Editorial / America Last
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL "AMERICA LAST" When one has reached the advanced age of the Holy Man Ruhollah Khomeini, the professional services of the weatherman become very important indeed. Allah and...
...Their nostrums have lead to literally millions of deaths and could lead to ~ millions more...
...Eric Blow, director of the .Jefferson County Animal Shelter, steps to the microphones and says, " I t ' s a problem we have to figure out . . . . Is he a lavished pet of the family or a normal household pet...
...They also alleged that I was a racist and elitist because the white victim in my story was murdered in an ostensibly nonwhite neighborhood...
...I pushed my way through the angry crowd amid shouts of "fascist pig, fascist pig...
...Precisely what the weather was in historic Qom during the first weekend in November, I do not know...
...One has to be an idiot and a drunk to believe, as Mr...
...1 of Humanity," and, well, indelicacies so shocking that even members of the League of Women Voters would not utter them...
...could not make decisions...
...It is significant that our President chose Mr...
...and reporters...
...Here is leadership...
...The result of my efforts was another confrontation with radicals...
...Things go numb...
...A vagrant chill in the wind is but a prelude to paresthesias of the most exotic and unenviable variety...
...The latter carry notepads, but are probably more interested in Kennedy than in the bill under consideration...
...Abu Abdul Rasoul AlRida spoke for millions when he said, "The West, whose civilization is visibly crumbling in a morass of hedonism, unbridled mmerialism, social indiscipline and the rule of special interest groups, naturally fears the rise of a rejunvenated Islam and the alternative moral values it posits to the West's discredited myths of democracy and liberalism...
...Holbrooke hoped "that we will recognize that we do not need to dominate the world in order to live safely in it . . . . And above all, we must retain our belief in the exceptional nature of our system of democracy...
...The irrationality of the Iranians can be laid to anti-Americanism, and the way to deal with anti-Americanism is to pull a page from t h e Israelis' manual on defense against bigotry...
...That is to say, our government must cease rendering itself contemptible to the world and must respond decisively and punitively to those who violate our rights...
...He should have been purring with holy contentment...
...A "markup session" is what happens when the senators on a committee get together and debate among themselves various proposals to amend pending legislation...
...I kept my position, and ultimately had a chance to refute some of the charges made against me...
...At this point I was dean of a EDITORIAL (continued from page 5) are dozens more yawps like this and there are thousands more solemn idiots propounding them...
...The numerous legislative assistants, who outnumber the senators two or three to one, are more interested in trying to influby Tom B e t h e l l ence the bill this way or that...
...Iranian radio roared with the sacred vituperative of this gifted "Islamic philosopher...
...That explanation fell on deaf ears...
...The dog has been placed in a local animal shelter, and the question now is what to do with the dog...
...Under his homiletics, the crkme de la crkrae of Iranian studenthood--all middle-aged, inflamed, and some speaking Russian --went marching, and the entire U.S...
...They are self-righteous and intolerant, and choose facile slogans for hard thought...
...Kennedy enters the room and pops a cigar into his mouth...
...Instead, he and his traveling companions, Professor Richard Faik and Mr...
...The fundamental tenets of the America Lasters were pithily set out by Mr...
...A generation has been paralyzed by its moral outrage...
...Our American newspapers no longer carry all the important foreign news, and our newly reformed CIA would have difficulty spotting a major earthquake in the area, so humane and progressive has it become...
...The faculty approved, as an olive branch to the minority, another motion which opposed United States military action in Southeast Asia...
...Sitting next to him is the aged Senator Strom Thurmond, an extinct volcano most unlikely to erupt...
...Even so, the demonstrators pelted me with eggs and tomatoes, and forcibly prevented me from entering my office...
...Since Vietnam's fall our foreign policy has been in the paws of an America Last movement, and I only wish I could have been in Istanbul-pen and pad in hand--to record Mr...
...Service man takes up station by the door, and Kennedy moves over toward his chair, taking his jacket off...
...They are not susceptible to international law or to American diplomacy...
...Great Satan," the "Enemy No...
...Kennedy is on his way...
...Whatever the weather, it is apparent that it took a drastic change on November 4. Before that date the days must have been halcyon, for the venerated Mullah was relatively quiescent: sweetly lapping up his luncheons of bread and gravy, perhaps mulling over plans for a few new prisons, but nothing more...
...The draft bill is over 400 pages long, and very few people in America have any idea what the whole thing means or why in fact it is necessary to rewrite the criminal code...
...There he urged that we "use our natural s t r e n g t h s . . . t o replace (in Marina v.N...
...And to think that the Shah was our "puppet" and that we were responsible for his policies-well, here one has to be less than an idiot: One has to be Garry Wills writing his syndicated column...
...When a.celebrity shows up at a crowded party, the decibel level rises...
