Editorials/Youth in Rebellion/I Remember Mario
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
YOUTH IN REBELLION These are mournful days in the faculty clubs of America. The profs, so many of whom have made politics their religion and gauchisme its inspiration, are finding themselves...
...Given the choice between Mr...
...The majority of American youths are supporting Ronald Reagan and the clock-stoppers...
...Furthermore this generation of young people is the first to be exposed to all the social engineering experiments implemented when utopian liberals gained the ascendancy over our educational and political systems...
...Now, in the case of GM vs...
...How to account for the scandal...
...What I am trying to establish here is the underlying basis for negotiations in general...
...As editor of The American Spectator I visit college campuses frequently, and from these anthropological expeditions I have concluded that today's youth are unsatisfied with the false pieties and other ideas bequeathed them by their radical predecessors...
...Finally, there are those observers of solid disposition who see the young's support for Reagan-Bush as a vote for "selfishness" and "narcissism...
...Nor are they necessarily mindless...
...On one side are the appeasement-oriented State Department doves and their media parrots...
...God knows where they all ended up, but I never pass a middle-aged bag lady or her male equivalent without thinking of the bright ones of the 1960s...
...foreign policy has been won by the militaristically minded...
...As has become the custom with the resurrected heroes of that decade, Mr...
...Some observers insist that young voters, having suffered through the Carter Administration's episodes of indecision and weakness, are fetched by what they perceive as Ronald Reagan's "strength...
...Savio derelict and forgotten...
...More recently he was a middle-aged student...
...Mondale in the White House the fortunate few might improve their economic positions, but'not the majority...
...I think not...
...Newsweek told us that "sources in Moscow were acknowledging that arms talks are a necessity," expressing the cost that we are imposing on them, and that "the Soviet military has begun to lobby for the resumption of negotiations" (ditto...
...This fall a rising generation of writers is producing a spate of intelligent books arguing against the liberals' gloomy nogrowth ideas...
...After more than a decade of high taxes and low productivity, the America of the early 1980s has not been as abundant with opportunities and riches as the America of the recent past...
...While most of his fellow students were at class preparing for the future he was leading demonstrations and getting arrestedmonce the gifted orator was jugged for biting a cop on the leg...
...Upon becoming eligible for Social Security he might still be a student...
...Do you remember the"silver tongued orator...
...Last month it was Berkeley's Free Speech Movement...
...His season of glory lasted but a few months, perhaps a year, certainly not much longer...
...Simply stated, today's young have by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Mondale's call for higher taxes and more sacrifices and Mr...
...with youth opting for Reagan's optimism and self-reliance over Walter Mondale's gloom and dependency...
...a compromise, by virtue of its ability to threaten a more burdensome cost...
...if we do not enter into arms control negotiations with them...
...Today those who spent the 1960s intelligently preparing for the future are stepping forward even as the erstwhile radicals continue staggering about, wondering where Ronald Reagan came from and why so few Americans listen to the Beatles...
...The union would have gone on strike, and instead of losing something tolerably small, GM would have lost something intolerably large (namely, total production...
...Savio weeping in Sproul Plaza last month over some has-been singer who was a wow twenty years ago reminded me that youth is not only a time for sowing wild oats but also for preparing for adulthood...
...The question is: What cost does the Soviet Union threaten to impose on the U.S...
...Mondale will move homes and cars still farther from their grasp...
...Still others don their Freudian robes and rumble orphically over the allure of the President's "grandfatherly" image--though some consider the ~mage to be that of a venerable uncle...
...Youth is supposed to be a time for hoisting the black flag and hollering for anarchy and liberty...
...Gromyko complained at one point, "The tug of war between the groups that determine U.S...
...For a while he was a bartender...
...The profs, so many of whom have made politics their religion and gauchisme its inspiration, are finding themselves lecturing to classes whose students sport an inscrutable abundance of Reagan-Bush campaign buttons...
...Along with the other radical fly-bynighters he was boomed as a prodigy populating "the brightest generation in our history...
...Each commemoration is going to be served up in a warm bath of nostalgia as commemorations of the Glenn Miller Orchestra might be served up in nostalgia...
...and again no mention slipped out about the malign results, in this case the damage done a great university...
...The young people I have seen are engaged in a search for ideas that is characteristic of youth...
...In August we relived Woodstock, very little being made of its unappetizing aftermath: drug addiction, venereal disease, petty criminality...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 II...
...on the other side the more realistic Defense Department "hawks...
...If today's young find satisfaction in the ideas of such writers as Charles Murray, the author of Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, and George Gilder, the author of The Spirit of Enterprise, there could be still more lugubriousness in the faculty clubs...
...The Soviets are not a separate side...
...The Soviets do not enter into the picture at all...
...Arms control negotiations" based on such a rationale are really negotiations with ourselves...
...My interest in the arcane topic was aroused by two nearly simultaneous and unrelated events: the arrival at the White House of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who fulfills the classic definition of a diplomat (someone who goes abroad to lie for his country...
...NATO's fragile unity could crack if Reagan appears to be dragging his feet...
...The topic is arms Control...
...These young people have been bused from school to school, propagandized by all the pontificators of reform, made into guinea pigs for each progressive enthusiasm that could tak~e over their school system...
...At the time of Gromyko's visit articles were published in both magazines in each of two issues (cover date, October 1 and 8)--four articles in all...
