Capitol Ideas/Phrase Mating

...How about offering the players chauffeur-driven limousines to the ballpark...

...I think he actually believes that if "he or she" appears in print frequently enough then the glorious day will arrive when babes emerge from the womb with genitalia 5 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1981 as interchangeable as pronouns...

...semantic world has a tangible, external reality...

...Similarly, it is an odd budget cut that is billions higher .. . Before this was published, the copy editor suggested to me that "wife" be changed to "spouse"not, I hasten to add, in any spirit of dogmatic allegiance or ideological solidarity with the feminist cause, but simply, as she wearily explained to me on the telephone, to prevent the hail of angry feminist missives that inevitably would come flying airmail into Harper's offices...

...On the other hand, the existence of a virginal radical feminist, who has never in her life so much as seen the Pill, would entirely disprove my thesis...

...George F. Will would have it...

...Those with children who doubt this may reconsider their position if they will only imagine the following: You have a teenage son and daughter, both are out on "dates," both are late returning home...

...The phrase-mating internationalists naturally spend a good deal of time meeting other people, and thus sustain in themselves the illusion that they live in the real world...

...I thought about this and eventually decided that I had already seen too much truckling, and too many white flags of surrender run submissively up various editorial flagpoles-"he or she," "congressperson," etc...

...So they said yes, many of them, and many of them got screwed as a result...

...By way of example, turn back to almost any issue of the New Republic edited by Michael Kinsley...

...And there are many other profound inequalities associated with Sex, which I won't go into...

...Ball, Geyelin, and a small army of like-minded professors, have found that it is possible to make a decent living by trotting out a rather limited repertoire of wisesounding phrases with overtones of a laboriously acquired expertise"peace process," "initiative," "accord," and so on-and it is not long before they start believing that this Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington editor...

...Writing about international affairs has always struck me as being more than normally fraudulent...

...I know you are looking forward to writing, and it is always a pleasure to hear from you...

...Certainly their behavior this summer has been piggish...

...Since it was now simply something that felt nice, and had nothing to do with procreation, how could any rational, humanistic, twentieth-century person claim that anyone was being disadvantaged by it...

...It is Sex, the ultimate expression of inequality between men and women...

...The problem is that they meet mostly with other people exactly like themselves, more often than not at the United Nations or some other such carefully constructed theater of delusion, the function of which is to benefit its occupants...

...And it is a great mistake to imagine that it is on the wane, as some seem to think...

...Would manage ment in any other labor dispute expect such a gift...

...John Lukacs made this point very well in his recent excellent article, "Easter in Warsaw," in National Review...

...He can parley with a preposition, argue with an adverb, joust with a gerund...

...What brings Ameri cans out to the ballpark is the spectacle of animals...

...When sex, as in pre-Pill days, very likely resulted in pregnancy, or could reasonably be expected to do so, and abortions weren't so easy to get either, then men as a rule behaved chivalrously and respectfully toward women...

...But I don't think he knows a great deal about what goes on beyond the confines of his briefcase...

...Feminist attitudes that seemed extreme in the sixties...

...Tom Wolfe got this exactly right when he pointed out that the isolated howls of the 1960s became the "background noise" of the seventies...

...Ellen Willis had a very long article in the Village Voice addressing this subject recently...

...If there are any such feminists, do drop me a line won't you...

...There was considerable social pressure for them to do so...

...If the woman became pregnan-t (it was far less likely to happen to the man), the man was expected to "do the decent thing" and marry her...

...The noblest of the animals are, of course, on the field...

...have Tnot disappeared...

...The egalitarian ideology of today's feminists is a reaction to something that happened earlier, and unless I'm much mistaken that something was the Pill...

...I speak of the owners, many of whom are apparently quite piggish...

...Are you not more solicitous for your daughter...

...and provoked a strike by trying to renege on their player compensation agreement...

...Some feminists might even partially agree with this analysis, but others will notice the tremendous heresy at the center of it...

...The Israelis, with their brief and yet ancient history, are realistic enough to understand that all the diplomatic initiatives, peace accords, treaties, dialogues, negotiations, and quiet diplomacies in the world cannot parse away the hatreds and enmities that boil inside the human heart...

...In one of them I was excoriated in characteristically Marxist terminology as a "lackey...

...So I demurred, and the passage remained unchanged...

...But, as things stand, the Pill has indeed given birth, and a grizzly offspring it is: the Women's Movement...

...The Pill had the devastating effect of breaking down, in a very few years, the elaborate and precarious ritual of premarital behavior between the sexes...

...Can you beat it...

...George Ball is not without his skills...

...Can anyone doubt that wives really do most of the shopping, by the way...

...The feminists, so smitten have they been by the general idea of liberation, accepted the Playboy philosophy of Hugh Hefner...

