Journey to Nowhere: A New WorldTragedy
Kaplan, Howard
the sons of the bourgeoisie into the academy or the arts, also impeded the formation of "a counterelite and counterhegemony" by keeping the scions from piling million upon million through the...
...The sight of the American journalists' well-weathered briefcases causes him pain...
...then he destroys this thesis by stating that both world wars were really one war with the same cause...
...We begin with the apprehensive author zooming into Georgetown in late 1978...
...Send for free, illuatrated 40-page brochure H-80 Vantage Press, 516 W. 34 St...
...But the assumptions beneath democracy are historically, philosophically, and theologically, at best questionable...
...13.95 Three years after J onestown the Monday morning quarterbacking continues...
...During the course of his review, at page 32 of your publication, Mr...
...The courts of various jurisdictions have developed a large variety of limitations on the right to recover damages for emotional suffering, unaccompanied by any physical injury...
...every conceivable institution is fronted by the word "People's...
...Toward all parties Naipaul shows remarkable fairness--the man lets everyone have it...
...The voting machine perpetuates a far more pernicious superstition than the Holy Ampulla...
...Edelman v. Jordan [1974...
...My second point is a substantive qualm...
...The journey to nowhere is Naipaul's journey...
...Under his eye every object, every chance encounter, yields up meaning that the reporter purebreds miss...
...Such damages would normally include medical and other expenses of caring for the defective child and sometimes compensation for emotional suffering...
...And the Third World angle is what Shiva is pushing here part-time--another miracle, since everyone but Sbiva seems to forget that the Jonestown folly occurred in Guyana...
...Actually, most courts that have considered the question do allow damages to the parents of defective children whose defect is caused by some medical malpractice, including the doctor's failure to diagnose the defect and inform the parents of their right to choose an abortion...
...However, I have been unable to find any reported case of this sort...
...ESSEX CT06426USA .M~ CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 32) Ira case arose where despite the due care by the medical profession in transmitting the necessary warnings, parents made a conscious choice to proceed with a pregn a n c y , with full knowledge t h a t a seriously impMred infant would be born, that conscious choice would provide an i n t e r v e n i n g act of proximate c a u s e to preclude liability insofar as defendants other than the parents were concerned...
...Why did you not quit if you knew he was no good...
...In his 1914 essay, More notes that the nation which gave the world Nietzsche also gave it Marx...
...California residents add 6% sales tax...
...In the Golden State, Naipaul keeps the questions simple...
...Different ages have different names for the actors and different ideas for the pretexts...
...the evils remain the same, as does their consequence...
...Mayer sets out to prove that monarchy itself was the immediate cause of the Great War...
...For these he hustles off to California...
...On behalf of the College, it is requested that a correction be published stating that Mr...
...New authors welcomed...
...The idealism of democracy is a poor thing beside the idealism of monarchy, and this fact should humble us...
...Jones and the Comrade Leader, one of the world's ranking black moneybags, understood each other as only hucksters can...
...Jones...
...I was not aware of it when I wrote my review...
...We know that Communism is founded on a lie...
...Even THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 39 Relatives, they "have never denied that they took J o n e s ' s threat of a mass suicide seriously...
...James W. Huston is right about the Curlender case...
...Bishop's responses are somewhat difficult to interpret, but I think that generally he concedes that this is the explanation...
...They bear, therefore, no responsibility, only "accountability" before what Coriolanus called the beast of many heads...
...Name Address City ___State __Zip _ _ Q Check [ ~ Money Order $12.95 plus $1.55 shipping & handling...
...But 20 years later a political establishment that was the ancien r~gime's antithesis harnessed the same doctrine for the same ends...
...Questions of originality aside, however, Naipaul's judgments are necessary and correct...
...I wonder whether Naipaul knew how popular a sentiment this was here...
...t h e melodrama of the suicides" fails to lure him...
...Bishop was in error and that the American College of Trial Lawyers has not been engaged in lobbying so far as your publication is aware...
...Only romantics believe that the evils can be eradicated, or else revised into virtues...
...How litigious can society get...
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...Survivors and defectors jabber of their innocence until blue in the face, and it drives one crazy...
...I think the decision is wrong...