...She was 17, had been raised in upstate New York, and was pumped up with social justice slogans and eager to assist the downtrodden...
...Professor Falk, for instance, returned from his visit with the Rev...
...Not even during the Vietnam war did we have so many people demonstrating such hate toward us--and of course that idiotic war was another example of our dragging a crisis out to the benefit of our enemies...
...It was amusing to see signs in front of my office which read, "London is racist"--I immediately thought of Anglophobes who were protesting British immigration policy...
...The Iranians have made themselves perfectly clear...
...It wasn't good deeds that I criticized, hut an inabiIity to recognize our own limitations...
...Why such furious allegations against us and not our neighbors, the hospitable Mexicans...
...The Holy Man should have been kicking up his ancient heels and dispensing cigars to his entourage of yokels...
...And it is more significant still that the dyspeptic Holy Man left him blubbering and scratching his noodle in Istanbul...
...that I could no longer marshal the .--~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . strength to oppose the latest activist cause...
...Yet very few of those doing the denouncing trouble to examine their own actions during the sixties and early seventies...
...In front of Kennedy's Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington columnist and Washington editor of Harper's...
...They began their farce with an act of war...
...They have acted as bellicosely as it is in their power to act--a point that might even penetrate the Wonderboy's thick skull had the Holy Man a few nuclear devices to send Satanward...
...Heads turn and there is a subtle change in the noise level...
...It is true to say of most of them, if not all, that a portion of their daily routine is devoted to imagining that they actually are senators, in which capacity they find that they easily outperform their employers...
...The irrationality of the Carter administration is more complicated...
...These people maintained that I had maligned the girl's character in order to convey a message: " a condemnation of idealism practiced by today's youth...
...Most of our enemies want nothing to do with liberal democracy, and some even bray at material riches...
...In the Southeast Asian holocaust and in the Iranian hysteria, we see the utter discrediting of the sometimes guilt-ridden, sometimes self-righteous appeasers who have reigned atop our foreign policy establishment since Vietnam...
...Khomeini singing of his superb character and commitment to "social justice...
...Yet what has not been widely noted is our own devotion to unreason...
...Then on November 4 he filled with an inexplicable fury...
...as they trot along in his wake--the whole convoy proceeding at well above normal walking speed...
...Khomeini as underwear ads and toothpaste...
...This sanctimonious vaporing has inspired three years of foreign policy blundering for which the civilized nations of the world will be paying dearly for years to come...
...At the very least, I maintained, idealism should be tempered b y a healthy respect for risks...
...It really would not matter...
...Clark's reaction as he was repeatedly denounced by the Holy Man and his sweating disciples as a "dirty character...
...It was apparent to me that academe during that time bore a strong resemblance to Elsinore...
...One week prior to their demonstrations against me, I had surgery on my knee and was forced to use crutches...
...They get in the way, and wait until they get up in years...
...to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, where he will preside over a markup session of Senate bill S. 1722 (formerly S.1...
...ch.air, at the end of the table, there is a little wooden gavel...
...the basic moral force that exists in the principles of our system of government...
...What makes his advisors, at least the bulk of them, adhere to their idiotic notions...
...Don Luce, returned with praise for Khomeini, admonitions against impending American deviltry, and scorn for the Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, by all accounts a decent liberal intellectual who was then a staunch opponent of the autocratic Shah and has ever since shown himself to be a brave friend of liberty...
...Does the Holy Man go about his daily ministrations amid a gaggle of prostrate followers...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 29...
...Inflammation of the mucosa cannot be ruled out...
...Well, why should he not pause occasionally to boot one in the arse...
...Despite all our government's lovey-dovey policies, there are more people railing against us today than ever before...
...It is a vast question duly requiring the services of Aristotelians, Freudians, Ann Landerses, and all kinds of expert minds...
...Firmly and publicly eschewing force in Iran was not only irrational, it was dangerous and provocative...
...Now these nostrums and the beliefs underpinning them have been exposed in all their lurid vacuity...
...To persist in advocating them is to declare oneself a fanatic in behalf of idiocy...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 Behind the enormities of the Iranians, behind their obstinacy and the hysterical obscenities they spit out, there is a huge element of unreason...
...As we have drawn out this crisis, we have allowed the passions of primitive peoples all over the world to be inflamed...
...Since only the demonstrators were interviewed on camera, I called the station to offer my side of the story...
...A Secret...
...It is a mentality whose ancestry dates back to the days of Henry Wallace...
...Suddenly there is a surge of gas in the upper gastrointestinal tract, a burning behind the eyes, perhaps dizzy spells...
...For an hour and a half I shouted...
...Our present peril issues from the fact that we have allowed our foreign policy to be dominated by popinjays...
...On the other hand, there were far fewer causes...
