Editorial / Ramsey Clark, World Patriot
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
RAMSEY CLARK, WORLD PATRIOT tK.wrimes~ of America Conference"? Did someone say "Crimes of America"? Now where did that disheveled crowd of mediocre graduate students now running...
...The Wasbtngton Post columnist Joseph Kraft gave this sentiment suitably camouflaged expression when he referred to "Middle Americ a . " For obvious reasons it is considered bad form, not to mention bad politics, to allow this disdain to show through too blatantly...
...Of course, their sophistries have all been unhorsed by serious scholars like John Lewis Gaddis, but the books still pour forth for the credulous, and among the credulous are numbered thousands of envious and bewildered foreign students like the 60,000 or so Iranians who still attend our universities and who huff and puff about the reactionary Shah, even as the Holy Man cuts back their scholarships-scholarships the nefarious Shah gladly gave them notwithstanding their hostility to him...
...Even the extravagant rubric--Crimes of America--is not all that alien to our populist President...
...The unspoken truth of the hysteria that now seizes Iran and lies nascent throughout many of the nations of the Third World is that their anti-Americanism is made in America...
...The Institute for Policy Studies could organize it, and may already have, for that matter...
...Today the Republic is nearly as fertile a source of antiAmerican propaganda as the USSR, and these Yankee howlers are more celebrated and prosperous...
...Clark has appeared in Tehran to espouse his "belief that dialogue between all people is essential for understanding and respect...
...Truth to tell, the idea of convening a conference on the crimes of America could as easily have been hatched right here in America as anywhere else...
...The most avid audience in the world for antiAmerican tracts is right here between the Atlantic and the Pacific...
...Ramsey Clark's appearance in Tehran nails down my point...
...Now where did that disheveled crowd of mediocre graduate students now running progressive Iran get the idea to hold a highfalutin confabulation like that...
...He Has a Marketing Problem...
...Now the Hon...
...Our authors, accredited members of the Ministry of Mind Patrol, set off bravely for Las Vegas, which they found to be "a mirror of popular style and taste," but not entirely to their liking on that account...
...In case you had forgotten, the authors remind us that "money is America's standard unit of measurement," and Kaiser, who was the Was,Sington Post's correspondent in the Soviet Uhion (about whose citizens he wrote with a good deal more affection than he displays toward American~ in this book), apparently, cannot bring himself to write the word freedom without putting it into quotation marks...
...Mussolini began as a socialist full of populist whim-wham, but how many recall that in his last weeks, as the fascist state crumbled around him, he returned to the socialist fold, solemnly promising liberation and palmy days to the workers of Milan...
...American civilization still has its small triumphs even on the Holy Man's Islamic turf...
...There is an entire subculture comprising them and their dupes...
...This book, of course, is an idiot yawp, written by a man displaying little knowledge of either fascism or democracy...
...Mussolini was a quack...
...Were the conventioneers paying with their American Express cards or with Visa...
...America is abundant with goodygoodies like the Hon...
...prisons just to keep our government on its toes...
...It is rooted in colossal transnational corporations and complexes that help knit together a 'Free World' on which the sun never sets...
...Is Clark's dialogue honeyed enough to spring these chained Americans...
...Once ensconced in their oddly furnished apartment ("all blue, from the blue shag carpet to blue toilet paper"), they set about their task of interviewing the natives in such a way as to convey to us both the inferiority of their subjects and their own superiority...
...The Soviet Union, now the most brutal empire on earth, employs poison gas and other ghastly tools to continue its conquests...
...Deliciously enough, his prescription for the preservation of our rights could just as easily have been written by the Duce himself, though the Duce's hot air would be more amusing...
...So too are so many of those who would liberate us from exploitation in America today...
...Consider Friendly Fascism, a malodorous tome published last month...
...Clark might stop off in Hanoi to reestablish his dialogue with Hanoi's progressives...
...The more one studies this unpleasant book, the more one realizes that what really bothers the authors is the sheer, unforgivable independence of the middle class...
...They're not interTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 5...
...Many, perhaps a majority, of the nations on earth are ruled by petty jailers and grafters, yet we still publish nearly as many' discourses on American peccancy as on dieting and sexual hygiene...
...America is at one with the late Adolfs ideal state, author Bertram Gross warns his readers, because America's "emerging Big BusinessBig Government partnership has a global reach...
...Presumably they concluded that this was a risk well worth taking and perhaps negligible compared with the joy of conveying to the world their own superior status in life...
