Editorials / Visions of Jesse / Front Page Indignities / Sockdolagers of 1983
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
H a s n ' t the Rev. Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign gotten off to a grand and glorious start? Certainly Jimmy Carter's 1976 bid did not begin as auspiciously, and look where Jimmy was...
...fifteen of them, to be precise...
...As explained by L. de Paor's book, Divided Ulster: The fear of being out-bred has ever been present, and the Unionists have been able to call on the Protestant employers and workers alike to exert economic pressure to drive Catholics out of the area...
...At the beginning of the year the economy sputtered and gasped for breath...
...Precisely one year after South Vietnam was turned into a giant concentration camp, he informed the Chicago Tribune: "It has been fascinating for me to observe what has happened in South Vietnam . . . . The new Saigon leaders have spent little time talking about the Americans who carpetbombed and defoliated their country...
...Perhaps the most important news story of 1983 is that delusion spreads...
...I ' m so happ y , " enthused Mrs...
...It is only by the operation of selective pressures, mainly economic, that the proportion of Catholics in the population as a whole has been kept relatively stable...
...Well, because they want to get food...
...Department of Agriculture food--five-pound packs of cheese and containers of honey...
...The consequences for Europe in the first half of this century and later for the Third World have not been salutary...
...If an American pilot were pulled from a downed airplane with his pants blown off and his genitals showing would they dutifully display that unedifying image on page one...
...You snicker, but have we not been taught that all is relative...
...Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church on 16th Street...
...A line of people, all black, were waiting at the church door...
...The media would see to that...
...As Rothman and Lichter have shown, the colleagues' tastes are exceptional as an archbishop's tastes are exceptional...
...I know we've had considerable information that people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that that's easier than paying for it...
...Happy New Year...
...Obstacles remained, for Mrs...
...Obviously there are large numbers of Americans who would like to know a lot more about an AP photographer whose repute is so high in Syrian eyes that he is trusted to go about taking pictures behind their lines...
...The Liberal brethren's favorite story is the story of spreading hunger and misery...
...How about showing him as his brains are being blown out...
...They ate the mail," the venerable Washington Post quoted prosecutor Glenda G. Gordon as saying...
...This turned out to be a free distribution of U.S...
...As Joe Sobran recently wrote: " I f one person in America had starved over the last 20 years, you, reader, would know his name...
...This undoubtedly is one of the chief functions served by the recurring sectarian riots and pogroms in Belfast: driving Catholics out, whenever the pressure of their numbers was felt, has been a feature of these...
...The colleagues are serenely isolated from the people, a point political scientists Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter have demonstrated by carefully polling them in their media sanctum sanctorums...
...What impels differential emigration impeding arrival of the ever-impending Catholic majority...
...Oh, you mean that they can afford it and then they still g o . . . " Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Jackson is a very modern American phenomenon, to wit: the media candidate, whose prototype was the rabble rouser...
...The IRA played no ostensible role in the start of the present Northern Ireland troubles, in 1968 and 1969...
...Jackson has had no career in business, the military, or government...
...In Baltimore, Maryland, two postal workers were convicted last spring of having eaten the mail...
...In the same years in the age group of 20 to 24, 28.6 percent of Roman Catholic males, but only 9.5 percent of other denomination males left...
...But after the large-scale Protestant assaults on Catholic areas of Belfast in August 1969 when 300 to 500 homes were burned, traditionalists in the IRA reasserted themselves.[New York Times, September 1, 1976] Thehard evidence demonstrates that the democratic principle of majority rule has mandated an independent, united Ireland...
...Early in the year Orange County Superior Court Judge James F. Judge presided over adoption proceedings wherein 45-year-old Joanna Clark, who underwent a sex change in 1975, adopted as her daughter 25-year-old Anna Marie Mostyn, whose sex change was then only half completed thus making her one of the few United States citizens whose anatomy has been reconstructed in accordance with the gender-neutral guidelines of the Department of Health and Human Services...
...Emigrants tend to be young people...
...The Economist of London, the most prestigious news magazine in the world, in its issue of October 30, 1982, found that the 64,000 Northern Ireland Assembly votes for Provisional Sinn Fein derived generally from Catholics who never before had voted...
...In New York City it was reported that young boys were sucking subway tokens from turnstile slots before subway customers could pass through...
...Was he beaten...
...Jackson is the candidate of a minority group recently emergent from political neglect or oppression...
...The IRA has been involved in a struggle against one of the biggest armies in the world for years...
...Clark as a mother...
