Editorial/Papa Brezhnev (1906-1982)/Bishops at the Barricades
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Pursuit to Algiers by R.W. Neill (USA, 1945), and Our Da@ Bread by King Vidor (USA, 1934). For some reason, in this part of the museum, there could be heard a bagpipe recording of some...
...The ~-year-old building and the at-least-as-ancient music showed little signs of having been he's probably fighting a hopeless battle, bifteck, and so on...
...I le~ Manhattan Burger and made my way to the Ile de la Cit~, the island on the Seine which contains some very famous old buildings...
...What's going on here...
...It is a culture in which a nurse earns less per year than a cretinous, unwashed rock singer spends on dope per day...
...The Catholic Church in America has been an immigrant church whose members looked to the bishops for religious and worldly counsel...
...You know how many liberals head totalitarian intelligence agencies...
...One hazards a guess, so remarkable is this building and so enduring its appeal, that it must have been constructed when French culture was at its peak...
...later General Se~eta~ of the C...
...hronicks td'('ullurr 934 North Main Street | Rockford, Illinois 61103 ! I wish to judge Chronicles of Cull ture for myself...
...White House intimidation...
...Tom BetheU The American Spectator ward the Subscription Request and Free Issue coupon...
...and most of the religious French counterpart whose hierarchy having taken one ill-advised political position too many now mainly serves asthe butt of ribaldry and the curator for empty monuments built in another age...
...Soviet physician wants to appear too munist Party of the Soviet Union, President of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Leonid I. Brezhnev had assumed ~m temperature...
...Thus the revision of the Catholic liturgy moves from the stately Latin of times past to the bibble babble of the moment...
...He exuberantly carried out Stalin's policies in the Ukraine where between 1945 and 1950 some 500,000 of the republic's estimated 3,000,000 were executed, sent to the Gulag, or ANNOUNCING THE END OF M A MUSH -TOOISM You arejoyfuUy invited to subscribe to afresh, zesty, alive alternative: Chronicles of Culture...
...In 1950 he was appointed first secretary of the Moldavian party where things were tough and he "draconian...
...What of our style and content...
...Puncturing t h e liberal pontification...
...We attempt to s h o u t " h o g - wash," but in a distinguished manner...
...With the rise of the nuclear freeze doubtless many of the good bishops thought that they could gain both intellectual respectability and political power in one sally...
...We encourage you to find outuat no obligation...
...Hero of the Soviet Union, causes, though it is curious that three days before his sudden expiry someone persuaded the old boy to stand for two hours during the ~ traditional Red Square parade ~ celebrating the Bolshevik Revolution.: Many of the Hero of Soviet Labor, Lenin Peace ~ze Laureate, Lenin Literary ~ze Laureate--he had won it all, missing only a medal at the Moscow Olympics Yet the USSR is in dreadful condition...
...Be prepared for 200,pound weights here, amidst the prissy Kandinskys and the Giacometti wire, the Calder bores and the lightweight L~gers...
...The Catholic hierarchy has always had an intellectual inferiority complex...
...What a building...
...By the time the sonorous proceedings had shut down, the bishops had confirmed the belief that they are indeed oblivious to the modern world, though not to its whiny political tactics...
...When William P. Clark, the President's national security adviser, addressed a letter to them admonishing that their new ideas were not all that enlightened, they let out a horrible squawk...
...The spirits and principalities of the upper atmosphere are not accorded a very respectable hearing here...
...Persuasion, moral example, and an absolute lust to negotiate were useless in ending Hanoi's brutality toward the boat people, ridding Afghanistan of Soviet troops, or banning the use of chemical and biological warfare by the Soviets and their henchmen...
...John Lofton, reviewed this document for us in our September 1978 issue...
...A decidedly articulate alternative you will relish...
...6 11 Leonid Brezhnev resign from his many leadership posts in December...
...That the Catholic bishops now thump for it is evidence of that and more...
...Imaginet An Early Warning System e v e r y month on what's worthwhile and what's worthless in theater, film, books, and morel Is Chronicles of Culture for you...
...He will cheer things up...
