Capitol Ideas/Food and Art/H G Wells' New Class/Senate Spenders
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS FOOD AND ART/H.G. WELLS' NEW CLASS/SENATE SPENDERS by Tom Bethell This is a story about Modular Mon-drian and Crisp Romaine Lettuce. You see, I've been back to that new East...
...This was the privileged political bureaucracy which now lorded it over the rest...
...But finally, Kitty Muggeridge says, Beatrice Webb (her aunt) predicted toward the end of her long life that socialism wouldn't work, because if people are given a living by the state they will become corrupt and unproductive...
...there's a certain Prairie Populist, I seem to recall...
...The big spenders are now able to resist any tax cut on the...
...The Congress is now spending about $30 billion more than it takes in from taxpayers...
...We are dependent...
...Legislators are now in the joyful position of having more and more money to spend every year, thanks to inflation and the progressivity of the tax code, without ever having to vote for a tax increase...
...I entered the East Building, and as I did so I became aware that I was in an exciting public space, designed for the future...
...Washington columnist and Washington editor of Harper's...
...The staff of the committee deals with the staff of the President and you get the phenomenon that Governor Evans called the Iron Triangle in Congress, of the committee staff and the staff of the executive department and the lobbies involved...
...and destruction of capitalist ownership, would result in a classless society...
...Have I forgotten someone...
...The more complicated and technical affairs become, the less confidence will the elected official have in himself...
...Senator Byrd of Virginia then proposed an amendment to cut $1 billion out of the CETA program (paying people to read their poetry on buses, etc...
...What food, therefore, is served in an art gallery...
...So the situation looks pretty hopeless at the moment...
...Senator Proxmire thus introduced an amendment to cut spending by this amount...
...In addition, there's nothing more status-y than the food we eat...
...My theory was and is that going to an art gallery, a modern one at least, is primarily an affirmation of status: a declaration of one's superiority over the bulging-at-the-waist middle class...
...We want to suggest that these expert officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very powerful class in the community...
...Then caught sight of Mother-well's elegy-brooding, looming, protesting, anguished, textural, and contextual...
...She has done a good job of this, severing as many ties as possible...
...I dare say that there is not one bill in ten that passes the Senate that could be read and interpreted freely by the members herein...
...Last year's tax-cut movement has now run into a serious snag: this year's balance-the-budget movement...
...Rather my heart's desire was to take a look at the new National Gallery cafeteria...
...We have that very much in mind...
...Soon there is light at the end of the tunnel, a brightly tumbling waterfall, and the cafeteria with lots of tables, and grouped around them squat green Cubist proudly plastic designed chairs which brought a word to the tip of the tongue...
...In any case, I have now discovered an early use of the phrase "new class," in a sense very close to what Kristol had in mind, in H.G...
...The "we" in the quotation refers to Altiora and Oscar Bailey, who (Muggeridge says) "were intended to, and indeed do faithfully portray the Webbs...
...Byrd's amendment received 29 votes, with 17 Republicans voting against it...
...Yeas 23, Nays 67, with Moynihan and 22 Republicans among the Nays...
...It was Irving Kristol who used the term a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal to describe "those who find it convenient to believe the worst about business because they have certain adverse intentions toward the business community to begin with...
...There has been some dispute, of no small moment in neoconservative circles, as to the origin of the term "new class...
...Here the character Oscar Bailey is speaking: "From the mere necessities of convenience elected bodies must avail themselves more and more of the services of expert officials...
...Included in Kristol's new class are "scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communications industry, psychologists and social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper level of the government bureaucracy, and so on...
...Sometimes she just gives in to the urge and heads off to the local McDonalds...
...Back to the National Gallery...
...When she does, she practically puts on a disguise: sunglasses, raincoat with collar turned Tom Bethell is The American Spectator...
...The more complicated and tech nical affairs become, the less con fidence will the elected official have in himself " Let us turn our atten tion now to the United States Con gress, which has reconvened after a long Easter recess, and where, on April 23, Daniel P. Moynihan is speaking on the floor of the Senate: Finally, Mr...
...A renegade Communist from Yugoslavia, Djilas points out in this book-which unfortunately is not quite as well written as one might hope-that "the greatest illusion was that industrialization and collectivization in the U.S.S.R...
...Anyway, modern...
...we require translators...
...The only recourse is to make a note of those legislators who have got their hands most determinedly in our pockets and to vote against them when their turn comes around...