...Yet in America there remain nitwits and scoundrels obsessed with these American infamies: the CIA, the multinationals, the Rockefellers, Commie-baiting...
...The National Council of Churches could fund it, and doubtless many good capitalists would gladly cater it, dutifully attending to the logistics for the honored guests...
...Elsewhere they write: "Americans talk good, as a lot of them might put it...
...That is what makes Great American Dreams (Harper & Row) such an interesting book...
...Yet who doubts that on their chests were worn little plastic name tags whose large letters proclaimed: "HELLO, MY NAME IS...
...This kind of goof-ball jamboree has grown ever more frequent under our President's populist foreign policy, notwithstanding all the tommyrot about Andy Young's charm with the Third World...
...Undoubtedly, he and the Hon...
...Clark...
...Clark would have spent many pleasurable hours in Tehran, wearing thin wheat jeans and boots and fretting over bourgeois decadence...
...On his way home, I had hoped that the Hon...
...The sight of several hundred peppy conventioneers jetting into modern Tehran, unpacking their bags at the local Hilton, and swarming into the Hilton's climate-controlled conference hall, there to bloviate and pound fists on table tops of simulated wood and marble puts one in mind of nothing so much as Indianapolis in summertime, its streets full of Shriners...
...In fact, Las Vegas was "a monument to American classlessness--and if the truth be told--tastelessness...
...But their sneer at automobiles and fast food, although obligatory, somehow lacks originality: "There would be no mass American culture without automobiles, no familiar status ladder, nothing for the kids to aspire to-no McDonald's...
...Could they bring America to the same chaotic condition in which the Italian Messiah left Italy...
...These are elements of a new despotism . . . . I call it friendly fascism...
...The Third World enrages owe more to American civilization than merely our genius for conferences...
...they inquire sternly at one juncture...
...We are told that many of the participants swathed their heads in "red-checked scarves," revealing only, the whites of their skittish eyes...
...True, much of Southeast Asia is either a bone heap or a concentration camp...
...Why are so many Americans fat...
...Was this jamboree duly run through a Tehran Convention Bureau...
...And then there is this sample of their refined distaste: "A fat lady in a halter top and double-knit slacks stopped her younger, red-haired female companion, she with the explosion of curlers not quite hidden under a chiffon kerchief, and pointed at Robert Dolgin...
...indeed an undeservedly neglected one...
...I have recently returned from Paris, and twice in the past nine months friends in the French media have reminded me of the 30 or so Americans whom the North Vietnamese still retain in their Adapted from RET's Monday Column in the Washington Post...
...Its authors, Robert G. Kaiser, a reporter for the Washington Post, and Jon Lowell, a correspondent for Newsweek, have written up the Middle American hoi polloi with such gusto and candor that they risk being labelled snobs...
...This specimen of 1960s bromide could issue from the Wonderboy himself at any moment...
...Tom Betbell is The American Spectator's Washington editor...
...Kaiser and Lowell earn themselves a God-Is-Mocked citation for their chapter on religion, subtitled "God Isn't Dead...
...One can even imagine Jimmy, in the high fever of Campaign '80, blurting out such guff, American crimes are pondered very carefully amongst the forward lookers nowadays...
...And then they are off, jetting .thither to their respective Third World Utopias, there to roar to the yokels about the abominations of the affluent gringo and surreptitiously to overby R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...After all, Clark, who in 1972 made a similar appearance in Hanoi, was our President's first minister plenipotentiary to the Holy Man after the brave conquest of our embassy by his dirtynecked votaries...
...see their Coca-Cola concessions...
...In any event, we m~ust thank the'm for giving us a rare glimpse into the rather unwholesome mind-set that is today so characteristic of the governin.g classes and their news media patrolmen...
...His economic charlatanry, his grandiloquent blah, and his phenomenal energy for baiting the bourgeois colossus might have made 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 a very positive contribution to the Crimes of America conference, had he survived his sad political setbacks of yesteryear...
...Egad, run for your lives...
...WEARY OF THE LEISURE CLASS by Tom Bethell Contempt for the American middle class is a dominant motif in the ideology of the American governing class...
...One sees them being chauffeured back to Dulles International Airport, their bags laden with treasures from the Washington branches of Bloomingdale's and Neiman-Marcus...
...We all know that Mr...
...One can easily see White House speechwriters sitting over in the Executive Office Building and thinking to themselves, "Well, the Iranians do have a point...
Vol. 13 • August 1980 • No. 8