...As we earnestly pad about the world, first taking our legalistic briefs to the United Nations, then to the International Court of Justice, then, in desperation, to any foreign government that will listen, it is increasingly apparen~ that our government is not acting rationally...
...While we posture and render ourselves contemptible to the world, terrible things are happening...
...I decided to tell her story...
...The murmur level rises...
...S e v e r a l springs passed, and I managed to stay out of the path of the hurricane...
...What makes them follow a policy of America Last...
...For a perceived moral principle, they were willing to disregard the rights and welfare of others...
...What I wrote was a fable that intentionally altered the facts of this one case, but, I hoped, contained the spirit of a generational tale...
...Khomeini, carrying away no hint of the man's lunatic viciousness...
...The jutting line of his back-corset is plainly visible beneath his shirt...
...Holbrooke reminded us that "we still possess...
...Perhaps a sudden fall in the barometer constricted the flow of blood to the Holy Man' s ancient ruin of a brain...
...Then he hung up...
...In 1975 I met such an idealist...
...Judging by their reactions at today's markup, quite a few senators don't know either...
...Whatever course the Iranians follow, you can be sure it will have been taken not because of our protests at the International Court of Justice but because of their whim...
...Today this mentality stands exposed in all its decrepitude...
...The basic moral force that exists in our system" is repugnant to him, and to the comrades and colonels of this orb "moral force" is the stuffof comedy...
...Box 1969 Bloomington, Indiana 47402 Please enter a [ ] new [ ] renewal subscription to The American Spectator for: [ ] 12 issues for $12 [ ] Best offer: 36 issues for only $30 [] Payment enclosed [ ] Bill me later PLEASE PRINT Name Address City State Zip Canadian and foreign subscribers, please add $2 per year for postage...
...Eric Blow, a lively prospect for Secretary of State in the next Carter administration or in a Kennedy administration...
...But it wasn't easy...
...Embassy was kidnapped...
...Painful therapies were a certainty...
...But this is more complex...
...Will the temperature remain benign ? Let the barometric pressure dive, and a geezer is ambushed by sudden inflammation of the nasal mucosa, painful swellings in the joints, and, as every subscriber to the New England Journal of Medicine knows, constriction of the blood vessels...
...There's a lot of different angles to look at...
...Exhausted at the end of the session, I discovered to my astonishment that mine was the only class that had been held...
...The room is already packed with senators' aides...
...I had no choice but to give my lecture over the ubiquitous bullhorns...
...Last January Clark, a tireless and unctuous sympathizer for some of the most barbaric so-called liberation movements, returned from a personal conversation with the Rev...
...In the end, all the talk about conscience and morality did not mean much when pitted against student pressure...
...Perhaps I was so enervated by the events in May 1970 college, proud of the progress my division had achieved, and generally well regarded by colleagues and students as a sound administrator...
...A campaign was launched in the student newspaper and in mimeographed hand-outs for my resignation...
...They answer only to the buzz between the Rev...
...E D I T O R I A L AMERICA LAST When one has reached the advanced age of the Holy Man Ruhollah Khomeini, the professional services of the weatherman become very important indeed...
...In far-off Mexico the Shah, attired in his everpresent glamour shirt, discoed lewdly, but the cerebral chambers of the Holy Man remained free of fever...
...And here they come, Kennedy leading by a nose, rounding corners and now clattering down the final straight, which i s an echoing flagstone corridor in the center of the United States Capitol building...
...Luce does, that there would be no boat people had the United States and the refugees been more cooperative with Hanoi...
...A reporter listened politely to my account for about ten minutes and then said, "If I accept your explanation then we have no news story...
...Khomeini's ears...
...She used her university experience as a way to get involved with the "real people" in the inner city...
...The Holy Man Khomeini can tell you that, as the shadow of one's years lengthens, a bout on the prayer rug is no picnic, and, should the barometer heave suddenly, there can be flatus, perhaps worse...
...In a letter in the November 10 issue of the Economist, a Mr...
...Ramsey Clark, of all the political corpses in America, as our envoy to Iran...
...Air mail rates sent on request...
...I would not, and could not, permit this rabble to drive me from my position, particularly since most of my opponents were neither students in my college nor students in the university...
...Our CIA analysts, busily pondering their meager evidence and pestering the Library of Congress for more facts, remain in the dark...
...One now hears glib denunciations of the McCarthy era on campuses all over the country...
...There he had his gall bladder removed in a twoand-one-half-hour operation, and-Allah be praised--cancer was reported...
...Falk found the old scowler progressive, and the dreaded Yankee in error...
...One has to be an idiot to believe, as some piously do, that America's war in Southeast Asia persuaded Pol Pot to destroy his own nation...
...Richard Holbrooke, our President's Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, in a 1976 issue of Foreign Policy...
...A long table with microphones in front of each chair awaits the senatorial arrivals...