...Scheuer v. Rhodes [1974]) and allowed the imposition of attorneys' fees against state governments (Hutto v. Finney [1978...
...Under s u c h c i r c u m s t a n c e s , we s e e no sound public policy which should protect those parents from being answerable for t h e p a i n , s u f f e r i n g , and misery which they have wrought upon their offspring...
...This is not the kind of man, thank god, who squawks of conspiracies, cults, and the devil in Mr...
...With its People's this and People's that, its fairytales of racial chumminess and of green-thumb productivity, Guyana was already a king-sized Jonestown...
...Jim Jones controlled my mind (a real favorite...
...The College has never engaged in lobbying in any state on the issue of no-fauh legislation or any other issue . . . . I have written to Mr...
...Naipaul asks, and by "them" he means American blacks...
...Naipaul may be a novelist at heart, but he's not a cheap one...
...It remains to be seen what the California Supreme Court will do if there is an appeal, as I expect there will be...
...One of them, titled "Jonestown--A Model of Cooperation," describes the settlers as having "found themselves in a land of spectacular beauty, graceful trees and beautiful, friendly people of many races...
...My objection to cases like 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982...
...Yet the Trinidadian-born Naipaul wasn't really starting from scratch...
...Post OFFICE BOX 668~.M J'fX.J 5...
...Eliot pointed out, is really a doctrine of divine responsibility...
...Why did you quit...
...a London resident, he hadn't heard of People's Temple until the cyanide party two weeks before...
...Accompanied by his scribbling rivals, he does manage a once-over of the ghost town...
...we may say that monarchy is based on a myth...
...After knocking around the Bay Area awhile he voices the sentiment himself~with an air of telling us something new...
...Jurisdictions other than California do allow damages for "emotional distress" caused parents by the birth of a defective child, but California is certainly a leader in this area...
...What did you think of Jim Jones...
...In the end, "making the world safe for democracy" is as absurd a pretext for war as the Will to Power...
...Pius X refused to bless Franz Josef's cause...
...Monarchs may be the actors and instruments of evil, but "you would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more monarchs...
...Can we really accept Justice Holmes's facile characterization of the fundamental precepts of personal and political freedom as debatable assumptions of social science...
...After skirmishing with esties, Zen Buddhists, Male Libbers, Black Panthers, Save-theWhale maniacs, etc., he begins to see Jim Jones for the typical San Franciscan he was--a Midwestern refugee with a taste for raising consciousness...
...The rest is history...
...Christian kings have souls subject to damnation...
...The American College of Trial Lawyers is a professional association of lawyers skilled and experienced in the trial of cases, and membership in the College is by invitation only...
...But he avoids the easy porn of a suicide replay, insisting that the 900 bodies "obscure the real issues...
...Journey to Nowhere makes its appearance among a fresh batch o f " as told to" hack works and hard-core investigative accounts...
...Bishop about this matter and suggested that he had perhaps confused the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) with the American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL...
...Howard Kaplan is a free-lance writer living in Minneapolis...
...I am in agreement with some aspects of Mark S. Pulliam's point of view...
...But in neither case do I think that the Justices should use the Constitution to impose their personal views, economic or social, on legislatures...
...The difference between slavery and self-ownership, between tyranny of the majority and freedom, can never be debatable to men of principle and reason, the obfuscations of Legal Realism notwithstanding . . . . --Mark S. Pulliam Sepulveda, Cahfornia In the September 1981 issue of The American Spectator, Joseph W. Bishop, Jr., reviewed the book The Litigious Society byJethro K. Lieberman...
...New York, N.Y...
...The torrent of employment discrimination litigation is, in contrast, mainly a product of legislative zeal to rectify ever,) incident of real or imagined "unfairness" in society, even among private individuals so long as they are among the most disfavored group in Arherica: the employer...
...I t ' s a strange thing," says the waitress of Jonestown, "but not many people hear of that place till they went and kill themselves...
...The fault lies in individuals, not institutions...
...Naipaul, whose first two books were novels, prowls with a novelist's instincts even in his nonfiction...
...His only plans are to see what he can see...
...Why should courts abdicate review of economic legislation-prompted by hostile, envious, or simply misguided majorities--if property rights are an indispensable component of personal freedom...
...indeed, it's the most important question posed byJonestown...
