Capitol Ideas/Entrail Reading
Bethell, Tom
of homosexual rights, no-nuke JFK champion of the nuclear freeze and holistic medicine--doubtless many of the Believers now at work have spied evidence of all these good causes in John F....
...A person making $100,000, for example, would get a tax cut this July of about $1,500...
...Picasso...
...Lou Harris, you can be sure, would be there to hint that the former prisoner would unfairly "benefit" from such a change...
...There is a clear "pattern of discrimination" in favor of leftist ideology, whether Harris himself knows it or not...
...They were not asked about liberal ones...
...Do you favor or oppose putting a $700 limit on the tax cut anyone can get on July 1? (Favor: 66~ Oppose: 30070...
...Signed limited edition of 150...
...Elisabeth Clerget's i.~s Dewx Barqs~es, original etching...
...sexism" say the feminists...
...You experience the pollster's inquiry as an examination, a multiple-choice test in which one of the responses is correct, enabling you to "pass" some unstated but dimly sensed test of good citizenship and sound values...
...also, alas, he was erratic...
...Vasarely...
...techniques of entrail readers, but of course we recognize today that the precise methodology is irrelevant...
...They oppose indexing the tax brackets to inL flation...
...Signed limited edition of 100...
...But the question never will be asked this way because Harris is quite obviously in the business of representing "public opinion" as favoring the left-liberal agenda...
...This safe conduct into the haven of responsible citizenship, sound value structure, and media approval is done by wording the question in such a way as to nudge the alert but nevertheless tractable respondent down the path that seems to promise least criticism or eyebrow raising on the part of the examining pollster...
...Do you really believe that a majority of Americans feel that way...
...Imagine that there are two prisoners, one receiving 100 lashes a day and the other only ten...
...This is not even particularly surprising...
...On the shooting down of KAL 007, Americans support Reagan "more for what he did not do than for what he did," a conclusion directly contradicted by Harris's own data...
...George Gilder has called polling the modern equivalent of entrail reading, which may not be too far off the mark...
...The same is true of today's fashionable pollsters...
...The keepers of the Kennedy Legend may have the poetry, but I have the quotes right from the Legend's mouth...
...Our offerings include signed original etchings, engravings, lithographs, woodcuts, and silkscreen prints...
...They are opposed to business and "conservative" political action committees, but they support (surprise) "proenvironmental" PACs...
...And as I know from my own experience of being polled, your first reaction tends to be something like this: " . . . this guy has my phone n u m b e r . . . perhaps he has my name . . . . " I am assured the numbers are randomly dialed, but people don't know that...
...I mean, someone has gone to all this trouble to phone them up...
...Perhaps that's why The WallStreetJourhal, Business Week, Barron's, Money, AP and UPI have quoted us as an authority on investing in art...
...The correct answer to that question is yes, and it was furnished by 84 percent of those polled...
...All this is quite untrue, as is the claim that Kennedy at some point in his presidency turned resolutely from Cold War bellicosity to conciliation...
...If the bias in his questions were random I would not say this, but it is consistent...
...For more information, send in the coupon...
...Not that I know anything about the Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...In fact he will seize gratefully upon such clues, because he will be ashamed to admit his ignorance...
...Democrats in Congress propose that no one get a tax cut above $700, because they feel it is unfair to have the rich benefit so much more than everybody else...
...Artists like Calder, Mir6...
...Elizabeth Drew of the New Yorker evidently thinks it is, and my guess is that Mr...
...But we are rarely given the contradictory evidence...
...If you do then there may be an entrail-reading job waiting for you, and you will no doubt be good at it, too, because your patter will be convincing...
...But the statement with which respondents were asked to agree or not was: "The communist threat in E1 Salvador and Nicaragua is so serious that we must accept any allies there even if they are military dictators or represent rich and powerful interests in those countries...
...The question was: "Do you feel that excessive campaign spending is a very serious problem...
...I tell you, gentlemen, this whole polling business verges on the scandalous, and it is doubly deplorable that the news media, who pride themselves on their skeptical, tough-minded attitude toward "press release journalism," not only print the pollsters' press releases uncritically, but are increasingly involved in orchestrating and conducting their own polls...
...Signed limited edition of 24,S...
...Pollsters essentially capitalize on this sense of shame, themselves shamelessly leading respondents out of the panicky mental cul-de-sac they find themselves in when questioned out of the blue about Anne Gorsuch (has she "failed to press charges against known violators of anti-pollution standards...