...Are college students as immune to the radical hooey as non-college youth...
...been entering a world that extends to them diminished possibilities...
...Even if a second Reagan Administration keeps the government from growing more onerous, it is going to be tough...
...He did not take credit for any of the social problems that grew ever worse in the 1970s...
...UAW, we have a real and purposeful negotiation...
...Apparently our media intend to relive many of the epic dramas of 1960s youth culture whether we like it or not, although each is to be expurgated of all the sordid details 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 so that Americans from every walk of life can sit back and enjoy...
...Nor did he explain why, if he and his friends were so successful, we have heard so little from them these last 20 years...
...Savio last month associated himself with all the virtuous deeds that supposedly followed...
...This was followed by: The Reagan administration also has tangible reasons for wanting arms negotiations, apart from the imperatives of presidential politicking...
...If UAW hadn't shown up for talks once the old contract expired, GM would presumably have been free to hire nonunion workers...
...Naturally within a few fleeting years all these geniuses had vanished from center stage...
...and the General Motors-United Auto Workers negotiations over a new contract for the labor union...
...Now back to Gromyko and arms control...
...Two of these were cover stories...
...Reagan's policy of lower taxes and more growth, the young voters quite naturally favor growth...
...Every now and again the average, taxpaying, God-fearing American, flipping through his newspaper or glancing at his TV screen, comes away feeling that he is a stranger in a strange land...
...The fact is that a new car and a new house are farther beyond the grasp of today's youth than they were for recent generations of young people...
...But therein I found no straightforward statement of Soviet-imposed cost...
...they simply weigh in on the State Department side...
...You negotiate with your adversary, and arrive at a compromise, when the other side has the capacity to impose a cost greater than your negotiated concession...
...Begun in the fall of 1964 as a popular protest against officious university bureaucrats, the Free Speech Movement soon fell under the control of Stalinists and Trotskyists...
...And this election could become one of the great l~litical watersheds of the twentieth century...
...In time, the becalmed ideologues wandered into the cults and the personal growth therapies--though I have known some who became excellent shyster lawyers and shady businessmen...
...Savio's oratory was perpetrated twenty years ago at the University of California at Berkeley where he was an accessory to what was called "the Free Speech Movement...
...The answer, of course, is that GM had much more to lose if it had not entered into negotiation...
...I doubt that today's youth are any more susceptible to baseness than any other generation, and I suspect today's youth are just as liberty loving and given to lapses irito thoughtfulness...
...Thus the UAW extracted from GM Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...They know that they face a very tough time just matching their parents' standard of living...
...The tough ideologues of the left began by manipulating the zomMes of the already established drug culture, but the America of the 1960s was not the Moscow of the last Czar...
...How many felt this way last month when we were confronted with news stories heralding the return of Mario Savio, the "silver tongued orator...
...Then time rushed on by...
...if Reagan wants money for his pet weapons projects, such as the MX or his "Star Wars" missile-defense system, he will have to give arms control the old college try...
...Today's youth understand this and recognize that the increased taxes and government regulations promised by Mr...
...Likewise, of course, GM threatened UAW with an equally severe cost...
...But it's important, too...
...For a brief and brassy hour he had a place on the national scene...
...Doubtless all these explanations have their merits, at least until we get to the last, whereupon I mutiny...
...Its demonstrations against university life were repeated all over the country, as was the movement's collapse into hedonism and anarchy...
...That the vast majority of Americans today do not give the first hoot about the 1960s counterculture seems not to matter...
...It is dull, I know, and I promise to do my best...
...The European allies are almost desperate for arms talks...
...Did you want to...
...Bear in mind that it ended up agreeing to certain provisions it would rather have sidestepped: establishing a job security fund, and so on...
...Is it "selfish" and "narcissistic" for the majority to want to provide for itself...
...Truth be known those who serve up these nostalgic commemorations are hugely selfindulgent, and it ought not to escape commentary that precisely this sort of 100 percent American self-indulgence is what ultimately sank the Free Speech Movement, leaving Mr...
...Nonetheless there he was last month back at Berkeley's Sproul Plaza with the press duly embalming the event and sentimentalizing it as only the American press can...
...In order to find an answer to this simple question, I decided to enter the arms control debate at the most popular or "high school" level, as it were--the level at which it is presented to us by Time and Newsweek...
...Seasoned political observers are as puzzled as the profs...
...These are all self-imposed costs, of course...
...Congress also is applying pressure...
...Let us ask ourselves this simple question: Why did GM enter into it...
...W e l l , what...
...With Mr...
...Do I hear groans...
...Well you are only young once, and the sight of Mr...
...The presence of Reagan supporters on college campuses is particularly mysterious, for it was not long ago that the campus was the preserve of radicals, and now many radicals hold forth from the lectern...
...Moreover, considering the frayed condition of such aspects of their lives as the educational system, their dissatisfaction is justified...
...Others stress the different moods conjured up by the candidates, Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...In these 26 pages of copy (13 for each magazine) I would presumably find the answer...
...Some observers may consider them bleak reactionaries, but as I see it they are merely typical young Americans seeking personal liberty and self-reliancq...
...Soon the revolutionary types found themselves being seduced by the drug culture and the idiots of sexual utopia...
...My guess is that they are a little weary of it all...
Vol. 17 • December 1984 • No. 12