...Simply forff you haven't seen Chronicles, it's worth a look because it is such a refreshing change from the normal diet of humanist cellulose...
...The progressive foreign policy that the bishops have decided to recognize was found to be valueless in the late 1970s...
...Check for $18.00 is enclosed...
...At last, there exists a journal worth reading for its originality, its zest, its willingness to examine books, film, music, theater, politics, the press and other insti: tutions--with no concern for Consensus or Conventional Wisdom...
...Highmindedness was the heart of the Carter foreign policy...
...This last estimate comes from Brezhnev: The Masks o f Power, by former Newsweek reporter John Dornberg...
...D I T 0 R I A L PAPA B HNEV (i906-i982) by R. Emme~ Ty~eli, Jr...
...When we observe that some popular idea is, at best, constructed of very wet papierm~ ch6, we state so...
...In the 1930's a German antifascist by the name of Kurt Tucholsky, before he was tortured by the nazis in Dachau, addressed himself to his nation in one of his last warnings: "All I wish is for you to remember, I was agalnstl" So are we, when we face the travesty of humanness and the humiliation of reason in America...
...Here was French culture, still alive and well...
...It has been downhill ever since, n "est-ce pas...
...He was a '!good mixer and sought the company of people his own age, especially those who were bold, energetic, and eager and considered the building of a new world something close to their hearts...
...Treacheryl Had (continued on page 41) 8 " THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 EDITORIAL (continued from page 8) the letter never been written they would have groused that they were being ignored...
...They failed...
...Succinctly, but, we hope, with a modicum of style...
...The immigrants are now mostly dead...
...i ent Brezhnev Holds Fast to Power" read the front-page headiine in the November 8 Washington Post...
...May I recommend, You can go on upstairs to the main then, Manhattan Burger, only a museum floors, but I don't recommend it highly...
...If I'm not satisfied with my | first issue I'll write "cancel" onthe | invoice and return it unpaid...
...Last month, at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the assembled potentates labored mightily to overturn this old perception: they grasped at nuclear freeze poli.tique in all its stupefying perturbations...
...The Pope's cisatlantic agents have always been somewhat quaint...
...Possibly the quacks could not lay hands on a stethoscope, and no i believe that it is safe to say that everything, though personally he President Brezhnev died of natural ~ prospered...
...Their heirs are no longer soeasily led...
...According to Dornberg, "Culturally, intellectually, and in terms of human freedom, the USSR has regressed under Brezhnev's rule . . . . The Soviet Union he will leave behind will be an infinitely sadder country than the one he found upon becoming ruler...
...Next spring" when the bishops' pastoral letter goes out still more pious Catholics will be snoozing in the feathers on Sunday morn...
...For some reason, in this part of the museum, there could be heard a bagpipe recording of some well-known Scottish jig (one of Crofter Jack's little jokes...
...In every issue you should find enough critical common sense to save you from the purchase of at least one book or the price of one movie...
...Right now the Catholic laity is taking sides on foreign policy and neither side will feel very congenial with bishops who opposed them on a question that they rightly vfew as mainly political...
...Naturally he rose rapidly in the Communist hierarchy during Stalin's 1930s and 1940s purges...
...This recent head of the KGB is, some Westerners tell us, a liberal...
...The eminent Kremlinologist, Dr...
...They are probably in error..Furthermore this error could prove catastrophic, leaving the American Catholic Churchsomewhat like its The Catholic bishops and their new allies in the nuclear freeze movement may think that high-mindedness is a revolutionary approach to foreign policy but close students of the Carter Administration know better...
...r hini Plaries, it can be difficult to find a place to eat where you don't have to worry about mysterious additions to l'addition, three difwork behind the counter wherever look like dry old bones, but living such eateries are to be found, still...
...What Vladimir Nabokov so well described fifteen years ago has been religiously preserved in Paris" "Crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, zen stereos, polystyrene stinkferent sauces covering up your gristly Pack your primary-color pants and couple of blocks from the art center, at the corner of Rue des Lombards and Rue St...
