Editorials/Let Me Call You Sweetheart/Among the Woodstock People
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L S LET ME CALL YOU SWEETHEART Has it been noted and analyzed by the learned anthropologists of the Republic that modern feminists do not fall in love? Or if they do, they are...
...Pauken then pointed out that the USCC's Campaign for Human Development is in the business of funding leftist causes, to which the bishops respbnded by raising hell with the White House and trying to get Pauken, a Catholic, fired from his job...
...What was strange for me was to be in the company of so many who appeared so prematurely burned out...
...The ACORN protestors were encamped in the Trinity River bottoms, near Dealey Plaza...
...Is it normally this hot in August...
...They hold hands, smile coyly at each other, and he holds doors for her without fear o f controversy...
...The Catholic bishops started picking up the ACORN check after the U.S...
...I got the spirit today," he said more quietly to himself, wiping his lips...
...Don't fight the word," said a young black preacher to emerging shoppers...
...and he seemed to believe that his organization had wrought wonders in the job-training area...
...There you feel the real life of the city may be, and there you can believe that Dallas is the fastest growing city in the country: lots of land, lots of opportunity, and lots of ready and willing labor from across the Rio Grande...
...It has endured Puritanism, it has endured Hollywood, it has even endured the chill lectures of the sex educationists...
...My Woodstock experience last month did convince me that many of the participants stopped reading newspapers around 1974...
...The great black monstrosity carried me and a pal into the wilds of upstate New York and deposited us in a common cornfield...
...I formed the impression that there might be other rich folk clustered inside the doorway, anxiously peering out to see if the coast was clear...
...Sorry readers, it would have been worth a visit, but it was just too hot for me that day, and so I decided to go and see some old Dallas friends instead, who live out toward those northerly suburbs...
...Phew," I said when I arrived...
...Something must be done to put a smile on their faces and a gentleman at each elbow...
...or was I to fulminate or to solemnize on the nobility of those of my peers who disported al fresco and took dope in the sunshine while others were fighting Communists in Vietnam...
...Every Tom Betheli is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...I read all their intellectual tracts...
...Does the feminist's husband hold doors for his bride...
...But what about our feminist friends...
...Well, I hate to be a stickler for detail, but I liked a little popular music in the 1960s and no radical idea ever crossed my mind...
...Many were deep in melancholia...
...Green Co., with "Cool Tomato Sandwich Shop," a "Welcome Republicans" sign, huge glass skyscrapers towering up behind, the sun beating down, and the street strewn with paper and leaflets...
...Nowadays it is love, love, love...
...Now there is a red hot romance for you...
...The wino called after the retreating pair...
...and a corpulent and contented chap next to me purred about how in the intervening years he had become quite wealthy and a living saint...
...More to the point, the largest student activist group of the era was the very conservative Young Americans for Freedom, and in 1972 the youth vote went to Richard Nixon...
...Catholic Conference-funded outfit called Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now...
...There has been tremendous growth in the suburbs, especially to the north along the LBJ Freeway, where a whole new city seemgd to be under instantaneous construction...
...called out a disheveled wino, his arms out horizontally, as a young couple came out blinking into the glare...
...On a baking hot Saturday afternoon I went to Neiman-Marcus, one of the few shops on Main Street...
...He had been reading about the ACORN nuts and the peace 'n' justice nasties who were camping out in Dallas, hopi[lg to embarrass the Republicans...
...I hadn't been there for fourteen years...
...Ah known it hotter," said the knobbly old fellow who was walking about pigeon-toed in cowboy boots...
...The gurus of personal liberation can take credit for some of the nation's growing rate of illegitimacy along with a rise in petty lawlessness, drug addiction, welfare, venereal disease, and mental illness...
...Kunstler would have us believe that the peace movement was vindicated by events, but the bloody tyrannies that rose up after the fall of Southeast Asia proved the movement to have been tragically wrong, and recently North Vietnamese officials have boasted to European journalists of how they duped the peace movement...
...It was enough to make even a sour fellow like me revise his theretofore low estimate of moonlight and roses, for the Reagans even then manifested their affection with the utmost dignity...
...Whoom...
...I felt good about being back in Dallas after so many years...
...AS a very modern fellow I try to be terribly sensitive, but those rosy-checked progressives whose adolescence began in the 1960s have sustained more epochal events than were chronicled by Gibbon in the entire Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...
