Editorial /The Travels of Parson Anderson
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial - "THE TRAVELS OF PARSON ANDERSON" Tom Wolfe, midst the drolleries and insights of his superb book, The Right Stuff, depicts the press metaphorically as the "Victorian Gent," the espouser of...
...went 1o a black Baptist church in Georgetown (a former working class, now f a s h i o n a b l e , neighborhood, where church attendance reflects the old living arrangements...
...They may even embolden him into running on a third part}' ticket...
...I would hope also not to hear anything at all about "human rights," whatever they may be...
...I was expected t(~ start things moving, to lead the procession to the table, since the enfilade began, evidently, with the rear-most pew...
...One gets the impression that Anderson, as a student of politics and ideas, misses things...
...When offered the opportunity, some even vote for him, holding their noses and voting in the party of Coolidge for the first time in their lives...
...After all, Republicans too have rights, one of which is to nominate the candidate of their choice...
...He is not...
...Such sermons are unappealing because they put too much emphasis on the material world and so tacitly repudiate the spiritual...
...He changes his enthusiasms with the seasons...
...I took a rear pew as the minister, wearing a three-piece business suit, began a lengthy fund-raising " p a t t e r , " accompanied by organ crescendi, piano fortes, drums atoll, whooping and weeping--the whole pitch reaching a climax (with cymbals by Tom Bethell crashing and suspenseful sevenths trilling in the organ loft) when I came to . . . and found that a well dressed young usher, tall and dapper-suited, stood expectantly beside my pew and was urging me altarwards...
...He has become a skittish cad, awaiting orders from the higtl and mighty...
...I decided it was high time that I too retraced my steps, back toward the Catholic Church from which I had strayed years ago not so much in a spirit of apostasy as of disillusionment with the doctrinal confusion that seems to have so weakened the Church ever since the Second Vatican Council...
...himself up as a barnstorming Socrates, a Jefferson for moderns, a ~ . ~ f wallower in the ambience of the highfalutin, he approaches the outer limits of our credulity...
...The thing is an extravaganza of incoherence...
...This romance borders on narcissism...
...One Sunday evening I Tom Bethellis The American Spectator's Washington columnist...
...For those in the dark, this mid-60s gathering, convened, by Pope John, was "captured" by left-leaning clerics who then succeeded in imposing their belief that the ecclesiastical compass was in error, meaning that the Church's course would have to change, which was not very encouraging for those like myself~and we must have numbered in the millions-who had grown up contentedly under the ancient regime and could see no reason o t h e r than a p e r v e r s e neophili.a for changing it...
...A hundred curious heads turned toward the door, my entrance appraised by stout, starched matrons under floral hats...
...He is a champion of democracy, yet he thumps fl~r placing ever more areas of governance under the claw of unelected bureaucracies and unelected judges...
...Anderson has now become the candidate of good works...
...These patriots will keep Anderson following in the well-trod path of old Quixote for weeks to come...
...This is too much...
...There the businesslike minister sat enthroned in front of his counting house, consisting of a folding table around which stood a covey of eager deacons, ready to scoop up the offertory and arrange it in orderly green piles...
...But it will not make him the Adlai Stevenson of the 1980s, nor will it wing him into the White House...
...fered the ideas of ~he I.eft to ~he voters...
...True, he is skeptical of wanton government spending and wage and price controls, but then his positions on social issues, defense, and foreign relations put one in mind of a conventional liberal and nothing more...
...A campaign of ideas...
...Why the solemnity...
...What he is is a mischiefmaker whose mischief is downright dangerous to those whose politics he claims to champion--namely, the pols of the center and of the left...
...The thing too often revolves around nothing more than petty complaints and hysterical premonitions...
...That's the romance, the excitement, of this camcourse, this is precisely what Anderson is: a conventional liberal, playing the time-honored role of liberal egghead and moralist for all it is worth...
...Here would be an act of political onanism, yet in committing such an act the ritualistic liberals would be acting in perfect character...
...In fact, it is just the kind of idea that would assure Anderson of a brisk and painful slaughtering on November 4, were a legion of magicians to intercede and wrest the Republican nomination for him...
...This is much to the Massachusetts Messiah's credit as an ideological pol if not a practical pol...
...The recently retired Prime Minister of Canada, Joe Clark, can testify to this...
...surely it is audacity Adapted from RET's Monday Column in the Washington Post...
...Republicans generally are out of sympathy with him, and he is out of sympathy with them, an issue he exploits very handsomely...
...mericans of seemly sentiment speak of him in the same hushed tones generally reserved for UNICEP', Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club...
...This is modern day liberalism in all its beauty, an exercise in self-gratification...
...U] ALTARS, With mullahs, popes, and ayatollahs on the move once again (dare one hope this spells an end to the misnamed Enlightenment...
