Editorial / A Parable
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL A PARABLE X now have secured in my safe-deposit box a most important document of our time, the May-June 1979 issue of Harvard'Magazine, the magazine of the Harvard alumni association. It...
...whose book-lined living room actually does contain a Nobel Prize, asks, "Why is it that for a century and more before 1971, there were no energy crises, no gasoline shortages, no problems about fuel oil-except during World War II ?" His answer is a shocking one, to wit: The oil companies were allowed to purchase and to sell oil at the market price...
...He asks too much...
...Yet Californians have yet to secede from the Union...
...Is the Senator correct when he says the cost will eventually be lower than what private medicine would be costing us...
...Medicaid was meant to cost only $3 billion a year...
...today there is a large con-stituency that actually yearns for it...
...And is the conscription of virtually all medical personnel consistent with a free and democratic society...
...In California people sit in queues miles long, waiting for up to an hour and a half for gasoline...
...During the past decade their influence has profoundly flummoxed American society, particularly our government and our economy...
...His Nobel Prize...
...Yet another prize winning economist is not in sympathy with them...
...Nor have they checked into our current energy mess...
...They are no more enlightened than the fundamentalists of yore, and they are no more tolerant or civilized...
...Galbraith a part of the natural order of things...
...Milton Friedman...
...It is the progressive fundamentalists of modern America who are now a peril to the Republic...
...This is a parable for our time...
...Galbraith won this award...
...Imagine, energy sup-plies in the state are so low that peo-ple are living under conditions nor dissimilar to those they experienced during the last world war, and the Mullah Brown starts hollering about the evil of nuclear research...
...Alas, the Great Man has no Nobel Prize...
...It contains the following description of the eminent Dr...
...Newsweek Dr...
...They are the same timorous, gullible, inane, and asinine oafs who find a Nobel Prize for Dr...
...All were members of one magnitude or anoth er of the intelligentsia...
...Galbraith, the smiling Teddy, and the earnest Jerry all think that it is...
...Today it costs $25 billion...
...What...
...Galbraith's Noble Prize with a Nobel Prize...
...Can any of the faithful apprise me of the date on which Dr...
...Just so...
...For though it is one of the most meticulously edited of magazines, a magazine aspiring to the highest standards of the art, it contains a botch of egregious magnitude and transcendent significance...
...Nor did many of them march on the governor's office when at the height of the debacle Jerry sonorously called for an end to nuclear research at the state's universities...
...John Kenneth Galbraith, gracefully decomposing in his Cambridge manse: "Galbraith is concerned now with summing up and doing the things he enjoys, in places he enjoys...
...There are in our time vast hosts of demi-educated believers...
...How many citizens of the Peach State would confuse Dr...
...What we see here is one of America's rare moments of authen-ticity...
...What...
...What looms large or his shelf is a Noble Prize, presented by some jovial Parisians in recogni tion of Dr...
...How many of the faithful have ever bothered to check any emanation from the Great Man or from any of his fellow preachers of progressive fundamentalism...
...Teddy lives like Hamilton Jordan and feels he knows how to improve on the sorry performance of Hamilton Jordan's boss...
...Is more regulation of: energy pro-duetion the way to assure a plentiful supply of energy...
...And no one bothers to check...
...Yet none thought it implausible that Dr...
...Yet as conditions worsen, they holler all the more violently for more of the mountebanks' flimflam...
...No one bothered to check it,' a rather superior-sounding young lady at the Harvard Magazine informed us...
...Nor was it a typographical error...
...Teddy thinks so, but then Teddy thinks Bicardi and Coke is a show of class...
...It is a cruel and compassionless thought, but it just might eliminate those cruel and compassionless lines streaming into America's gasoline stations...
...For that matter, there were few progressive yahoos...
...It is an amusing sight, and as they gain strength and vehemence, led by mountebanks like Kennedy and Brown, do not be surprised if mobs descend on research laboratories and begin lynching scientists...
...All the actors were employees of a Cambridge magazine...
...He sits in his book-lined Cambridge living room, his Nobel Prize on one shelf, other awards nearby, and a sampler embroidered with 'Modesty Is A Greatly Overrated Virtue' on the wall behind him...
...It is as though during the darkest days of the Depression, FDR began lecturing Americans on the peril of an affluent society...
...He thinks millions of Americans are starving, and that Swiss bankers control the world's economy...
...Gal braith had won a Nobel Prize some where along the rose-strewn pat) that he has trod these many years c service...
...Yet during the Depression people would have rebelled at such lunacy...
...by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...He would like to be the success in Washington that he was in Atlanta, his only prior experience in a high elected office...
...In the June 4, 1979...
...My guess is that not many of the faithful have checked very carefully into this latest Kennedy venture...
...In Georgia there were no Kennedys and no Browns stirring up the progressive yahoos...
...Will it really cost only $40 billion...
...How many of them have bothered to check the claims that the suave Senator Kennedy makes for his latest health care scheme...
...They flummox modern society and they yell for more...
...Nonethe less, such is the delusory influence of the Galbraithian miasma that a young reporter from the illustrious Harvard Magazine spots a shiny trophy, per ceives the syllable "Nob," and presumes it to be the genuine article No editor caught the mistake...
...It is a thing to cherish...
...Inculcated with lofty notions at educational plants, these patheti-coes enter the adult world full of self-righteousness, fear of modern life, and the desperate will to believe in their supercilious mountebanks...
...Galbraith's amusing pub lie utterances, utterances that have brought merriment to us all...
...In the history of fundamentalism such things are not unheard of...
...Meanwhile, back in Washington a woebegone Wonderboy is struggling to decontrol oil prices and keep the government of the United States as solvent as the governments of Italy and Turkey...
Vol. 12 • July 1979 • No. 7