...eager to sign the death ce~ificate of a member of the Politburo, Not that the Soviet pol is as insanely sensitive ~out aging ~ as his American counterpart, in Moscow you will see none of those pinched baby-faces and fluffy hairdos that incongruously protrude from the floats were amazing imitations of military weapons, but he had seen it all before . . . . Many Americans are now asking, "Is Brezhnev in heavenT" I believe that he is not,~ though I do not mean toxile our liberal clergy...
...Do you ever get that feeling when you enter an art museum that you have invisible 100pound weights attached to both legs...
...they incorporated all this into a pastoral letter, which will be read, I am advised, during Sunday services, possibly this spring...
...Martin (4th arrondisement...
...plotof Stalin's time physicians on the Maybe it takes this long to get a deathwatch bear a heavy responsideath certificate through the Soviet bility...
...Yet in modern America their power is draining off to the shrinks, the schoolmarms, and the disciples of Mammon...
...Recall if you will his admonition to President Jimmy Carter at the Vienna summit u165h at manner of man was hey Fortunately I have at hand Leonid B re z h n e v: Pa g e s Fro m His L ife, a charming biography prepared by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and advertised in the New York Times Book Review as the Soviet leader's " f i r s t fully-rounded port r a i t . . a work of extraordinary THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ~ JANUARY 1983 7 importance, scope and depth...
...For years he had been in failing Adapted from RET's weekly Washin g to n Po s t c olu m n sy n dic a t e d by King Features...
...In one fundamental way, we stand considerably removed from the herd...
...Brezhnev will not resign in December...
...R esU...
...where, placing his hand on our President's shoulder, he said, "If we do not succeed, God will not forgive us...
...Well, now we know...
...So frail was he in the end that aging bodies of CapitOl Hill gentleit took his physicians 26-and-a-half men...
...Eight hundred years...
...But here we finally do find French c u l t u r e - - a t Notre Dame...
...He kept us in the dark fight to the end...
...NAME | ADDRESS | CITY | STATE ZIP | AS9 | Chronicles of Culture exiled...
...Jack Lang...
...including of course Notre Dame de Paris...
...Two days health...
...Brezhnev tells us in his special introduction that his is the story of how "only Soviet power enabled me, the son of a worker, to rise to the leadership of a glorious many-millions-strong party of history's first socialist state...
...Brezhnev failed at out the peculiarities of Soviet medicine...
...Notre Dame's old white stones affected by the passage of so much time: the Battles of Crecy and Agincourt, the Renaissance and the Reformation, Louis XIV, the Enlightenment, Rousseau, Voltaire, Robespierre and the French Revolution, Napoleon and the Revolution of 1848, all had come and gone and left little impression on these architectural and musical expressions of the permanent...
...Beginning as one of the top four engineering graduates at the Arsenichev Metallurgical Institute he went to the Dzerzhinsky steel mill to become "a good fitter and an even better gas purification machine operator...
...Actually, aside from keeping Russia as peaceful as a morgue, Mr...
...No | further obligation on my part...
...Enroll me as a | potential subscriber and send me | your current issue free...
...Inside, by the door, was a The price was right, too---less than throng of tourists, but beyond them a a dollar for a cheeseburger and about congregation filled the nave and at 50 cents for les f r i t e s . Thanks to ~ the altar priests were celebrating Monsieur Mitterrand's Unwise socialist experiment, which makes all sensible investors nervous, a lot of Frenchmen have been trying to get rid of their francs, which means the money-changers do give you a decent number of them for a dollar these days...
...BISHOPS AT THE BARRICADES In the 1970s, as hundreds of thousands of pious Roman Catholics were deciding to spend Sunday morning snoring rather than praying, University of California sociologist Robert Bellah observed, "The Catholic church finally decided to recognize the values of the modern world just when American young people were beginning to find it valueless...
...Again, it was only a short walk...
...The uselessness of progressive foreign policy is as manifest today as the uselessness of appeasement was two years after Hitler's panzers rolled into Poland...
...My judgment is based solely o n t h e man's own published statements...
...It costs billions of rubles to hold off the invading armies menacing Soviet borders...