...I know if you got the Holy Ghost...
...In fact, according to my estimate, these much-maligned Republicans have climbed high in our society, doing so without benefit of affirmative action and without making their male friends miserable...
...After our show, while they roamed that hallowed field congratulating themselves and soiling their shoes, I vamoosed...
...The idea that the majority of the Republic's young in the 1960s and 1970s was radical is but one of the many inaccurate ideas pushed today by the keepers of the Woodstock myth...
...The squeamish dons of the press chastely characterize the relationship between the President and First Lady as "close...
...They were exchanging jibes and desultory comments back and forth as they waited for the very occasional bus to come trundling up the street...
...The Reagans were the most senior guests at the table...
...so far unsuccessfully...
...Across the street there was H.L...
...The papers next day said it was 108 degrees at Love Field, a record...
...Bobby Seale, the vaunted revolutionary, complained to me that he is without a publisher for his new book-a cookbook that fell short of the obligatory number of low-salt recipes...
...and Bobby Kennedy...
...Possibly it was there, and possibly an old sock worn round the neck will cure the common cold, but I remain unconvinced...
...The feminist's relative celibacy was particularly evident to me as I watched Nancy and Ron at the Republican convention last month...
...It is about a mile square, and it seems to consist of about fifty skyscrapers set down in the midst of a great deal of Allright parking...
...Business is good all the same," said another...
...No one would repeat that old Dallas cliche today--not downtown, at least...
...Apart from being too hot, the trouble with Dallas is that it is too far to walk wherever you might be going, and you end up trying to avoid going out of doors for any reason...
...Over a decade ago it was fashionable to speak of young people as representing "the brightest generation" in our history...
...The Son of God kept the Sabbath...
...There's no downtown in Dallas," a Neiman-Marcus salesman told me a bit later...
...In the 1960s these insufferables were called "the kids," and as they oxidize into middle age they remain kids...
...I confess I do not know...
...Yet the feminists remain impregnable...
...When the camera came on, Bobby Scale, on my left, spoke of his Black Panthers, who once threatened the police and urged armed conflict, as though they had been in alliance with Martin Luther King, Jr...
...That's what it was like to open your hotel door in Dallas...
...but I can recall not one having ever boasted of her ardor for a particular American male...
...In fact polling data clearly indicate that the majority of American young people remained quite square...
...Reckon the rattlesnakes should get one or two of them," he reflected...
...The next day I went to the famously wealthy First Baptist Church downtown, where a congregation of about 1500 enjoyed a thirty-piece orchestra, a robed choir perhaps 200-strong, and a cogent sermon by its pastor of forty years, Rev...
...All this self-congratulation was attended by an intellectual slovenliness of colossal dimensions...
...He had actually been in SDS...
...government--specifically ACTION Director Tom Paukenmstopped funding it in 1981...
...The blinds were down and the air conditioner humming...
...Surrounding the skyscraper archipelago, effectively sealing it off, is a great encircling reef of freeways...
...Yet one spies little friction between the Bushes, and here again I see traces of what even a sociologist might identify as romance...
...However, their obvious affection for each other conferred a youthful charm on them that set them apart...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 9...
...King...
...I wanted to go and inspect the tent city organized by a left-wing, U.S...
...What is it with these Republicans...
...He held a Bible next to his heart, and he wore navy-blue pinstriped trousers and well-polished twotone brown shoes...
...Yew mean water moccasins, daddy," said his rhinestone-spectacled wife, who came in from the kitchen carrying a most welcome tray of Coors and Budweiser...
...Outside the front door of the luxury store there stood an assortment of amateur preachers and winos, nearly all black...
...I know...
...Then he hoisted a quart beer bottle to his lips and took a lengthy swig...
...While on the subject of romantic Republicans--a subject that may not be raised again in 1,000 years--forget not George and Barbara Bush...
...I remember very vividly a dinner I had for them in New York before the 1980 campaign when the exgovernor of California expressed his desire to meet some of the liberal intellectuals of the East who were then moving right...
...Yeuoooo brother...
...There seem to be very few shops, restaurants, or even people, as far as I could see...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S REPUBLICANS TARNISHED by Tom Bethell Have you ever opened an oven door, not realizing it was on...
