Editorial / Bulbous Tip / Pedalphilia
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL BULBOUS TIP by R.Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. I have been wrong to call House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Congressman Falstaff. I apologize. There is indeed buffoonery in his yelps and furies over...
...I refer to the religious fervor and political energy that the reform-minded zealot now drains off into trivia...
...Finally they are a threat to urban pedestrians and to that occasional canine companion who might be answering nature's call at curbside, for the bicycle is eerily silent while in motion and-face the facts-many urban bicycle riders glide along in a confused state owing to their heroic delusions or to airborne objects such as insects-bicycles do not have windshields...
...Yet after mortgage payments, automobile payments, 'educational expenses, and the welfare state's taxes have been paid there are very few of these households whose members are as Speaker O'Neill sees them...
...They are about as stable as a martini balanced on the forehead of a drunk...
...The fanatics could then move on to heliotherapy or some other such nonsense...
...O'Neill has his way these young people will not get very far, for his high tax rates will just about destroy economic growth, by discouraging investment, and tiie young wage earner's dream of joining middle-income families in a higher-income bracket, by dampening his ardor for work...
...What I had written was of course very reasonable...
...Bowing to reality, he had just ordered the removal of New York's dangerous bicycle-only lanes from city streets...
...Up until now only the truly rich have had tax relief, and in fiscal year 1982 their economic activity picked up sufficiently to return the federal government 11 percent more from them in tax revenues than was expected...
...It derides Reaganite supply-side economics, though it makes perfect sense that a cut in taxes will spur economic activity...
...To his mind this is the starting income of "therich...
...Reagan as the defender of the rich...
...He wants Americans to get out there and buy cars and homes...
...Over two-and-a-half-years ago, I wrote a column congratulating my favorite big city mayor, New York's illustrious Mayor Koch, for having grown and changed with the new decade...
...O'Neill's...
...If Mr...
...When Speaker O'Neill promises to deny "the rich" the third round of the Reagan tax cuts he is talking about households with yearly incomes beginning around $35,000...
...There is indeed buffoonery in his yelps and furies over Reaganomics, but there is also an affecting quaintness...
...Reagan should eagerly welcome...
...Then last month came renewed assault from one of these two-wheeled McCarthyites...
...Is a middle-income family really Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Now it is time for the middle-income working class to get a tax cut...
...rich...
...No other group has ever put on such a riot against me in the correspondence sections of the great and patriotic institutions that carry this column, and bear in mind that in this space I have been dubious of over 750 other species of crank-not to mention both major political parties...
...Thus the unemployed, remain unemployed, and Speaker O'Neill can run to them with ever more lucre filched from the middle class...
...If it were not that Ralph Nader envisages them as a threat to Detroit he would have joined me years ago in putting them on the consumers' index of dangerous products...
...O'Neill was first educated to the political economy of Robin Hood...
...VV ith the passage of time and the accumulation of provocations I have come to the further judgment that reforming the bicycle is impossible...
...A lot has changed in the American economy since the 1930s when Mr...
...Not the down-and-out for whom Mr...
...O'Neill is enough of an old-fashioned Keynesian to believe that purchases rather than production drive an economy...
...In brief, they are an anomaly, suited for neither the sidewalk nor the boulevard...
...O'Neill professes solicitude, but citizens of middle income, whom he would tax...
...The /average household with a yearly income of $50,000 has at least two wage earners-occasionally more...
...On Capitol Hill right now the old gang of taxers and spenders is making a desperate attempt to save its way of life...
...700 cap would hit the home of a blue-collar worker whose wife is a schoolteacher or secretary...
...For all around fitness I still prescribe the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises, or better still a summer at Marine Corps boot camp...
...I shall not divulge where the assault took place, for I do not want to encourage the fanatic...
...If Speaker O'Neill cannot bear to witness these orgies let him join Michael Foot in retirement...
...Others are young people just starting out...
...They arrived there decades ago...
...Bicycles are not autos...
...Bicycles are dangerous...