...I think we have a system in this country that virtually everyone is taken care of by one program or another, that is who is truly in need, and a lot of people on the margin...
...I ' m looking forward to sitting in a church pew someday and watching her walk down the aisle . . . . Normalcy in her life, that's all I want for her...
...Jackson has ever done is hollered...
...The PLO...
...But that people are not being cared for, or that people are going hungry involuntarily, that's why the President has appointed this task force on food assistance to find out if that is true and if so why...
...If my friends in themedia truly respect the black community, perhaps they will treat it as they treat others...
...When polite opinion does not like them they are called one-issue candidates...
...George Washington did it, though only Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...The New York Times kept things more in proportion...
...Recently America has welcomed the antics of a lot of these media hustlers...
...The people's right to know, indeed...
...On Day One Washington Post reporter David Hoffman claimed, not believably, that Meese had "created a major political controversy" ("Meese Sparks a Firestorm"), and by Day Two the Post had two reporters on the case, Margaret Engel and Edward Sargent ("Meese's Hunger Remarks Stir More Outrage Among Groups...
...When the colleagues tell us that they are giving us the news the truth is that they are giving us what strikes them as newsworthy--according to their tastes...
...The indignity committed against Lieutenant Lange was less spectacular...
...Certainly Jimmy Carter's 1976 bid did not begin as auspiciously, and look where Jimmy was living by early 1977...
...I can, and I am sure that my Liberal friends could have used these news stories too...
...Mark Lange, the plane's pilot who was apparently in the process of dying...
...Think of it...
...Nor need we swallow the flumdiddle about the camera presenting the reality of war...
...though he has had considerable experience with government...
...I went inside the door to observe the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 7 EDITORIAL (continued from page 7) passions of the 1960s...
...Well, I think some people are going to soup kitchens voluntarily...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 5) allowed to arrive...
...Jackson becomes President of the United States he will be one of the few to rise to that high office with no elective experience whatsoever...
...Meanwhile, the Associated P r e s s reported that "Protestants elected 47 members who are pledged never to share power with Catholics and whose aim is to force London to hand back control of the province to the Protestant majority...
...I would gladly have dipped into my 1983 news files and fetched reports guaranteed to choreograph their laments with a stageful of hungry wretches...
...A l l the Rev...
...They do not recognize freedom's enemies nor freedom's friends, for their sense of reality was formed by the ideological (continued on page 44) The media Hive shifts the focus of its attack on the Reagan Administration so rapidly and so unpredictably that by the time you read this it may be as passe as "Debategate...
...Bureau of Prisons, alleging that it would be highly irregular to send such a comely prisoner to a male hoosegow where she might suffer a life of moral compromise...
...Or does he...
...The Liberal brethren look at the same economic indicators, that so reassure me and they see hunger and misery...
...Yet there are plenty of seasoned black politicos on Capitol Hill and the Republic's city halls whose professional backgrounds are not dramatically dissimilar from those of the flotsam and jetsam now floating and jetting toward the Democratic nomination...
...But did the IRA not launch the post-1969 current cycle of terrorism...
...What the newspapers did to Lieutenant Goodman was show--often on page one--an AP photograph of him trapped in humiliating condition: forcibly seated next to the most dignified Syrian I have ever seen, Lieutenant Goodman's arms apparently handcuffed behind his back, his dazed head cradled on the insouciant Syrian's shoulder, his mouth agape, his eyes 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 rolled back into his head so that only the whites showed...
...This is not f u n n y . , . I use the mail...
...Many are very docile poseurs, easily manipulated by the enemies of freedom...
...In March 1981, he assayed the emerging conservatism in the Republic and, as some 20 black youngsters were being brutally killed in Atlanta, declared, "It is open season on black people...
...What people aside from friends and admirers of the Syrian dictatorship want to see American servicemen humiliated...
...Yet when Jimmy's presidential campaign began in 1976 he was a political nobody, the ex-governor of Georgia...
...I wish they had come to me...
...It would be the most thoroughly documented death since John Kennedy's...
...Female emigration shows relatively similar percentages, although both are somewhat lower than males...
...Once again the Administration was making the mistake of playing the game of Policy according to the rules established by its adversaries...
...They did it with military authority and a liberated attitude...
...Judge Judge looks out on his courtroom and sees Mrs...
...Sir Harold openly boasts that the employment situation in Northern I r e l a n d has been manipulated economically on a massive scale by London, and that this produces antiseptically characterized "single religious community" employees who keep their neighbors out of work . . . . 3. The Election Figures: 1982...