...polls show a consistent majority over 60 percent in favor of the ERA...
...Well, it isn't going to end . . . . because what happens in Europe or Latin America or Africa directly affects the security of the people who live in this city, and particularly those who are coming after...
...Then, too, ideologues need exemplars...
...Signed limited edition orS0...
...At the conclusion of an encomiastic column on Kennedy last month Anthony Lewis adroitly shifted from bouquets to an invidious comparison of the illusory Kennedy with the present reality: "We have a President now who shows no sensitivity to the nuclear danger, who seeks to provoke paranoia about communismmwho in his third year of office has learned nothing...
...Worse, the question is calculated to stir up resentment, suggesting that "the rich" (those earning $50,000 a year now qualify for this label, even though they might well not qualify for a mortgage...
...But there are probably not more than a couple of hundred, or maybe at the outside a couple of thousand, people in America who have any idea whether current campaign spending in America is "excessive" or not...
...Here, for example, are some of the things that the Harris Survey found out about the American people in 1983...
...Jarle Rosseland's Fret in tbr Air, original woodcut...
...continued on page 46) by Tom Bethell I t seems odd that the press, which prides itself on taking such an adversarial view of life, should not only be uncritical of pollsters but actually be in bed with themmhiring them and publicizing their often absurd findings on the front pages of the newspapers...
...Lou Harris has also found this year that Americans are opposed to the MX missile, just as they oppose a potential laser-beam defense against enemy missiles...
...Deadline for submission of essays is March l, 1984...
...And we recognize that our vision is somehow obscured by "science," by the pollsters' claim to be saying things "with 95 percent certainty that the results are within plus or minus 3 percentage points of what they would have been if the entire population had been polled...
...Custom-framed...
...They did not quote those later speeches wherein Kennedy slipped back into that weird oratorical style that charmed the romantics in America but set off alarm in the cocos of the Kremlin's paranoiacs...
...The "public opinion" that they purport to measure closely corresponds to conventional media opinion...
...There's no obligation...
...It would be interesting and instructive to make a list (it would be a long one) of all the other institutions that the "adversary press" regards with equanimity, indeed encouragement, but today let's stick to the polls...
...Not sure: 4070...
...Americans oppose a bigger defense budget, and, finally, "a record high 62~ of Americans have expressed sad and bitter alienation toward those running society and feel powerless to do anything about it...
...Pollsters and media have also persuaded official Washington that "public opinion" favors the Equal Rights Amendment...
...You do not have the sense that your opinions are being measured as a part of a larger, scientific exercise...
...Harris's question on the income-tax cap went like this: The Garvey Fellowships will be awarded for the three best essays on the topic "THE ROAD TO SERFDOM FORTY YEARS LATER" o r "AN EVALUATION OF 'NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL POLICY' "' Essays of not more than 5000 words may be submitted by students or young faculty members 35 years of age or younger, who are not members of The Mont Pelerin Society...
...Works by artists we offer tend to appreciate, sometimes as much as 30% in a single year...
...In January 1983, for example, the Harris Survey reported that a sizable majority of Americans believe that excessive campaign spending is " a very serious problem...
...It is my impression that all these alleged measurements of public opinion are ultimately intended to influence public policy by reassuring elected officials that it is safe to implement the liberal agenda because it is desired by a majority of Americans...
...Such findings will be called "scientific," they will be accorded the status of news, and in time you may even be called "respected...
...He was always ardently anti-Communist...
...But there is a more pervasive problem...
...Harris's envy-inciting question on the tax cut could easily have been rewritten to elicit a response favorable to tax cutting, e.g., by pointing out that high rates drive "the rich" into shelters, so lowering such rates will induce them to "shoulder a greater portion of the tax burden...
...From his bravura inaugural address to the day of his death he persisted in mixing highminded aspirations to reason and sobriety with magniloquent pep talks exhorting America to defend the "frontiers of freedom" everywhere...
...A benign ruler then suggests a "ten percent cut" in their rate of punishment...
...Friedlaender...
...You must wonder when it is all going to end, and when we can come back home," Kennedy said, exhorting a cringing audience, suspected, quite possibly, of shilly-shallying in its defense of "frontiers of freedom...
...Uneasy feelings like this flit halfconsciously through your mind...
...The question is fiscally illiterate, to start with...
...The tax one pays, and thus one's "tax cut," depends not on how much one "makes" but on one's taxable income...