...We certainly do not want them to grow reasonable, not about politics and things that matter.cs and things that matter...
...Doubtless he sees the household with $50,000 of yearly income as the manse of the super rich...
...O'Neill's fellow congressmen grumbling about the difficulty of living in Washington on yearly incomes of $60,700...
...and, in truth, they do not apply...
...It is eminently possible that Mr...
...Consider the militant bicycle riders -and here I have in mind solely the militants, not those who ride for recreation or out of economic hardship but those with the ulterior motive of making moral or political statements...
...After listening to Speaker O'Neill's drivel about the rich, one begins to wonder who he believes his natural constituents are...
...But who pays for new homes and cars...
...Let cyclists confine their pedaling to country lanes where it is probably useful for maintaining fitness, at least of one's cardiovascular system and the lower body...
...It took weeks before normalcy returned...
...It claims that the Reagan cuts have been flagitious, though as the Wall Street Journal asserted last month, from 1980 to 1983 income-transfer payments grew from $283 billion to $408 billion...
...His enduring passion against me, however, is noteworthy...
...The subsequent salvo against that column from militant bicycle riders was withering...
...Some of those with apparently low incomes are retired people with few expenses and considerable assets...
...People fall off bicycles onto Hard and congested pavement...
...O'Neill's supporters believe that when the President vetoes the aforementioned $700 cap, the Democrats can then depict Mr...
...As often as possible, the urban cycler ought to adhere to the walk patterns of pedestrians, and in many situations he ought to be ordered to walk his bicycle...
...hence his enduring gall...
...It is a fate Mr...
...Urban cycling should be banned or greatly restricted...
...Are they the Okies en route to California from the dustbowl...
...He remains a pest, but think how much more dangerous he would be were he to forsake his absurd enthusiasm and become a cooperative, liberal Democrat willing to compromise...
...In his campaign to slam down a $700 limit on the final installment of President Reagan's 25-percent cut in personal tax rates, Mr...
...Middle-income families are often forced to send not one but two breadwinners into the work force...
...That would separate the fanatics from the wholesome riders, who surely exist...
...His point ran roughly: "If you think this Tyrrell fellow was unkind to cinema's phony Gandhi, witness his discourtesies to the noble bicycle some two-and-a-half-years ago...
...It preaches economic gloom, though more and more economic indicators suggest optimism...
...Bicycles provide no protection to their riders, and their brakes are less reliable than those put on the Model T generations ago...
...There is, as George Gilder the author of Wealth and Poverty is given to pointing out, an enormous amount of motion in a modern economy...
...They are slow and unprotected...
...Apparently he believes that he speaks, for those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, but those people need not stay there forever...
...Not only is this a quaint and static view of economics it is also muzzy-headed...
...O'Neill came across as nothing so much as a rotund Michael Foot, sans dog, English walking stick, and frayed raiment but with the same woebegone 1930s vision of working classes struggling under the lash of the Big Bosses while their children pad about barefoot, dirty, and with tears rolling down their cheeks...
...PEDALPHILIA I have been accosted in the public print by a maddened bicycle rider...
...It is symptomatic of a widespread spiritual and political disorder that afflicts the West, accounting for-among other boons -Margaret Thatcher's huge victory last month, the disarray of Germany's Social Democrats, Ronald Reagan's palmy prospects, and much of the amusement that I derive from an otherwise near monastic existence...
...It is not easy to buy cars and homes after the government has run its fingers through your pocket-book...
...Well then, why are so many of Mr...
...People do not fall off Oldsmobiles, and the sturdy Olds has no handlebars to damage the soft, vulnerable parts of the body...
...Consider the evidence...
...Though we often apply the laws governing motorists to the cyclist, he flouts these laws regularly...
...This is how Michael Foot saw the world before his Labour party went down to Prime Minister Thatcher with over 50 percent of Britain's trade unionists voting against him...
...There are more such fantastkos than you might think...
Vol. 16 • August 1983 • No. 8