...in their place are three socialist regimes and eight Communist dictatorships...
...Rumors of CIA conspiracies are just so many red herrings...
...He dips into the Guyana Chronicle and reads us post-Jonestown news...
...bureaucrats sign their dispatches "Yours cooperatively...
...In the egregious Professor Mayer we observe the representative of one side of the heresy trying to analyze a situation induced by the school of the opposite extreme...
...There's a sympathetic visit to Opposition headquarters, and a joyless one to a golf course haunted by what's left of the Guyanese middle class--"ruined people in a ruined setting, seeking after pleasure which could no longer be found, pretending to enjoy themselves...
...A romantic creed of nationalism which glorified strength for its own sake triumphed over traditional morality, which would have found the Central Powers on the unjust side...
...This Eliot meant when he said they " a r e not men enough to be damned...
...Of all the J onestown commentators only Naipaul sticks to the main issue with any passion...
...Why did you join...
...As for the Concerned On checking in at the Pegasus, Georgetown's finest, Naipaul hangs loose in the lobby...
...Liberal American politicians, encouraging social democrats and dictating plebiscites in defeated countries, as well as acquiescing to the captivity of Eastern Europe, seem personally implicated...
...Because he follows world politics like 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 a spectator sport, he already knows what a loser of a place it is...
...the Burger Court, despite a largely undeserved reputation as a "conservative" coalition, has single-handedly resurrected the archaic "Ku Klux Klan Act" (the Civil Rights Act of 1871) in a series of decisions which, inter alia, abrogated existing immunity doctrines (Monell v. New York Department o f Social Services [1978...
...but creators of havoc in the world of ideas must not be tolerated...
...Burke observed that human vices are the cause of great public evils...
...They feared it, and yet, by their words and actions, they helped create the conditions in which it could take place...
...I don't know what Professor Bishop was referring to when he cited the "ultra-conservative" Supreme Court of long ago which struck down "legislative efforts to improve the conditions of labor...
...or $8.50 (elsewhere) for a one-year / subscription, starting with the current issue, 1 Money back if not pleased...
...Equating economic liberties to the half-baked privacy/autonomy theories of Griswold v. Conn...
...and Roe v. Wade unjustly trivializes the former while dignifying the latter . . . . Responsible conservatives must, I submit, address the New Deal/New Class animosity toward freedom of contract with a critical eye...
...He's given a fresh reminder when the Guyanese on board his flight plunder the bathroom of the Charmin...
...They made a great deal of it, using it to draw attention to themselves and their campaign...
...Many of these are the same people--the Temple's educated white elite--whose reason for joining up in the first place was, by their own admission, liberal guilt...
...Democratic politicians, though they promise never to tell a lie, do not claim to have souls...
...I assume that he was joining his collectivist colleagues in their standard denunciation of " t h e discredited Lochner e r a . " It disturbs me to hear conservative legal scholars (especially those as eminent as Professors Bishop and Karl O'Lessker [March 1981]) voice blanket objections to the judicial treatment of economic and property rights as bona fide constitutional liberties...
...Guyana's idea of cooperative socialism is particularly impressive: The chief of state dons a dashiki and calls himself Comrade Leader...
...Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer [1976...
...Meanwhile, back in the States, we were thinking, Figures, they're from California...
...Few will care if Mayer's kind seek academic tenure by beating dead horses...
...Naipaul, have been bringing us the news from Third World hellholes in their fiction and nonfiction...
...The two clashing impulses of romanticism, egoism and humanitarian sympathy, ultimately divided into mutually exclusive philosophies, though both were equally relativistic and antinomian: Communism and the creed of the Superman...
...Over the years he and his big brother, V.S...
...or, I did his bidding but I always distrusted him (see the Nuremberg Trials...
...This mindless drive for " f a i r n e s s " in all things (probably a variant of the egalitarianism/envy that Lino Graglia lampooned so effectively in these pages not long ago [May 1981]), is manifest in the present campaign for federal reparation on behalf of the West coast Japanese-Americans who were interned (after the attack on Pearl Harbor) in World War II...
...In addition to the explosion of products liability, medical malpractice, corporate/securities, and habeas corpus actions in recent years, one must include the now-ubiquitous federal "civil rights" lawsuits against govvernmental entities under (Title 42, United States Code) section 1983 and the blight of "employment discrimination" causes of action created by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and their multifarious state law counterparts...
