brown's proclivity for wearing the same shirt two or three days at a time has led to the near asphyxiation of at least one close associateua fact duly established in Robert Pack's important work, Jerry Brown: The Philosopher-Pro'nee...
...So how to explain his two terms in Sacramento and his attraction as a presidential candidate...
...Accordingly, he has inveighed for years against the grand historical visions of Marxism...
...There is obviously something there...
...And that he is still more coy about how he will smite them is a matter vexing even to the constituency of conscience...
...Two presidential candidates: careening through America, camPaigning on the purity of their souls and the nitwit piety of their vision, filling the national agenda with issues that would make James Madison blush, and referring all questions to their weirdo staffs of young go-getters...
...So it is with the Mullah Brown...
...He takes obvious pleasure in abusing middle-class pieties, thus the Left is satisfied...
...And, perhaps most noticeable of all, the public discourse of this great state, a state whose 1200 billion economy ranks it with the ten or so most advanced economies of the world, now echoes with such complicated sonorities as, "I go from Whale Day to Space Day, from one issue to another...
...Is he not a renowned scold of tobacco in public places ? An uneasy observer of science and the motor car...
...The state's public health officials and university administrators would not be surprised...
...The results of such myopia became most visible in the Vietnam war, which our analysts were winning on paper as fast as our country was losing in reality...
...Nonetheless, beneath all the 1960s-1970s mountebankery reposes--sad to report--the grandeur" of Oakland...
...The chapter offers a clear explanation of the shortcomings in American strategic thinking...
...An occasional outrage of middle-class dignity quenches leftist demands forreform just as thoroughly as a cut in welfare spending quiets the Right's rhetoric about personal liberty...
...PoliticaUy this sort of reasoning is attractive...
...I am moved to doubt...
...So is a governorship...
...Life is a mosaic...
...BOOK REVIEW Polities and History : SeleCted Essays Raymond Aron / Free Press / $15.95 Walter Lammi change, guided by reason and a strong sense of realism...
...The editor of this book calls this vision "wisdom" and describes it as "the only path to whatever secular truth is humanly accessible...
...He expresses no interest in religion, our traditional source for understanding these matters...
...Has there ever been another American pol quite like him...
...Aron's fundamental view, which he shares , with many thinkers of our times, is that there is no such thing as a fixed human "nature" or "essence...
...i i ii ii iii| ilooooolD OIIOQOIIDIII10011DODQOOOeI0000000QQOOg8 aOOIOOOOOIOOOODO D0000000000 D QQOOOQ Qe O 6QI 0901 DOQOQOI I OOQO The American Spectator May 1979...
...He is already on record as believing that "Anyone who has time to shine his shoes isn't doing the important things in life...
...From early in his career he has warned of the dangers of political messianism and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he has understood the limits of what we can hope to achieve...
...These are things the Mullah knows, and he knows little else...
...He misses appointments, forces himself upon others, and abuses employees...
...Jimmy has proudly announced that one of his most exacting tasks upon entering the White House was learning the locations of all the foreign countries and their capitals...
...The ascendency of the Mullah Brown proves it...
...In political life, where action is what ultimately matters, we need such answers...
...Edmund G. Brown, Jr., than Gertrude Stein's appraisal of Oakland, California...
...But if we are trying genuinely to understand the meaning of politics and history, the solutions arrive, if at all, with great difficulty...
...If he has any character at all it is the character of a vague and moping Puritan...
...nauseam...
...In moral and philosophical heft are they any more substantial than the red-white-and-blue solemnities of the late Harding or of a Chicago alderman weeping over a renamed street...
...We know where he stands on macrobiotically cooked vegetablesmwhere does he stand on dancing or eating between meals...
...Neither i i ii ii i But on the different level to which this book as a whole makes claim--the "philosophy of history,'--Aron falls victim to his own:ability to give commonsensical answers...
...I say get on with the show...
...By the time he is out of office a good number of those foreign countries and their capitals will have disappeared...
...Like Ralph Nader, the Mullah Brown is another.of those weird 1960s Puritans full of rigorism and bile...
...So is history...
...On the one hand, the Aronian progressivist is wary of political idealism ~ la Marxism...
...Jimmy and J erry, both priding themselves on being "outsiders," "anti-pols," and masters of the 12-, 14-, and 16-hour day...
...Here is a man with no roots, no strong affections, no fixed ideas...
...It's the circuitry of semiconductors and computers and electronic interconnections, that'~ what's happening today...
...For me, the path remains hidden...
...Think of it...
...in the end we are all dead anyway...
...Both flattering us with their preposterous love songs to the lowly Americano and promising glad, confident tomorrows...
...Aron, for all his claims to have studied the limits of human knowledge, seems not to realize that this problem even exists...
...Basing his decisions on realistic choices and an existential moral commitment, he ends up with a perspective of moderate civility--the perspective, in Aristotle's sense of the word, of a "gentleman...
...Then, too, thousands of California civil servants now live in a world where there are no state-endowed briefcases...
...He is intense, abrasive, remote, and sullen...
...After allowing his moral choices to be circumscribed by historical context, he assures us that he escapes what he calls "vulgar relativism" because he continues in his effort to understand the world...
...We live under a tyranny of humorless minds...
...But that he is an "activist" no one doubts...
...Does he ever take in the pleasures of the movie house or a Bach cantata...
...Now Jerry wants Jimmy's job...
...And, as was shown in the 1976 presidential race, they are not sickened by the wanton caresses of a shameless flatterer...
...He could do this because he embraces the most misanthropic traits of both...
...Jimmy is against bureaucracy and inefficiency, and so is Jerry...
...One essay in the book, "The Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought (1945-1968)," is concerned with concrete political analysis and on this level Aron is masterful...
...Both heaving great boluses of moral flapdoodle at each other...
...Could anyone with any grasp of political principles so smugly and speedily adopt positions he himself had once put down as heartlessly reactionary ? Could anyone with any sense of the consequences of ideas and language so unflinchingly adopt the arguments of his erstwhile enemies...
...Where he needs to question the assumptions of "atheistic humanism" he gives us instead a restatement--which could have been paraphrased from Part VI of Descartes' Discourse on Method (written in 1636)--of its most extravagantly hopeful vision: Mankind may eventually be united, Aron suggests reassuringly, on the strength of our ultimate common project, the" mastery of nature...
...Jerry has asked if "the Chinese get philosophical in an eclectic way...
...In the fecklessness with which he defended pet projects once they fell under the assault of hostile legislators, and in the fluency of his apostasy from liberal collectivism, one sees not so much a man of new principles as a man of hollow chambers...
...Compassion," "caring," "progressivism," on and on an...
...Brown once promised voters that he would simultaneously move to the Left and the Right...
...He is a skinflint, thus soothing the Right...
...Yet, because he issues cryptic flummeries with the effortlessness of some fat swami ensconced in the Waldorf and surrounded by PR hacks, he is seen by the pundits as a sage and a statesman of moment...
Vol. 12 • May 1979 • No. 5
