Editorial / We Dedicate This Hole . . . /Johnny Eros
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D IT O R I A L R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. WE DEDICATE THIS HOLE... The broiling controversy continues over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial proposed for Washington's Mall. The design accepted by...
...If your theory happens to be out of synch with fashion (as Velikovsky's collision theories were 30 years ago), then it really doesn't matter how many facts you amass, you will simply be cast into the outer darkness of non-respectability...
...I wonder how many scientists have paused to consider that catastrophism is quite a bit closer to creationism than it is to the old, slow but steady, stodgy uniformitarianism (causal factors operating in the environment are approximately the same as they have always been) that has served the Tom Bethell, The American Spectator's Washington correspondent, holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair in Communications at the American Enterprise Institute...
...And in accordance with our national solicitude for safety, the National Park Service, I am confident, will duly barricade it so tha~ no drunks fall in...
...Such explanations used to be couched in terms of gradual changes in the environment, but the hot new idea is that an asteroid slammed into the Earth, stirring up a lot of dust which in turn shut off the sunlight, thus temporarily stopping photosynthesis, vegetation, and, by implication, dinosaur meals...
...As Norman Macbeth says in his excellent little book Darwin Retried, all explanations of extinction boil down to elaborate ways of saying that the animal at issue stopped reproducing...
...Holmes's replies to the Ann Arbor News interviewer, my favorite is his assertion of how he might handle vicious anti-porn protestors...
...Nor does this make me a romantic...
...I confess the significance of this last geographic detail eludes me, but no news account passed it by, and far be it from me to break ranks...
...There are just too many facts out there, like snowflakes by Tom Bethell in a blizzard...
...Men like H. Ross Perot, Admiral James Stockdale, and the author James Webb have washed their hands of Memorial Fund...
...At this hour he is under indictment in California for grand theft and receiving stolen goods...
...The big problem, which never seems to come any closer to resolution, is to explain why and how all those dinosaurs (and lots of other beasts, too,) became extinct some 65 million years ago...
...My penmanship is not even admirable...
...tallness as seen in the Lincoln and Washington monuments was a value...
...Evolutionary theory as constituted at present is unable to explain definitively the extinction of any species, whether it be modern mammoth or ancient archaeopteryx...
...And do not forget the spokesmen of the peace movement...
...I n the cool figure of Mr...
...I did not ask, but I do believe that the proposed memorial is the expression of an idiotized sensibility...
...Forget that last bit about " d a t a , " which is intended to create the impression that scientists just follow the facts whereever they lead and then dutifully and subserviently construct a theory to fit these facts...
...But I just think they're confused...
...I've straightened out a lot of people's lives," he declares...
...Once they have reflected on what he said in 1977, surely they will be on their feet, and forget not the advances in human justice that they have wrought...
...The real pornographers have been actors like "a John Wayne or Steve McQueen," he says, who made films with "blood and guts everywhere, with gallons of stage blood spewed all over...
...Or how about depicting her as she responded to the POWs' stories of torture in Communist prison camps ? Miss Fonda called the POWs "hypocrites and liars...
...In the first place, we are now witnessing (rather late in the day) the importation of leftist ideas into biology...
...The question then becomes: What forces " s h a p e " the permissible theories at different periods...
...He also said of the North Vietnamese's "indomitable spirit" that it "can never be overcome...
...Adapted from nET's weekly column syndicated by King Features...
...I take issue with the notion that monuments must always depict heroic moments...
...The proposed hole could not spring to an a r t i s t ' s mind spontaneously...
...The artistic goal for our Vietnam memorial should be realism...
...Mr...
...He also has a splendid intellect, and an enormously humane sensibility...
...Let us show Anthony Lewis pecking out that 1972 column wherein he noted that "the United States is the most dangerous and destructive power in the world...
...It was art...
...His need is considerable...
...After my upbringing I probably know just as much of the Bible as they do . . . and I believe in God just as much as they do...
...He predicted it back in 1977, when he warned of performers and producers of sexually explicit films being victimized by public officials "trying to make political mileage" at the expense of these enlightened marriage counselors...
...He [God] probably giggles a lot at all of our hangups...
...How is it that hypotheses come and go, falling every so often in and "out of favor," as the AAAS program puts it...
...Overcoming the "hangups" induced by "15 years of Sunday school and a very religious upbringing," he made over a dozen sexual masterpieces, and received "hundreds of letters from people saying I'd helped them, saved their marriage, and improved their sex lives...
...Better it would be if they showed the more routine elements of life, for instance: Newton goofing off, Churchill playing cards, Grant struggling to escape from an enormous whiskey bottle, or JFK eyeing a well-turned ankle...
...This vacuous conception had to be learned, and in an art school...
...In memorializing a war, I say dramatize it in all its fullness...
...Alfred C. Kinsey is redeemed...
...And he is a creative type, having written over 17 television scripts and " a t least" five "children's classics...
...Does Banfield believe that memorializing the Vietnam war with a hole is mentally disturbed...
...It is a hole...
...Holmes languishes in the coils of California justice...
...Recall how they sprang Jack Henry Abbott, the jailhouse author of In the Belly of the Beast, who, unfortunately, has just been convicted of yet another killing...
...The edifice of Science is less monolithic and dogmatic than it has been for many a decade...
...Ignorant of positive artistic values, this is the art of the "mentally disturbed...
...Nonetheless I can tell you that monuments should be above ground...
...People send their kids to watch that stuff, it's disgusting...
...But it is no more possible to do this than it is possible to predict the skirt-length at Paris fashion shows two years from now...
