Editorial / The Worst Book of the Year
Tyrrell, R.Emmett Jr.
E D I T 0 R I A L THE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. I f the fierce disciples of the Moral Majority ever work their wicked will upon the intelligentsia of the great Republic,...
...You've s t i l l got .you inside you, )ou beticve t h a t ? " Well, of course, she believed it...
...Summit Books...
...In our age, basic stupidity has replaced talent and learning as the engine for intellectual achievement...
...Her solution is a "second s'tage" that comes down smartly in favor of "the choice to have babies...
...This y e a r ' s J . Gordon Coogler Award" for the worst work of fiction goes to John Irving for The Hotel New Hampshire.t The Coogler laureate for nonfiction is Betty Friedan, authoress of 7;be Second ,Dage.* Both o f t h e s e writers draw their crcdenda from the same conventicles ~ THE J. 'GORDON COOGLER AWARD [~ "Ttae Hotel New Hampshire ~ R by John Irving ~l~ The Second Stage ~ , by Betty Friedan b where hermaphroditic men mince about with dyspeptic J a n e s and where credulous New Age Liberals pay the bills--usually with the taxpayers' money...
...She now agrees that careers~even o n Wall Street, e-oen on a garbage truck, even at Harvard--are not paradise...
...Sometimes he is the Joyce of his day, impatient with injustice, cruelty, and fuddy-duddies, tapping out bold roars that sound hke the bold roars of a Grace Metalious...
...In an adjacent New York Times column, David Binder in Washington compounded the problem by describing Wojciech Jaruzelski as "Poland's soldier-leader...
...This y e a r ' s Coogler laureates are characteristic of their time...
...Friedan has discerned " t h a t core of women's personhood that is fulfilled through love, nurture, home...
...Mr...
...It is hard to resist the conclusion that "dictator" is a term reserved exclusively for allies of the United States...
...The immensities they all ponder are the vagaries of imbeciles...
...The Hotel New Hamp~ shire's obligatory godlike gal has just been gang taped by villainous prep: pies (that is correct, by preppies...
...Why not "military dictator," the epithet so frequently attached to Chile's Gen...
...They hope only for e u t h a n a s i a - - a painless death...
...Let us take a look at some of the rhetorical nuances and opinions express-ed in our leading newspapers in the few days following the military intervention...
...I do not believe that she could have achieved so much had she not been so invincibly stupid through all these years...
...As far as I know, you will find no reference to "the Polish revolution" in our leading newspapers during the 1980-81 period...
...That she and Irving should be ushered into the Coogler limelight, then, is eminently appropriate...
...Now her bugaboo is "the feminist m y s t i q u e , " a " r e a c t i v e mystique" whose aversion to family life played right into the hands of Ronald Reagan and "the far right...
...The plangent stupidity of this egregious pest, then, is not unfamiliar...
...That she w a s - - a s Anne Crutcher points out in these pages~asked to lecture at the United States Military Academy against manliness and on behalf of an army populated by "sensitive and yearning and vulnera b l e " George Pattons is but an indication of how far this doltishness has been allowed to travel in modern America...
...She has spoken to an en, tire generation of young women and left them miserable, filling housewives with doubt and embarrassment while sending the p r o f e s s i o n a l gals out to scrimmage for t h e i r daily grub...
...Pinochet...
...If possible, he is even more stupid than Betty...
...Irving went to Exeter, so he knows) and rescued by the obligatory godlike blacks...
...The claptrap published in Moscow at least hearkens back to the mind of an interesting crank...
...A prize for any reader who can spot an instance of a Soviet bloc dictator labeled as such...
...Given a bit more intelligence, he would have reread his first novel and shot himself...
...She has no more bugs in her coco than any of the other philo sophes who write those moronic books about body language and future shock and the rights of puppy dogs...
...I t ' s not you they touch when they touch you that way...
...Such commentators view the world as occupied by one very dangerous beast, the Soviet bear, who never...