...Consider what was done with Daniel Boone, a man who rarely changed his linen or came in from the rain...
...More frequently, however, people do not have the slightest idea what their "opinion" is on the issue that has been raised...
...Pentagon procurement policy ("waste at the Pentagon"), or federal deficits ("leading to high interest rates...
...Each print we offer is Signed and numbered by the artist...
...In such cases, and they are the rule rather than the exception, "public opinion" is something that is manufactured rather than measured...
...Harris would like to reassure her that she is not alone...
...That bit of Lou Harris window-dressing exactly corresponds to the magician's patter, designed to distract you at the psychological moment...
...In cases such as the ERA people may consciously disguise their opinions...
...If you want to become a "nationally recognized" pollster (and bear in mind that there are plenty of nationally unrecognized pollsters) then your best bet is to frame the questions in such a way as to ensure that your findings are approved of, and thus quoted, by the major newspapers...
...Following Tom Bradley's recent gubernatorial defeat 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 in California--the polls said he would win--pollsters have belatedly acknowledged this obvious point...
...Lou Harris is no doubt correct to say that 84 percent " o f all Americans" would have given the same reply...
...Alexander Calder's Her/~mtal Pyram/d, fithograph...
...And each print has been chosen not only for its beauty but for its investment value...
...Nations need legends...
...They favored a cap on the third year of the income tax cut...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 11...
...In other words, people don't necessarily tell the truth in polls...
...What we can be sure of is that the entrail readers were able to make things come out the way their bosses wanted: The course of action "indicated" by the disposition of the entrails would certainly have been consistent with prevailing court wisdom...
...They oppose his policy in Central America, even though another and intriguing poll by the New York Times--an unusual one in that it sought information rather than "opinion"--demonstrated conclusively that the American people do not know what side the U.S...
...I think that most people of independent mind suspect there is something vaguely fraudulent about pollingAthat there is some sleight of hand involved, some mystification of which the pollsters themselves may not be fully aware...
...The Anthony Lewises of this world last month were quoting the conciliatory passages of Kennedy's June 1963 speech at American University...
...Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and a full money-back guarantee...
...People earning $100,000 a year could be in tax shelters and paying little or no income tax...
...They support wage-and-price controls...
...Out of "chivalry," says Gilder...
...In your own home, you can exhibit original work by artists who are represented in the world's great museums and galleries...
...will "benefit" from a change that merely diminishes the unequal treatment of Americans...
...People will only rarely say they don't know anything about the subject, or have no opinion on it...
...Precisely because the respondent has no real knowledge or opinion about the subject that has been raised, he is highly susceptible to the "leading of the witness" that is contained in the question...
...of homosexual rights, no-nuke JFK champion of the nuclear freeze and holistic medicine--doubtless many of the Believers now at work have spied evidence of all these good causes in John F. Kennedy's brief presidency...
...For example, a certain well-known conservative columnist who regularly tells us that we are undertaxed has used such a shelter, and I'm sure he earns more than $100,000...
...You'll find out about the special pleasure of owning original art, instead of just visiting it...
...First prize Garvey Fellow award of $2500 + $1000 travel grant to participate in the Society's Cambridge meeting Second prize Garvey Fellow award of $1500 + $1000 travel grant to participate in the Society's Cambridge meeting Third prize Gan/ey Fellow award of $1000 + $1000 travel grant to participate in the Society's Cambridge meeting Further information is available from: The Mont Pelerin Society PO Box 7031 Alexandria, Virginia 22307 USA means that those in higher income brackets of $50,000 and above get a much bigger tax cut than everybody else...
...At the Original Print Collectors Group, we offer moderately priced limited edition prints by these and other well-known artists...
...They oppose the re-election of Ronald Reagan (or they did in August...
...I i .Mz I .ORESS PLEASE F:-UNT I I I Kyohei lnukal's Mist - Vcrm~t, original fithngraph...
...The essays will be judged by a panel of three senior members of The Mont Pelerin Society...
...is on in Nicaragua and El Salvador...
...Precisely because their opinion has been sought, they believe that they ought to have such an opinion...
...Why were these rhapsodies being composed...
...They are not convinced that the Communist threat in El Salvador and Nicaragua "is worth the risk of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 9 American involvement...
...Statewide ERA's have been rejected by voters in Iowa, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Nevada, and Wisconsin, despite preceding polls indicating support for the measure...
Vol. 17 • January 1984 • No. 1
