Editorial / The Voice Grows Louder
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
The American Spectator is now fifteen years old and so is a period of unparalleled American decline in culture and in potitics~ There you have it: Ideas do, indeed, have consequences. This...
...It was secure and decorous in its redoubts on campus and in government bureaucracies...
...He writes a weekly column for the Washington Post, syndicated nationally by King Features...
...But I do not wish to suggest that Mr...
...Did he realize that politics would be jammed into our most intimate activities...
...Contented customers, happy Rotarians, Methodists en route to barbecue, irate taxpayers, CIA agents who are morally upright and vacationing with their families in Naples, Florida, are not the stuff of media intercourse...
...My guess is that today hardly a goody4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 goody Liberal exists who does not hear a voice in the back of his skull whispering "You are a little creep...
...I clearly understood, then, that Americans were awaiting only my instructions and advice...
...Liberals have been as impotent at turning back left.wing fanaticism as the nudists have been at influencing the fur industry...
...In fact (as I can attest) he has just been struck by a horrible wave of doubt...
...Listening to his gabble reminded me of what we have witnessed for over a decade: the high-minded Liberal stepping into the breach (Vietnam, presidential leadership, education, etc...
...Liberal students of the Danger On The Right have studiously avoided reporting the news, but The American Spectator grows withevery year...
...I f our Liberals think they suffered during McCarthyism I wince to think of how they are going to feel in the future...
...There follows a period of unaccustomed silence, lasting for several weeks...
...the r e a d e r s and writers of The American Spectator cheerfully oppose these louts...
...On television we see :the talking heads consulting with Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda, Ed Asner, Gloria Steinem--people so morbid that it is prudent to conclude that they do not actually exist...
...We have brought together a large number of those liberals who could endure the voice in their skulls no longer...
...Malcont e n t s shout oaths...
...Even in the humanities, college profs lecture on bugaboos once credible only to cranks...
...Americans, one had been told many times, were childlike, in addition to being seriously deficient in c u l t u r e . Still, as a r e s u l t of abundant n a t u r a l r e s o u r c e s , they were prosperous beyond measure, and generous to a fault...
...In his eyes the American military, the American government, American business, American labor, traditional theology, were discredited long ago...
...If he stays on in the country much longer than t h a t , t h e r e is a good by Tom Bethell chance that he will end up defending it against its numerous detractors, mostly homegrown...
...my passport was British, and my credentials were excellent...
...Moreover, one sensed that they knew t h e i r place, which was subordinate to that of an Englishman...
...It's quite a relief to me now that I cannot remember a single thing that I then said...
...They are egged on from the word go...
...Hostesses galore will scribble your phone 'number down...
...What has been going on since the mid1960s is that Liberals have allowed authority to drain from all our cultural and political institutions...
...The Liberal grows earnest...
...If one would only t a k e the time to exp!ain, patiently...
...CIA agents and tycoons, working their devious wills upon the average Joe...
...wholesome homosexuals smilingly coming down from the cross...
...Orwell had it right, but did he realize how far the politicization of life was going to go...
...There are always exceptions, an example being the left-wing writer Alexander Cockburn...
...Over the next fifteen years the little voices in the yahoos" skulls are going to get louder...
...The only problem is that Bishop Armstrong rejects the counsel of all those authorities that traditionally preside over these matters...
...For f i f t e e n years The American Spectator has been trying to amplify this voice...
...This is his historical patrimony...
...I s there a prototype for any of these esoteries anywhere in recorded his: tory...
...What is democracy, crime, liberty, art...
...A perfect specimen of the true blue Liberal is Bishop James Armstrong, mellifluous potentate of the National Council of Churches...
...Undoubtedly, however, I e n l i g h t e n e d my hosts with some profound ruminations on the topic of billboards and their proliferation, the ubiquity of gasoline stations, the pre-pacl~aging of food, and in fact all of life, and various other observations suitable for inclusion in a Bill Moyers commentary...
...We know that we are the party of liberty and civilized values...
...The system works...
...Then they will fall silent...
...Furthermore...
...They have become the third wave of totalitarian brutes to threaten liberty and Western values in this c e n t u r y , and all t h e i r prot e s t s against such b~tes noires as the Moral Majority amount to so much picklewash against this colossal fact...
...simply, and clearly, the various ways in which t h e i r country could be improved, why, then they would be overwhelmingly grateful...
...On all the large issues of the day he assured Buckley that he shared a statesman's concern: strong military, human rights, prosperity, spiritual wholesomeness, etc., etc...
...begins to preach within five minutes of stepping off the boat...
...Those outside are yahoos...
...This cultural and political deterioration has not greatly corrupted the Republic's common folk, though the welfare teat and the Zeitgeist's mephitis have transformed some among the lower orders into veritable invalids...
...You have just arrived in America and you wish to be lionized at Manhattan p a r t i e s ? Then tell the natives how backward they are...
...Journalism is equally as decadent...
...Ask an orangutan...
...Cockburn or anyone else is motivated by such base considerations...
...Think of it: Our major media features godlike feminists coolly overturning four thousand years of convention and biology...
...who has preferred to remain in the missionary position and has found it much to his taste...
...The American Spectator's distinctive position in American intellectual life is that it has been the journal where old Liberals joined without rancor with conservatives and libertarians...