...This is so obvious that even the Wonderboy has perceived it...
...The very next day there was a cordon of student radicals in front of the building in which my class was to be given...
...I managed to weather this storm, too...
...But no...
...You get the feeling that were it not for the accident of heredity he would today be far, far away from the tedium of a Judiciary Committee meeting~perhaps tending bar somewhere in South Boston or rollicking about with half a dozen pals at the racetrack...
...These three meatheads are significant because they so wondrously represent the foreign policy mentality that has reigned in the Wonderboy's White House...
...But in those days it was one thing to pass a motion and quite another to follow it through...
...The hearing room is plainly too small for the number of people in it...
...They should not rule out the weather...
...when they did, it was at meetings hastily called, on poorly drafted motions, after debate unworthy of being called rational...
...I responded by pointing out that the purpose of my story was to prevent episodes of this kind from being repeated...
...Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr...
...Soon he was bashing his old head into the holy rug, foaming with imprecations against our Great Republic, and defenestrating wastepaper baskets...
...It will be a very hard decision for them...
...Persuasion and compromise" are as loathsome to the Rev...
...The land of the free and the home of the brave became "The by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...However, I had never mentioned the race of her assailant...
...This condition, however, did not prevent anti-war protestors from using their "idealism" to try to solve other problems...
...Yet on one issue, noted by Peter Gay in The Weimar Culture, there does appear to be a similarity: As the need for absolute morality increases, the concern for human decency decreases...
...Professors SCRIBEI I AMERICAN SPECTATOR ITODAY THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR P.O...
...His face is salmon-pink, his hair somewhat tousled...
...Some call out, "Senator...
...After several months of working on a project on the Lower East Side of New York, she was brutally beaten to death...
...Whitman's words) 'leadership based on hegemony with leadership based on persuasion and compromise.' " Moreover, Mr...
...Founded on the most absurd fatuities, it always assumes the innocence and higher morality of our enemies: They are in the right, we are in the wrong...
...Anyone who entered the building encountered fierce invective and jostling...
...How blow the winds...
...It is possible even to feel sorry for him-driven by circumstances more or less beyond his control into a public life for which he is probably unsuited by temperament, and which he probably does not enjoy...
...Senator...
...Others carry briefcases and wave memoranda, while still others have little insignia in their lapels and wear large-cut suits to accommodate the bulges under their armpits...
...Turn to Louisville, Kentucky, where a pet dachshund recently killed a family's two-week-old baby...
...It is patently extreme to compare this era with the rise of Nazism...
...Fury descended on him...
...In the New York Times he wrote that our media "defamed [Khomeini] in many ways, associating him with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti-Semitism, and with a new political disorder, 'theocratic fascism.' " In the 1930s there was t h e America First movement...
...But I felt if my students were in the classroom, I had a moral and legal obligation to be there as well...
...Some students were so outraged by the soon designated "pusillanimous decision" of the faculty that they vowed to shut down the college...
...Doubled up with gallstones, the Shah had been flown to New York Hospital...
...Still, despite the great saintliness Brother Young spied in him, I wish he were dead...
...We have allowed the preeminent power of the West to be placed outside the international community and to be treated as a pariah nation...
...Speaking in elevated terms wonderfully suggestive of Mr...
...Should it be destroyed...
...With little or no consideration of the issues, university students were willing to jeopardize two hundred years of tradition in the name of "the revolution...
...It [the dog] is bound to hold a very high-ranking position in their family...
...Very THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JANUARY 1980 5 to be absent without penalty...
...Allah and all his esoteric blah doubtless remain diverting, but a septuagenarian grouser's preeminent concern is with the dance of the barometer...
...Things tingle...
...Clark and the Carter foreign policy, a Mr...
...Yet I suggest that the thing be pondered immediately, for even though the idiocy of these policies is now clear for all to see, the reasoning that supports them seems to have spread across the country...
...There (continued on page 28) C A P I T O L I D E A S "''OOOO'*'*''.O.OO.OOO6..O..OO..OO*.O*O..*.O.OO*,OO.*OOOOO*.*JOOO...O .,~176176176176176 ~176176176176176176176176176176176176 *,~176176176176176176176176176176 KENNEDY'S HEARING AIDES Wherever Senator Edward M. Kennedy goes, he is surrounded by a tight cluster of petitioners and protectors who maneuver for positions around his bustling person...
...S. 1722 is an elaborate attempt to rewrite a section of the criminal code, and it has been winding its way through the legislative labyrinths for eight years at least...
...accommodation 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 is our only proper response...
...Kennedy has about him an air of slightly disreputable, roguish charm...
...And what of the humidity...
...My amusement came to an abrupt end when the demonstrators had a CBS affiliate cover their pseudo-event for the six o'clock local news...
Vol. 13 • January 1980 • No. 1