...I gather that there are factions within the women's liberation movement that now repudiate the idea of sexual liberation...

...Now we have discovered that there are also animals amongst the management...

...and into which only the most gullible of young ladies could be expected to fall...

...Looking back over the past 20 years, the really amazing thing is that the feminists have actually embraced the idea of sexual liberation-the very trap that had been constructed by scheming males with lust and nothing else on their minds...

...the most amusing are rioting in the grandstands, pouring beer on each other's tee shirts, braying at the undertaker behind home plate, and otherwise comporting themselves in ways that are marginally criminal...

...At first, a few years ago, I thought it might be comparable to one of those irrational medieval crazes that occasionally swept through Europe, or perhaps something on the order of the tulip mania that temporarily unhinged the Dutch in the seventeenth century...

...They imagine that the real emotions of love, fear, hatred, hope, and envy that animate people can somehow be transformed by syntax, or brought into more harmonious relationship by a mere show of hands...

...I have no doubt that this "double standard" is realistic, however...

...They have built up a formidable strike fund by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...The act of procreation is a partnership which can take about a minute of a man's time, but must take nine months of a woman's time...

...The main problem with people like George Ball, an eminent purveyor of this kind of thing, and a number of newspapermen, of whom Philip Geyelin of the Washington Post is characteristic, is that they live in a wholly paper world, the dimensions of which do not exceed a standardsized briefcase...

...But feminism, I fear, is more than a fad...

...As recompense they offer the players nothing...

...although with some of them it would take a year or two or three to discover the second sense in which they had been screwed...

...A few months ago I wrote in a by Tom Bethell Harper's magazine article about budget cuts: If your wife were to come home with assorted packages under her arm, claim ing that she had just saved you money by foregoing even more expensive pur chases, you would probably think this was an odd way of getting richer...

...George Ball, I notice, writes in all seriousness about "international rules," as though they-really existed outside the imagination of deluded diplomats...

...they are simply taken for granted today...

...It isn't "equal pay for equal work," or affirmative action, or any of the other items on the egalitarian agenda...

...ANIMAL RIGHTS As the baseball strike lengthens and our national despair grows, let us never forget that what brings most of us out to the great baseball pastures of the major leagues is something more than ancient ritual or starspangled existentialism, as the learned and profound Dr...

...turning females into feminists, thence into radicals, finally causing some to "pupate" into the Hive of collectivism, wherein they will spend the rest of their lives as identical and interchangeable worker bees of socialism, buzzing angrily about the stage of life, railing against reality, and forever, endlessly, trying to transform it (as they themselves were transformed) into something unnatural...

...The characteristic feature of those who toil away with abstract nouns at places like the United Nations is that they believe there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved by rewording a communique or rewriting a resolution...

...Well, it turned out the copy editor was right because the epistles from the feminists arrived as predicted...

...PHRASE MATING A s I write, there is still a certain amount of distant rumbling, as of a receding thunderstorm, in the wake of the Israeli raid on the French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad...

...With children no longer a necessary consequence, why not indulge in it...

...Not that he is truckling to anyone, of course...

...Paul, "that recompense of their error which was meet...

...Anyway, I've tried to think a little about this weird business of feminism which clearly is one of the most militant, unquestioned, and unopposed dogmas of our day...

...0 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1981...

...Sex therefore became a "free" good...

...Implicit in what I am saying is the belief that sexual promiscuity is much more damaging to women than it is to men...

...The truth, of course, is that it is a world inhabited by abstract nouns, passive verbs, participial phrases, and gents in pinstriped suits...

...receiving in themselves," in the words of St...

...If I am correct, the Movement will be with us as long as technology survives, unless the Food and Drug Administration steps in and bans the Pill...

...And to feminists in general, I say, do get in touch...

...But the cries of alarm now that we have one less atom-bomb manufactory to worry about strike me as being quite exceptionally absurd...

...Another tried to argue that she could hardly be expected to understand what I had written because she was a woman and therefore didn't have a wife...

...As a result women didn't "get screwed" so often...

...How (continued on page 43) C A P I T O L I D E A S...

...here is something-and we must determine what it is-some new element in the social tapestry that has unleashed and sustained this feminine rage...

...Women at that point began to find it much more difficult to come up with persuasive reasons to say "No" to persistent males...

...But with the advent of the Pill, there no longer seemed to be any such thing as "disadvantage" connected with the sex act...

...After years of lavishly bidding up the value of their players they now rebel...

...Is it not highly significant that this verb, and a rather more forthright one in the same vein, use sexual intercourse as a metaphor to establish the idea that someone has been taken advantage of...

...The key to this whole horrible mystery, surely, is Sex...

...I read it, but couldn't understand a word, so abstruse were her arguments...