...At first he feels like backing out, not because he has to "solve" 900 deaths, but because he has to set foot into the Cooperative Socialist Republic (Guyana's tag since 1970...
...The result...
...One can sense at a certain level," Naipaul writes of Jones, "his raging hatred of the blacks whose god he claimed to be...
...What will he write about...
...The first literary man to tackle Jonestown, he's turned this readymade horror tale into the occasion for a travel book heavy on the sarcasm...
...In exchange for favors --you name it--the Guyanese government left Jonestown to its own devices...
...Almost as impressive are Guyana's vaunted racial harmony and communal farming: The ruling party is black, the Opposition is Indian, and everyone goes hungry...
...A more credible Princetonian, Paul Elmer More, wrote an essay in November 1914 called "The Philosophy of the War," in which he cited "Nietzscheism and Treitschkeism" as the paramount excuses for German aggression...
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...Naipaul's first reaction on hearing of the massacre was something like, Well, that's Guyana for you...
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...Alston Jenning s, president American College of Trial Lawyers Little Rock, Arkansas Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...This romantic creed is the slender fiber which supported Nazism--an anti-aristocratic movement setting out to institute national socialism before conquest by international socialism...
...I think that the framers of the Bill of Rights intended to give as much protection to property and economic freedom as to personal freedom...
...No wonder Jones picked Guyana for the site of his utopia...
...The simple-minded answers are of a piece...
...JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: A NEW WORLD TRAGEDY Shiva Naipaul / Simon & Schuster Inc...
...Occasionally he goes poking around town...
...He stuffs his pockets with glossy brochures...
...Human ideals are only the pretexts...
...Jim Jones, the self-professed Stalin-lover, tortured his black disciples with news of impending reprisals from Nazis and the KKK...
...What Mayer calls the "Thirty Years War of the twentieth century" resulted in the fall of nine European thrones...
...Allow 6 weeks, i ]~]~ ]~ A ~I"T EA...
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...The world might be quite different today, had the place of Wilson and Roosevelt been filled by men who understood the latent virtue of prescriptive institutions...
...There Howard Kaplan opportun, ity in America...
...488) The implications of this kind of thinking are staggering, but such thought processes would lead nowhere were there no Supreme Court endorsement of abortion . . . . --James W. Huston Charlottesville, Virginia I thoroughly enjoyed Professor Joseph W. Bishop's review of The Litigious Society (September 1981), but offer two further observations...
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...t tWhat~tV]" is to be done with them...
...replies: Like Robert K. Olsen, I have heard of clergymen being sued, but to the best of my knowledge, only for "malpractice" in their capacities as marital counsellors, etc...
...For the doctrine of divine right, as T.S...
...It is the book's most important question...
...Bishop made the statement in connection with a discussion of no-fault legislation that " i n all but one or two states the American College of Trial Lawyers and similar organizations (very powerful lobbies, for lawyers are grossly over-represented in most legislatures) have managed either to defeat or emasculate such bills...
...Mayer mentions the paradox of the aristocracy, which Nietzsche excoriated as " d e c a d e n t , " taking up Nietzscheism as a goad to drive the masses into fighting its war...
...Q Compared with the competition, Naipaul's effort is a miracle of imagination...
...Perhaps this couldn't be helped: Naipaul had his British readers to think of (Journey came out in late 1980 in England under the title Black and White), and I trust his vision of California was a revelation to them...
...the sons of the bourgeoisie into the academy or the arts, also impeded the formation of "a counterelite and counterhegemony" by keeping the scions from piling million upon million through the second generation...
...Utter irrelevance...
...Well, the journalists for starters, the Pegasus itself, a hotel waitress...
...Now guilt of any kind is unknown to them...
...Both were the ugly spawn of the original romantic heresy which he and colleague Irving Babbitt found personified in Rousseau...
...a hatred so deep-seated, so tormenting that, in its fury, it turned itself inside out and called itself Love...
...So,The City (and, by association, the rest of America) takes the Jonestown rap along with Guyana...
...The section 1983 crisis is a wholly self-inflicted one...
Vol. 15 • January 1982 • No. 1