...Bush is quite obviously a very sturdy and energetic sort, as is her husband whose biography reads: World War II bomber pilot, businessman, congressman, UN ambassador, emissary to China, CIA head, presidential candidate, and Vice President...
...Let me baptize you...
...Downtown Dallas is a bit of a mystery to me...
...They too seem hooked on each other...
...senators, congresswomen, a Supreme Court justice, plus a mob of happily married mothers...
...Or if they do, they are very demure about it: Never are they caught canoodling in public or even snuggling up to a would-be Romeo...
...Thus frauds multiply and prosper, though not always...
...From my fellow participants on this TV show, "Summer Sunday, USA," I got the impression that Woodstock was by their lights an epochal event...
...Only if it has been stipulated in one of those marriage contracts that the feminists prescribe, those documents that are supposed to designate each party's rights and obligations before marriage vows are taken and hostilities officialAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...A great wave of heat hits you in the face, and you beat a hasty retreat...
...Bolder minds, unfrightened by public displays of affection, realize, of course, that these two are madly in love...
...At this my spirits soared unaccountably...
...Now, my research staff notifies me that romantic love is a more prevalent theme in popular song than ever before...
...They set off walking fast without looking back...
...In point of fact, through all the vicissitudes in our history love between boy and girl has been a staple of song and verse...
...Scale would have us believe that his gunwielding associates were at the heart of the civil rights movement, though I do not recall his alleged chumminess with Dr...
...L a s t month in the media there was much wistful talk of the mellow Woodstock of long ago...
...I am sure that the happily married couple now inhabiting 1600 Pennsylvania has its stormy moments, but neither Ron nor Nancy seems to be anguished by the petty rivalries and calculations that the feminists tell us must be at the heart of the modern nuptial alliance...
...Just a mass of offices piled on top of one another...
...Scholars generally acknowledge that love, romantic love, remains one of the country's lasting values...
...William Kunstler, on my right, talked as though the war in Vietnam had had a very satisfactory conclusion...
...The women that I saw at the Republican convention last month seemed manifestly happier than any feminist I know of, and their achievements are of a high order: Cabinet members, U.S...
...When I came here twenty years ago," said the first, "I used to tell people back in New York that the streets in Dallas are so clean that you could eat meals off them...
...It was assumed that anyone who liked the rock music 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 of the 1960s supported radical politics, and that if you were not a radical in the 1960s you were a sorry wallflower, a member of a benighted minority...
...There in the company of William Kunstler, the radical lawyer...
...True, I have seen some of the nation's chief strategists of feminism cuddling prized household pets, and occasionally you might hear one suggest that she is the possessor of amorous powers comparable to, say, those of Helen of Troy...
...I grew dubious years ago...
...AMONG THE WOODSTOCK PEOPLE Last month a modem communications giant, NBC, transported me down memory lane, using a mundane limousine...
...but if those who gathered to commemorate Woodstock with me last month are any indication, the generation turned out a lot of dolts...
...My pal and I motored back to Manhattan, snickering all the way...
...Moreover they do so at no cost to the women's by R. Emmett Tyrrell, J r . self-esteem whatsoever...
...Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers' co-founder...
...Also education was impaired together with standards of intelligent thought...
...They do seem to be relatively free of the feminist fevers and can therefore face up to the wisdom of the birds and the bees much less gloomily...
...Actually the consequences of 1960s radicalism have been squalid, albeit marginal...
...The metaphysical rumble-bumble that was perceived in the popular music of the era passed me by...
...ly commence...
...In the past songsters might take a break from songs of love to compose ditties to the sidewalks of New York or a potentially white Christmas...
...Frankly, I still do not know what was expected of me...
...The vivacious Mrs...
...It is strange to see lines on faces that fifteen years ago looked so young," an illustrious activist confided to me...
...now and then, a nervous-looking, welldressed couple would emerge from the cool, dark shopping cave, only to run a gauntlet of proletarian inspection and comment...
...Back in 1969 I emerged from Woodstock unscathed...
...Wavy Gravey (profession unknown), and a couple of dozen other relics, I was supposed to summon up memories of the Woodstock rock festival of, lo, fifteen years ago and to blubber...
...I swear I will never complain about Washington summers again...
...He knew some of the most famous radicals of all, and he knows whatwrecks they made of their lives and how tragic their prescriptions were fbr others...
Vol. 17 • October 1984 • No. 10