...Nonetheless, Kennedy is the Left's legitimate candidate, 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 and he presents the Left's case most candidly and fully...
...His chances of becoming the Republican nominee are just a shade more promising than those of Harold Stassen, and his chances of becoming president are only marginally better...
...Alas, the candidate emits much music, all of it duty composed for organ--but ideas...
...He ought not to be denied political and financial support because of the fickleness of the Victorian Gent, whose enthusiasm has d i v e r t e d the Left to Anderson...
...When Anderson smilingly offers paign...
...The second-place showings occasionally conferred on Anderson by ritualistic liberals roaming into Republican primaries will not make him the paladin of the GOP...
...From the church door, so to speak, one is directed straight to HEW...
...The Beverly Hills boobs of liberal sensibility and their trendy kind all across the United States, its protectorates, and the isle of Majorca are sending their checks to Anderson...
...Today's liberal is inimical to most of the founding principles of liberalism...
...I believe," Anderson notified a Yale audience on March 6, "in the power of ideas...
...And so our so-called liberals cross the line and vote for him...
...THE TRAVELS OF PARSON ANDERSON Tom Wolfe, midst the drolleries and insights of his superb book, The Right Stuff, depicts the press metaphorically as the "Victorian Gent," the espouser of seemly sentiment...
...Shortly thereafter I made good my escape...
...Beyond his 50-cent gasoline tax, his ideas are modest, familiar, somewhat contradictory, and, in general, primly liberal...
...he is reverenced...
...Anderson espoused right-wing orthodoxy during the debacle of 1964...
...Obviously neither high-mindedness nor love of reason have had anything to do with their orgies for nearly a decade, maybe longer...
...Bush was the only candidate with a prayer of stopping Ronald Reagan, and Kennedy is the one candidate who has forthrightly of...
...C J n e Sunday 1 made my way up to the vast, incomplete, imitation-Gothic National Cathedral, a citadel of ecumenicism, where the clergymen are in general more eager to stress THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 5...
...This is hallucination...
...even the Victorian Gent might be moved to doubt...
...Heads were beginning to turn in my direction once again, with a great bobbing and nodd;ng of artificial cherries atop hats...
...Yet the Anderson bleep has suddenly filled the Victorian Gent with wholesome visions: Ronald Reagan is floundering in high seas, George Bush is going under--on comes the invincible Anderson of Illinois...
...Of course, he has presented the Left's ideas with the requisite sophistries, his favorite being to include the average taxpayer when he essays the hellish conditions forced upon us by the rich, while neglecting to mention that, when it comes time to soak the rich, the average taxpayer will get a thorough dunking, too...
...This spring the order is to whoop it up for the sermons of Parson Anderson...
...Yet how poor Teddy is suffering...
...he espouses goo-goo orthodoxy today, when even Jimmy Carter is starting to sound like Grover Cleveland...
...by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...itself...
...Sometimes I enter churches experimentally...
...After an awkward pause, the young man beside me evidently decided to grant me "observer status" and moved forward to usherout the next pew...
...Onanism has been at the heart of the liberal enterprise for some years...
...Imagine, here is the liberal worth}' devoted to tolerance, yet he fills his waking hours by demanding an end to smoking in public places, an ea~d to scientific inquiry into areas placed beyond the pale by his archbishops, the extinction of the term " M r s . , " and a thousand more importunities trivial and not so trivial...
...It is rather amazing that, at a time when so many reputedly wise pundits are speaking of America's rising conservative mood, many of the same pundits insist that Anderson is a superbly electable candidate...
...I wonder what Wolfe has made of the instantaneous eminence of candidate John Anderson, that vaguely clerical figure now wowing the Victorian Gent with poetry and pronunciamentoes on college campuses, in suburbs, in television studios~wherever Puritan sophisticates gather...
...Thanks to the votes Anderson's quixotic campaign diverted in Illinois, George Bush was mortally wounded, and Teddy Kennedy's war chest remained in astonishingly straitened condition...
...Well, I have removed my hat and scrutinized the corpus delicti...
...His reliquary contains essentially only one worthy of the fanfare we are hearing, to wit: Anderson f/avors a 50-cent tax on gasoline, the consequences of which would be, he insists, nothing less than miraculous, at home, abroad, everywhere...
...Nevertheless, the Victorian Gent insists that Anderson is waging "a campaign of ideas," a claim that gives the candidate pleasure, not to say exultation...
...For some time I have been telling people that I would happily return to the fold if only I could find a mass in Latin (no need to dwell here on the PULPITS, AND KNAVES unwisdom of translating the liturgy into humdrum vernacular) and did not have to sit through too many sermons on the theme of Social Justice...
...Now this idea may be absolutely copper-bottom...
...Ho ho ho...
...Anderson is not just well received by the press...
Vol. 13 • May 1980 • No. 5