...When someone touches you and you d o n ' t want to be touched, t h a t ' s not r e a l l y heeng touchcd--you g o t to believe me...
...Therefore it defies rhetorical etiquette to use it to characterize a diminution of such power (which is what Solidarity has tried to achieve), however "revolutionary" such a diminution might be...
...Will illumination cease without the Puritanical pontifications filling the nonfiction publishers lists...
...On Monday, December 14, Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham, who was in Poland at the time, reported from Warsaw that there was "a military council now ruling Poland...
...theless will eat us last if we are nice to it and don't provoke it too much...
...In nonfiction the theses are tlae fanciful delusions of fanatics, liberated from reticence by their own stupidity...
...and "Songbird of the Saluda...
...O 0 4 Q 6 ~ m * . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Q ~ O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ g ~ . . . . . . 9 6 0 q ~ 9 4 1 ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ . . . . . ~ Q 4 . . . . . ~ o ~ . . . . . . . . 4 ~ o C A P I T O L I D E A S SOLIDARITY NO MORE The foreign affairs columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who returned from a visit to Poland shortly before the imposition of martial law there, told me that the Poles she met talked about the rise of Solidarity as the Polish "revolution...
...Other times he-is a Henry Miller or a Hemingway...
...The claptrap published here i s s u e s from more random sources: a metaphysician resident in Martha's Vineyard, an irked vegetarian from San Diego, professors from the City University of New York...
...You're a really good girl, you believe me...
...Coogler's recent obscurity has been somewhat mitigated by the introduction ofcooglerism into the language to mean "a solemn absurdity...
...The Republic may not be abundant with learned minds--higher education has seen to that--but it is full of fanatics vehemently pontificating quackery in the abstruse...
...Friedan seems dimly aware of some of this...
...In the unlikely event THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY I982 5...
...14.95...
...It and pop sociology constitute the classical learning in such places, and when a dullard like Friedan stops in to schmooze and to illuminate the ever-changing dilemmas of this ever-changing world, all the budding Hemingways don their rough Levis and jogging shoes and head out to huzza huzza her...
...Irving shows no hint of this new enlightenment...
...This in turn would harm "East-West relat i o n s , " the neve term for dgtente...
...On the other hand you will find many allusions to "the Polish crisis," a striking example of the way our media heavyweights see the world as though through Soviet eyes...
...The spectacle has fortified the prejudices o f every misogynist...
...The Ford Foundation funds her "researches...
...When he writes he writes the rugged stuff...
...It is the wisdom of our pop thinkers, the yahoos who liven things up on college campuses, in foundations, in the churches, wherever nervous breakdowns are admired and the growingchanging-experiencing ethic prevails...
...Nonetheless, I believe that the hulk of the books published here are as worthless as the literary products of Moscow and no less sniveling...
...Rhetorical nuances may seem Tom Bet/sell, The American Spectat o r ' s Washington correspondent, holds the De Witt Wallace Chair in Communications at the American Enterpmse Institute...
...For that matter I do not believe that Irving could have written so many novels were he not so stupid...
...You've still got yr)u inside youl Nobody's touched y o u - - not really...
...Their enthusiasms have all been tried and unhorsed by the experience...
...yet all his brawls, his p r o s t i t u t e s , his incest, rape, and infibulation are without stench or bruise...
...I r v i n g is the typical " s e r i o u s " *The award is named after the illustrious poet and unintentional h'umorist, J. Gordon Coogler (1865-1901), revered by the literary establishment of his time as the "Bard of the Congaree," "Pahne~to Poet...
...ferences to which the minimally talented repair with morn and dad's consent "to learn the writers' craft...
...Even Marx would laugh at our regnant dogma, but first he would s c r a l c h . In fiction the males are wimps, the females godlike, the authors bedwetters...
...trivial, but they are important be, cause they are all but invisible and so can influence our perception of events subliminally...