...Unfortunately, aside from one presidential candidate's solemn declaration that students at some remote outpost were so hungry that they could not study, the Liberals have been very coy about providing corroboration...
...In the age group 25 to 29, 31.7 percent of Roman Catholic males but only 19.3 percent of other denomination males left...
...I couldn't think of anything more downright unhealthy," was a high Transit Authority's rebuke...
...and, suspecting v~olence, they lit out for the offices of the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals where they had deposited the contents of the young man's freezer--fifty pounds of it...
...Nonetheless hunger and misery spread...
...A l l these are memorable and useful stories, but my most memorable story may be the most useful of all...
...There was a time when out of respect for the dead we pulled a covering over the corpse...
...My first stop was St...
...9 . . [I]t is a clear fact that the Provisionals have emerged from the election with, for the first time, a solid political base...
...At approximately the 1969 revitalization of the current strife, the Northern Ireland government in Belfast and the various local authorities were perhaps the biggest employers in the region, and these invariably hired Protestants...
...There are those who will say that all the singularities of the Jackson campaign are owing to the fact that the Rev...
...For some reason, however, the Washington Post and other media seemed to be having a hard time actually producing a hungry person...
...Jackson is an activist...
...Moreover, inflation was down to the lowest yearly rate in nearly two decades...
...FRONT PAGE INDIGNITIES L a s t month the colleagues at many of the great newspapers of the Republic perpetrated an indignity on Lt...
...Sinn Fein had fielded just twelve candidates for the Assembly, but elected five...
...Nevertheless, let the record show that December's cause-of-the-month began when a wire service reporter engaged presidential counselor Edwin Meese III in the following colloquy: "Why do people go to soup kitchens on holidays...
...Authorities took desperate measures to end these Dickensesque scenes, including sprinkling the slots with chili powder, but to no avail...
...A predictable sequence of "indignat i o n " stories came out in the Washington Post...
...Jackson is the head of PUSH, People United to Serve Humanity, and in modern American politics outfits like this are the equivalent of yesteryear's Tammany Hall, though possibly not as representative...
...Clark...
...It was disclosed during 1967 that of 106 public service positions paying over s yearly, only three were held by Catholics...
...It is also doubtful whether an organization such as PUSH is as effective as Tammany, though PUSH seems to be more effective than most...
...Clark's daughter was serving a fifteen-year prison sentence for knocking off banks, and the poor thing languished in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville...
...Was he just called in once the Syrians had prepared a proper spectacle...
...So on Day Eight I omitted to shave, donned my scarf and rumpled raincoat, and set out to explore for myself...
...I was told this church has a she-minister, is in a black part of Washington (on the fringe of the ghetto), and has lots of white-liberal volunteer activity...
...You think others are going hungry voluntarily...
...Apparently there is an AP paparazzo who knows...
...Of course that is all he has had to do, for the Rev...
...What the media candidate does is assume a radical position and harangue it with panache...
...Since the war, it has shown a tendency to rise slowly, as follows: 1911 34.4070 1926 33.5070 1937 33.507o 1951 34.4070 1961 34.9070 By 1971 the Catholic proportion overall had slipped to 31.4 percent, yet in mid-1981 the Catholic birthrate remained higher than the Protestant...
...What emerges from these polls is a bovine herd of 1972 McGovernites who have never smartened up...
...It presents just as much as the cameraman either wants or is allowed to show...
...At least I would find it an important news story...
...Thus, the Administration once again demonstrated its (close your eyes and guess the next word) insensitivity to the poor...
...President Franklin Roosevelt was always photographed from the waist up...
...But hold...
...Blood-spattered and near death, he was shown in a frontal photograph...
...Conclusion...
...Navy navigator-bombardier who had been captured when his A6E was shot down over Syrian-held Lebanese territory, and on Lt...
...When they are favored they are called activists...
...By the end of the week the Washington Post seemed to be maintaining its indignation level fairly well, but there was an obvious reluctance On the part of reporters to set out for the soup kitchens...
...Over 90 percent of the sixcounty Northern Ireland civil servants were Protestant . . . . The memoirs of Sir Harold Wilson (from 1964 to 1970, and from 1974 to 1976, the U.K...
...The Rev...
...No American who saw last month's picture would not want to know about that...
...We know, of course, that a Pulitzer Prize is awaiting the journalist who can find an American who dies of hunger, and probably the Nobel Prize for Literature as well...
...Then they discovered that the young man's landlord was missing...
...Instead they have concentrated on rebuilding, putting people to work, inculcating new values and attitudes...
