Editorial/The Worst Book of the Year
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL THE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Have the eminent minds who dissect our time ever annotated and scrutinized the marvel that until very recently the great bulk of...
...How did the fascists take over...
...Why do they not call themselves fascists...
...it runs along like this for over 550 pages...
...One must even have edited Mr...
...Great haranguers like Hitler and Castro are noted for their ability to harangue on an essentially fallacious point for dozens of hours, but who recalls a line of their bilge...
...What is the uniform of our fascisti...
...One believes that people live in large cities merely out of thoughtlessness...
...Who is the Duce...
...Every page of Human Scale has a lunatic passage like the above...
...When did the putsch get under way...
...Have the eminent minds who dissect our time ever annotated and scrutinized the marvel that until very recently the great bulk of mankind's speculative thought was pretty much absorbed with aching feet, sore teeth, and allied miseries...
...Freed from the mundane miseries of his person, the yokel now often takes a college degree and settles down to a lifetime of worry over such matters as the imminent, irreversible poisoning of all life on this planet and the storm trooper potential inhering in the Fortune 500...
...Both have moved on to higher concerns...
...Most of these dreadful books are prominently listed on college bibliographies where they amplify the fears of wimpy college boys and gals, and where they fortify the cleverer students' assumption that the teacher is an ass...
...In other words they are everywhere- in giant corporations, giant bureaucracies, giant cities, giant buildings, everywhere...
...Friendly Fascism is not a pleasurable reading experience...
...Ask General Hannibal and his Carthaginians...
...Ask Rudolf Nureyev...
...I choose to think that they are quacks, though I shall not take issue with the charge that they are also nuts...
...During the 40 or so years that this book gestated in Professor Gross's cerebrum, he and his liberal coconspirators were apparently fervently engaged in the construction of the Liberal Paradiso...
...The first piece of catastrophist twaddle is Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America...
...He calls it "friendly fascism," for despite his high positions as Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Planning at Hunter College and Professor of Political Science at City University of New York, he is also every inch the super salesman...
...According to Professor Gross, there is an "emerging Big Business-Big Government partnership (that) has a global reach...
...Professor Gross is in the same boat...
...According to Mr...
...Perhaps I am trying to forget...
...More importantly, they are selling their propaganda to a multitude of inflamed half-wits...
...Sale's findings the giantists are behind paperback books that fall apart during the first reading, home hair dryers whose plastic knobs and hooks break off, window shades that never go all the way back up, plastic "sponges" that disintegrate in a week, rotary can-openers that rip and slip, kitchen towel racks that snap off after a month, ballpoint pens that run dry the second time you use them, charcoal lighting fluid that flickers away in moments, flashlight batteries that never work, dresses with buttons that fall off after the first wearing, costly towels that shred after a few washings, and toy trains that are in pieces by the day after Christmas...
...How any normal human being could read such a book and depart feeling informed I cannot say...
...Is there anything we can do about them...
...These are elements of a new despo* Formerly ' The Harold Robbins Award...
...Our laureates long for the times when yokels still lived under sod roofs, and, midst flies and staphylococci, waited for the dusty -foots.for the dusty -foots...
...It left me with a ringing in the ears...
...These are the catastrophists...
...He is proud to have been a "major architect" of the 1946 Employment Act and the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill...
...The other believes that 220 million Americans are the unsuspecting victims of a coup d'etat...
...The answers might be in this endless book...
...Here is an astounding truth: Education spreads, science advances, medicine banishes infectious illness, and capitalism forks over the goods-nonetheless, as many yokels as ever live in terror...
...Then again, they might not...
...Perhaps I forgot...
...Sale's book...
...Alack, now, with the Founding Fathers' edifice derelict and overgrown with such statist marijuana, the great architect has become unnerved...
...With the advance of the podiatrist's science, with the passing of the old guard in dentistry -the executioner mentality departing, the dental-hygiene mentality stepping in-there has come about a dramatic change in the topics of popular thought...
...Are they happy...
...Yet, whereas Professor Gross, if he is right, has probably lit out for Albania or some other land beyond the CIA's grasp, Mr...
...If our Coogler laureates and their customers have their way, popular thought will again be taken up with meditations on primitive miseries, for under them America would return to primitive times...
...Today they prosper...
...Where are our Nuremberg Rallies...
...They ruin Christmas and love BIGNESS...
...They work with con-sumerist groups, ecologists, pacifists, members of the Democratic National Committee-wherever there are simpletons who have any doubts whatsoever about modern society, there you will find a host of quacks feverishly assuring them that madness, enslavement, and doom are our present condition and that things will get worse...
...What is their next move...
...Gordon Coogler Award'' * for the Worst Book of the Year...
...Truth be known, it is very difficult from his garrulous besotted spiel to recall any memorable passages, so quickly is one diatribe replaced by another-all equally replete with error and dizzying contradiction...
...On the other hand it seems that giantists are even more pervasive than the smiling fascisti...
...We rename it this year "The J. Gordon Coogler Award" for obvious reasons...
...At any rate, today the quacks who prey on them are fully employed, ministering to lunatic anxieties of lush variety...
...Freed from confecting smelly ointments, the quack now sells the yokels propaganda to keep them anxious...
...Now this is not to say that giantists are very democratic or even very nice, but so far as I can judge from Human Scale they are not as political as friendly fascists...
...Sale has merely called his opponents "giantists," people who advocate that all Americans wear size 13 EEE shoes, regardless of need...
...Nor is Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, our other prize-winning effort, a reader's delight...
...No more does the yokel puzzle and contemplate his swollen peddles...
...Here is Tafel music for maniacs...
...No longer can the quack make a killing by selling him a jar of foul-smelling ointment...
...Without apologizing for the damage he has done or even acknowledging how the damage was achieved, he perceives that the American polity has become a scandalous menage a trois of Big Government, Big Interests, and Big Business...
...tism.'' And for some 400 pages he yammers along, gathering thousands of elements of Americana, trimming and embellishing them to accord with his idee fixe: friendly fascism...
...Assuming for the moment that these men are sincere-and it is a difficult assumption to entertain-we have here two authors who see no validity in the present whatsoever...
...We have here either two nuts or two quacks...
...For the South, her books have grown fewer- /She never was much given to literature...
...I doubt that they have, and yet a pair of sore dogs is no trivial matter...
...Would the brethren in the Kremlin be of any help...
...Quite possibly their angst is one of the eternal verities...
...Like Friendly Fascism, no element of Americana is left unused if it can be fitted into the author's idiot theme...
...In 1980 there were published two portentous tomes so prodigiously idiotic as to elicit the unprecedented recommendation from our distinguished panel of judges that both books share the coveted' 'J...
...He will be read by neurotics, but not even a fawning social scientist will ever be able to remember a line...
...Most have actually gained what passes for intellectual renown, though it is a renown that would have been impossible in days past when our system of higher education was not so vast and pervaded by hokum...
...Professor Gross is not telling, at least I do not recall his proffering these revelations...
...It is rooted in Colossal transnational corporations and complexes that help knit together a 'Free World' on which the sun never sets...
...Hurrying across a wide range of intellectual disciplines, the catastro-phists gather bogus facts and idiotic arguments to cut and paste into huge incondite books, which they then hawk to the hypochondriacs and neurotics of the land...
...Coogler (1865-1901), the illustrious poetaster, an unintentional humorist, awed Americans for years with volume upon volume of Purely Original Verse, from which we pluck: "Alas...
Vol. 14 • January 1981 • No. 1