...Still, the memorial to the millions who served in the Vietnam war is only going to be a hole...
...A third woman survived...
...Edmund G. Brown...
...Or let us show Harriet van Horne reviewing the TV series on the Holocaust and referring to Vietnam as "our own mini-Holocaust...
...Visiting it is even something of a "trip...
...True pornography offends Mr...
...If we knew the answer to this question with any precision, we would be able to predict what was coming next...
...Now withdrawal and recumbency have replaced that value...
...Said Clark in 1972, " I t ' s so pitiful that the violence of technology would be used to destroy the lives of such a gentle and simple and beautiful people...
...In a word he is a progressive, deserving all the support the liberal intelligentsia can provide...
...Remember the Hiss case...
...The design accepted by the modern Medicis of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is unique...
...End of planteating beasts, and (a few weeks later, we may assume) meat-eating ones, tOO...
...Of all Mr...
...gum myself no artist...
...Ahs, now Mr...
...Holmes's role in X-rated movies transcends art, however, and reaches into the hushed realms of sexology...
...Not so...
...The THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 5...
...They contributed a lot, and their utterances and deeds ought not to be forgotten...
...In his words he would "shake their hands, buy them a Coke, and talk religion with them...
...So the scientists have to start with a theory which in turn guides them to the appropriate factual snowflakes...
...Holmes, and he pins that opprobrious label not on bodies passionately rubbing together but on cursed violence...
...Somewhat along the lines of Rodin's The Burghers of Calais, the Vietnam memorial ought to depict soldiers, sailors, airmen, and nurses toiling at all the various endeavors that went into that war--and let us not forget to include the statisticians preparing their graphs for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara...
...Finally the pundits should have a place on this memorial...
...Within certain empirical boundaries, obviously, scientists find what they are looking for and ignore everything else...
...Holmes's support...
...One day I saw a film called "The Asteroid and the Dinosaur" (Time-Life Video), a 60minute documentary which was thoroughly enjoyable but which 20 or 30 years ago would have been rigidly excluded from polite scientific company along with the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky, which it resembles...
...Now Elliott Banfield, whose exquisite drawings in publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The American Spectator testify to his artistic worth, has denounced the memorial hole, and in terms that should stimulate thoughts beyond the current row...
...Doubtless it is to be an elegantly executed hole, the bulldozers and steam shovels being directed by a trained artist well paid...
...It could save his hide, and his hide is only the mosi celebrated of his many attributes...
...In the official program of the AAAS meeting, under the heading "Evolution," there occurs the following, sentence: "After many years out of general favor, catastrophic causal mechanisms, both internal and external, have once again come to the fore, largely supported by paleoceanographic and geochemical data...
...Countless X-rated scripts have been turned down by him, especially those calling for "abuse" of other human beings...
...Leftists are inclined to believe (or at least hope) that life isn't regular and steady, but is on the contrary interrupted occasionally by violent revolutions...
...In an analogous way, however, it is fashion that concerns us...
...Decorative ornamentation would be splashed on the courthouse square or the corner pharmacy, but today Americans have "lost the feel for expressing themselves through a r t . " Once the idea was to raise something up...
...These are the conservative 1980s, I know, but this interview that I have unearthed should remind them that in Los Angeles a fellow progressive deeply committed to new age values is in trouble...
...Do you recall the time Jane Fonda was filmed sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun pointed heavenward...
...The words could be engraved in stone, perhaps with a reminder that a decade later she was the author of an exercise book helpful m thousands intent on preserving the innocent appearance of youth...
...To him, a role in an X-rated movie was more than a job...
...Anyway, catastrophism is back, and this is but a reflection of a more important underlying change in the intellectual climate...
...Holmes we have the makings of another good cause...
...When a veteran takes his kids to see how America commemorated his war he should not have to say " I t ' s down there kids...
...Holmes is duly exercised over child abuse and violence in the home...
...Why flinch from what happened...
...All this should be placed in a realistic setting to instruct future generations on what the war was really like...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S PROLETARIAN EVOLUTION I went to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at the Washington Hilton last month and had a good old time...
...Kids are too perceptive, unless they have been to art school.D j OHNNY EROS Last month, as legal problems mounted for Mr...
...This is quite revealing...
...Off to the side let us have antiwar demonstrators waving a few North Vietnamese flags...
...John Holmes, the talented star of theatre pornographique, art lovers could be thankful for a journalistic coup scored back in the summer of 1977 when Mr...
...So we have a return to catastrophism--abrupt change...
...My Vietnam memorial would have to depict both Miss Fonda and Ramsey Clark as they broadcast encouragement on Radio Hanoi...
...This amounts m a "discontinuity in our civilization," for in earlier times Americans relished the opportunity to heave up grand and ornate monuments...
...Speaking in New York last month, Banfield asserted that "Americans have apparently lost the capacity to speak in artistic forms...
...He opposes the commercial priority bestowed by so many actors on their work...
...Surprisingly, the liberal intelligentsia has been slow to come to Mr...
...4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 It goes without saying that Mr...
...The thing has a lot of people sore...
...Holmes granted the Ann Arbor News of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a rare interview...
...Intellectual fashion is the ultimate shaper and determinant of scientific theory...
...There is the sound of the 1970s for you, replete with unctuousness...
...They want a loftier memorial...
...I f people are making love in a beautiful way," he tells the Ann Arbor News, "that's not porn, that's beauty...
...evolutionary dogma so well since Darwin's day...
...Worse still, Los Angeles authorities accuse him of having beaten m death two women and two men at a plush address on Wonderland Avenue, a mere four blocks from the residence of Gov...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