...A conspiracy...
...Moreover, the Soviet writer is in thrall to a dogma decidedly more dignified and plausible...
...One of the New Age darkies administers a New Age therapy: " t t e y , l i s t e n , " said J u n i o r J o n e s . "You know what...
...In the early 1960s the authoress's bugaboo was "the feminine mystique," with its idealization of the concubine and the garbage disposal...
...That is the feminine "mode" characterized by "synthesizing, into intuitive, qualitative thinking" that comprehends the "relational...
...Everyone at the writers' conference believes this sort of earnest psychologizing...
...But that word is used in the West to dignify and glamorize political change in the direction of increased state power over the lives of individuals...
...they d o n ' t really get you, you u~Mersrand...
...There he reads the g r e a t books, meets the Great Writers, and is confirmed in the false pieties of the time...
...9 1 'riedan has achieVed a tot...
...writer of the moment, a sentimental sap lost in reveries of the toilette and the lunatic asylum...
...I f the fierce disciples of the Moral Majority ever work their wicked will upon the intelligentsia of the great Republic, putting the torch to libraries, boarding up the great publishing houses, and placing our most renowned authors and authoresses in concentration camps, there to copy and recopy the epistles of Saint Paul and the bulls of the Reverend Falwell, will it mean the dawn of a Dark Age or merely more of the same under d i f f e r e n t commissars...
...Hence, the second stage will be "generative," and even observant of "the g r o u n d i n g . . , realities of daily l i f e . " This glad and glorious morn will keep the harried forces of patriarchy on the run, however, for the second stage will be lived in strict accordance with the Beta "mode...
...He is the perfect alumnus of one of those ghastly Writers Con...
...by Tom Bethell As the world now knows, military rule was imposed on Poland on December 13 and at that point I suppose "the Polish crisis" became a defensible usage (but why not "counterrevolution...
...I am as much a patriot as Dick Cavett or Bishop Paul Elmer More...
...Will the minds of America go hungry without the infantile ribaldries tapped out by the darlings fi'om the Republic's Writers Workshops where halfwits sweat and bawl in a r r e s t e d adolescence...
...Occasionally, he was boomed to be the Republic's poet laureate...
...There have also been plenty of veiled allusions to the threat to world peace caused by hotheaded or unruly Solidarity leaders, resulting in "instability" and the concomitant danger of Soviet in, ervention...
...This I think was more accurate than John Darnton's version in the New York Times, according to which Poland's "new military leaders issued a decree of martial law t o d a y . " A leader, one senses, has willing followers (the consent of the led...
...Let us face the question unflinchingly...
...a ruler has a rod of iron...
...She has been a Senior Research Associate at the Center for the Social Sciences at Columbia...
...Though the working gals have multiplied in number, they have not multiplied .in any achievements not directly tied to politics and to government coercion...
...She has taught these mysteries at Temple University, Yale University, The New School for Social 4 THE AMERI('AN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1982 Research, and Queens College...
...Now Friedan suggests the gals have babies, but that the carping continue not only against men but also against the corporations...
...In most areas of male endeaw)r there ave no more female prodigies than ever b e f o r e , and in some areas of endeavor, for instance international athletic competition, American women have lost their edge to the women from the least liberated lands of all...
...No, editors and writers themselves are for the most part hardly conscious of such details, They merely respond to the dictates of intellectual fashion, the defiance of which would be perceived as a "gaffe" more nearly literary than political...
...I'.P...
...These are her findings...
...Eiedan is one of our foremost national pontificators, which is to exalt her above a multitude...
...l)urron, $15.50...
...The family "is the n u t r i e n t matrix of our personhood...
...Coogler awed Americans for years with volume after volume of his Purely Ortgmal Verse, from which we pluck: "From early youth to the frost of age Man's days have been a mixture Ofall that constitutes in life A dark and giuomy picture...
Vol. 15 • February 1982 • No. 2