...Moreover while at the KGB he opened more psychiatric hospitals than any of his predecessors, including Lavrenti Beria...
...One fragment, e x c e r p t e d from Leopold Tyrmand's Editor's Comment which launches a recent issue, as he writes about today's Hberal culture: One consequence of this culture is that a vast segment of the population is forced to work hard to support a class of parasites, many of whom--thanks to economic priorities gone berserk--have turned their lives into a grotesque Grand Guignol of drugs and kinky crime and who provide their own troubadours with an obscure wealth...
...The congregation sang the Magnificat ~ in Latin--Gregorian chant (ton royal...
...virtues are viewed as curious at best and as fit subjects for clinical inquiry at many universities...
...As the bishops stride into the New Dawn they are as dogmatic as ever and no better informed...
...Thus begins an imm e n s e I y i n for m a t i v e d is c u s s ion of p~sible successors in the October 27 number of Soviet Ana~st, one of the West's most authoritative p~~icals an Kremlin happenings...
...Yuri V. Andropov has replaced him...
...Consequently the level of Soviet medical technology remains comparatively primitive...
...But now Mr...
...1,1 THE AMERICAN SPEcTATOR JANUARY 1983 41...
...For this culture we have nothing but the deepest contempt, and we want to make it known...
...But do it today, so we may send you our freshest issue immediately...
...Our alternative to me-too magazines is Chronicles of Culture: Written for an audience in search of fresh, provocative, mind-jolting, original thought...
...Remarkably, readers and editors come together in Chronicles o f Culture to produce a vibrant, f r e s h approach to n0n-liberal journalism...
...The religious leaders are at a dreadful intellectual disadvantage in our cynical secular world...
...Please start my subscription now...
...Once again they are dogmatizing the antiquated...
...That the advocates of the freeze movement should be thumping so furiously for moral exhibitionism as opposed to vigilance and strength is but more evidence of mankind's longing for the irrational...
...I'm afraid it's true that they have been culturally colonized to some extent, but really, if Lang can't keep American influence out of his own Centre National d'Art et de Culture, birds, objects trouves in latrines, cannon balls, canned b a l l s . . . Freudian surrealism, roric smudges and Rorschach blots--all of it as corny in its own right as the academic 'September Morns' and 'Florentine Flowergirls' of half a century ago...
...It is just that since the doctors' hours before they could be sure...
...Early Warning System...
...When Jimmy duly implemented his progressive foreign policy against the Ayatollah, the old crank humiliated him for 444 days...
...It is a book of rare and genuine excitement...
...Bill me for $18.00 (12 monthly issues...
...Taking the opportunity for a rare boast, Mr...
...As l went in, a loudspeaker was playing a Ray Charles record (good Ray Charles, too---the French know their Ray Charles...
...Essentially it is a foreign policy that cashiers military strength and the willingness to use it for persuasion, moral example, and high-minded negotiations...
...We are non-liberal...
...Our political systems are bureaucracy, but one must not rule different...
...Most of its members are essentially ecclesiastical politicians who once believed that their robes and their collars would grant them power and authority...
...Vespers as though Vatican II hadn't happened...
...Imaginet A p u b l i c a t i o n t h a t begins with that fresh perspective, and then goes about the business of reviewing, criticizing, essaying each monthmin little danger of fraternizing with other magazines...
...they embraced the foreign policy nostrums of the progressive intelligentsia, Godless though its members may be...
...There's no doubt about it, the French have a winner here...
...The hamburger on sesame-seed bun was easily up to the American standard, the French frites every bit as good as our French fries, the milk shake not bad, and the service excellent- no rude garfons here, thank God, but the familiar, cheery gals who seem to your Madras blazers, bring along a couple of cameras to take snaps of the quaint artists in Montmartre, hop on the plane, and enjoy life for a few days in colonial Paris...
...So now's the time to visit, folks...
...All in all it amounts to a trinity of bosh as effective in securing foreign policy goals as good looks and erotic after-shave lotion...
Vol. 16 • January 1983 • No. 1