...up, big floppy hat-like Greta Garbo...
...Why is this...
...Kristol's and Djilas' respective classes are not really the same, although no doubt many members of the contemporary new class in America would like to enjoy the same degree of power and privilege as the Soviet commissars...
...More and more, we become the engine of expanding government for the purpose only of justifying the existence of the machinery...
...On the contrary, "a new class, previously unknown to history, had been formed...
...See Kristol's book, Two Cheers for Capitalism, where this article is reprinted...
...The new class felt insecure as long as there were any other owners except itself," Djilas wrote...
...So you put all this on your tray, you sit in your modular chair, you unseal your wine glass, pour in the wine, toy with your quiche, which is quite a decent quiche, and as you watch the prettily tumbling waterfall you will soon have visions of Noguchi playgrounds, Martha Graham's dance company, and entire environments, like Detroit's Civic Center, complete with bike lanes, wheelchair ramps, and signs in Spanish, welling up into your consciousness...
...in Prairie Populist, I seem to recall...
...The basic problem is that the temptation for legislators in a democracy to vote themselves more and more power is just too irresistible...
...And now, the menu: Beef Stroganoff, Mushroom Quiche, Crisp Romaine Lettuce, Per-rier Water (at $1 a bottle), or, if you prefer, little bottles of red or white California wine, with wine glasses fixed in place over the top...
...You see, I've been back to that new East Building of the National Gallery...
...We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid precursors of such a class This quotation occurs in Malcolm Muggeridge's new book, Things Past (a collection of his journalism), and specifically in a 1948 BBC broadcast about his in-laws, Sidney and Beatrice Webb...
...It is a fitting subject for inquiry...
...Muggeridge, incidentally, is in top form in this piece-as always when he writes about the Webbs...
...A Noguchi sculpture loomed into view, all 81/2 tons of it, complete with chisel marks on the stone...
...With what unerring precision they set their course toward the future...
...Wells, or perhaps we should say Sidney Webb, here furnishes a description of the "new class" that is both prescient and strikingly succinct1...
...Voting against those who want to spend our money for us has been called "negativism" by that most horrible of all examples, Senator Culver of Iowa, who currently deserves the title of Worst Senator...
...Perhaps he can be got rid of in 1980, along with Birch Bayh, Alan Cranston, and Frank Church...
...We require staff...
...grounds that it would merely put the budget further out of balance...
...Before Kristol, of course, there was Milovan Djilas, whose book, The New Class, was published in the United States in 1957...
...Pei's morphological masterpiece-vibrant, dynamic, taut, timeless, free-form, and sly...
...I made my way down an access-for-the-handicapped something or other, but wondered, why no solar-heating panels...
...I was not lured into returning by any sense of adventure, nor was my mood that day in tune with the mood of E.M...
...Wells' novel, The New Machiavelli, published in 1911...
...It is almost too depressing to record the smooth functioning of this engine of expanding government, which was in high gear when Congress reconvened after the Easter recess...
...And if you don't, well then you'd better take a swig of Perrier Water and another nibble of your hallucinogenic lettuce...
...Meanwhile, just about every attempt to cut spending has been defeated in the Senate in recent weeks...
...I spied potted plants, the pots being filled as usual with chipped-up tree bark...
...And when she sits down with her Big Mac, she almost gets underneath a copy of the New York Times in case anyone she knows happens to see her...
...They will necessarily have to have very much of a common training...
...More and more, the government does not respond to the purposes the Constitution set forth...
...To digress briefly, I have a friend in Washington who is a tremendously successful social-climber and hence eager to disassociate herself in every way from her former Middle American way-of-life...
...It is hard not to read about those amateur unpaid precursors of the new class without a kind of horrible, gloomy fascination...
...It may be the power of the future...
...Likewise, Senator Lugar's amendment to prevent a 20 percent increase in food-stamp spending lost 30-61...
...This exemplifies "the direct contact of man and matter," the master himself has explained...
...But she has an Achilles Heel: an occasional urge for a McDonalds hamburger, complete with pickles and onion strands and ketchup and mustard oozing out all round...
...mmmm, modular...
...We want to organize that...
...What happened...
...President, I call attention to a matter which has concerned me and which I think in time should concern more of us It is the problem of the increas ing growth of the legislative branch it self...
Vol. 12 • June 1979 • No. 6