...Utopians call for reform...
...It was the first magazine where neoconservatives and conservatives cohabited...
...What is a man...
...And above it all there is the sober insistent exhortation for new priorities and new initiatives...
...No Englishman in his right mind would dare to speak comparably to the French about France, even though he might well feel more critically disposed toward Franc than America...
...Yet when the challenge came from the Left there was dialogue...
...this point is missed only by morons and slippery Liberal scholars like Peter Steinfels whose bogus studies of the nonLiberal intellectual ferment have been essays in damage control...
...What is a woman...
...His most recent book is Public Nuisances...
...The great journalistic hopes of the Liberal, all funded by old and lavish wealth, a p p e a r to much fanfare then collapse, but The American Spectator endures...
...I thanked the insolent man for his advice, with the mental note that I should by now be giving it, not receiving it...
...Or, rather, tell the assembled tribe how deplorable "Middle America" is...
...These are the exhortations of the clinically insane, and in short order the Liberal will adopt them as his very own...
...For most modern Liberals reality has no objective meaning...
...MISSION TO AMERICA I t was twenty years ago this autumn that I arrived in the United States...
...and bringing everything to confusion...
...There is diversity under our roof and the crowd grows larger all the time...
...The voice does not lie...
...Most editorials are the utmost bulsh...
...Well, let me say it here and R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Has anything he has been saying in the past six months made any sense at all...
...All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia...
...Our circulation, once free and numbering only a few thousand, has increased to a paid circulation of over forty thousand...
...The rise of The American Spectator and the decline of Liberalism is no coincidence...
...is editor-inchief of The American Spectator, a position he has held since founding the magazine in 1967...
...The so-called Liberals have created a wholly politicized fantasy world and slammed it down hard on all of us...
...Thirty-six years ago in "Politics and the English Language" George Orwell wrote that "In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics...
...Conversely, in the media and on campus reality is almost never considered...
...What really amazes me, looking back on that period twenty years ago, is that so many Americans I met not only tolerated my rude remarks, but eagerly elicited them, enjoyed them, agreed with them, and pressed me for even more detailed indictments...
...Your average Englishman not only Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...In waging the battle of ideas they have rarely been honorable, and they have usually been quite shockingly deceitful...
...So are college campuses...
...For fifteen years the battle has gone thus: As a hubbub arises stage right, the goody-goody Liberal dutifully averts his gaze...
...Has anyone ever seen Ralph Nader in a restaurant or walking his dog...
...Recently he displayed the Liberal's habit of mind in a gruesome performance on "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley, Jr...
...As the Queen Elizabeth was nudged by tugs into the New York dock, and i gazed out at the s t a t e l y skyline, a crew-cut American at my elbow remarked that I would not have to worry about Red Indians shooting arrows at me as I set foot on the pier, nor were the skyscrapers in imminent danger of falling down, should I decide to take a stroll through Manhattan...
...And that of course is the main reason why newly arrived Englishmen are inclined to behave the way they do...
...Any challenge to its authority from the Right was slammed down with righteous fury...
...Moreover we have not gathered together merely the old-line conservatives and libertarians...
...Rather, it has corrupted our elites, especially our intellectual elites, whose members have slavishly laid down their hauteur and turned themselves into just plain yahoos, albeit sexless, infantile, and terrified by the spooky dogmas of a grotesque fundamentalist religion, Liberalism manque...
...I believe we have been successful...
...Well...
...To give him his due, he is also likely to come to his senses before too many months have passed...
...Today's Liberal has descended into mere inanity...
...He is incapable of defining the most fundamental matters...
...Yet, they deserve it...
...No wonder The American Spectator's rise and Liberalism's decline have not been widely noted...
...After all, we were already tied up alongside the jetty...
...Currently he is at work on a book about the Carter grandeur...
...What relief...
...Even Galbraith hears the voice...
...He cocks his ear to the left, and from that directionthe din grows ever more furious...
...Investigative reporters now probe ageless fantasies more properly found in the domain of the he-man and true confession pulps...
...The reason he THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 5...
...Quacks trumpet snake oil...
...Missionary work lay ahead...
...There, pseudo-studies, instructing women on their plumbing and everyone else on bizarreries too numerous to mention, have overwhelmed the liberal arts...
...It is God's will...
...When this magafine was founded by college students driven by premonitions that left-wing radicalism was not so auspicious as fhe profs assumed, Liberalism was the regnant orthodoxy of our culture...
...Not three months earlier I had graduated from a famous British university with a Bachelor of Arts degree...
...Within about six months he may frequently be seen in a pensive posture, staring down at the sidewalk with pursed lips gripped between thumb and forefinger, looking for all the world like someone who has absent-mindedly forgotten one of his p o s s e s s i o n s , and is trying to remember where...
...So I set about my missionary task with enthusiasm...
...Now the simultaneity of America's cultural decline and The American Spectator's growth is not gomething you are apt to read about in the New York Times or any other forum of Liberal orthodoxy, but then the enthusiasms boomed in those provinces and the personalities addressed there increasingly bear very little semblance to the real world...
...Televisiouland is a fantasy realm...
Vol. 15 • December 1982 • No. 12