...Yet Miss Mostyn's new mother remained sanguine...
...The truth is they have no standards...
...Of course these are mere bromides, bespeaking no journalistic standards whatsoever...
...hat even within the six occupied northeastern counties a local Catholic majority's emergence has been blocked only through gross THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 45...
...Now I do not want to distress the colleagues who react to criticism as a schoolmarm reacts to mice in her desk drawer, but the journalists who featured these pictures in their newspapers have no taste and for that matter no sense...
...I was improving my mind last month, and to this end I avoided television...
...4.5 percent for males of other denomination...
...Were FDR presiding over our government from his wheelchair today doubtless the paparazzi.would be shooting all manner of daring and tasteless shots of his crippled condition and rationalizing such crassness with incantations about the people's right to know, verisimilitude, and other self-serving arcana...
...think that they have money...
...How the colleagues in television news handled these men I do not know...
...In New Orleans, Louisiana, police speculated that a 25-year-old man whom they had arrested for allegedly stealing and eating neighborhood dogs had been driven by "desperation and hunger...
...Let the colleagues infiltrate their fearless foreign correspondents across occupied Lebanon to uncover the cause of our flyer's befuddled state...
...President Carter's administration gave PUSH about $4.5 million in grants that are now being investigated by the Department of Education whose spokesman says that PUSH may have to return anywhere between $880,000 and $2.1 million in misspent funds...
...Herbert Hoover did it, though he had a successful business background and a long and distinguished career in government service...
...Who in the Third World does he speak for most often...
...Yet it was Harland workers who more than any had denied their fellow Ulstermen the right to work...
...Officials knew not where to place her...
...The bottom line," she declared, "is that Anna Marie is now the daughter I always wanted, the focal point of my life...
...The Economist elaborated: Almost the entire Catholic voting population of Northern Ireland--37070 of the electorate--supported candidates committed to playing no part in the new assembly...
...He is admired for his ideals, style, and rhetoric, and if his ideals and style are resistant to critical judgment, his rhetoric is not so slippery...
...On Day Three, I went to the Safeway to see if they carried any books (they do have a sizable book section) on how to fatten up on the least amount of money, but all I could find were dieting books...
...Prime Minister) recall with approval his television address on May 28, 1974: My own speech the following day was concerned with two main points, one, to emphasize the argument about the vast assistance given by Westminster to help unemployment in the Province, and two, to open up a debate about the future...
...In fact, they are crass to the point of being primitive...
...This turned out to be what the White House had dubbed "Care and Share Day," I read in the paper...
...Where do the colleagues draw the line...
...What are their standards...
...These are men and women who have shown themselves to be as capable as any white Machiavel at creating a political organization, hollering at prospective constituents, and winning elections...
...The victorious Adams--a former Provisional IRA commander who spent two years on the run from British security forces--declared: "Obviously the IRA has support...
...According to the 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 San Francisco Chronicle, Judge Judge's courtroom became a scene of jubilation: " I ' m a mother...
...A sign on the door said: "Eligibility criteria: Food Stamp recipients, Medicare recipients, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Public Assistance recipients, Social Security recipients, Exhausted Benefits persons, the unemployed...
...It should be recalled that persons of other denominations outnumber Catholics about two to one, so the Catholic emigration on this basis is quite high...
...Nineteen eighty-three passes, and 'tis time to throw another log on the fire, uncork a jug, and savor our favorite news stories of the dying year...
...Paul Johnson in his splendid new history of this dramatic century, Modern Times, speaks with foreboding of the rise of politicos whose whole lives are devoted to political agitation...
...The Catholic Northern Ireland absolute majority is indeed always imminent but never arrives due to differential emigration...
...Social spending has increased thirty fold in real terms since 1964, and the expenditure for food stamps has grown at about the same rate since the early 1970s...
...The extent of the danger which has been, and still is, apprehended by the Protestant population to their "ascendancy" in this respect is shown by the fact that at any given moment the number of Catholic children of school-going age is nearly half that of the total of such children (and in 1969, according to [1963-1969 Prime Minister of Northern Ireland] Captain [Terence] O'Neill, the proportion of Catholic children was 51 percent...
...Their goal is to amass as much political power as their flamboyance can attract, and by capturing headlines many have amassed power out of all proportion to the number of yokels they sway...
...They seemed to be more interested in snagging Meese in another "gaffe," photographing him sitting down at a well-set table, and so on...
...But then, many of our journalists are.not intrepid at all...
...Clark looks at Miss Mostyn and sees a daughter...
...They also created boat people and used chemical and biological warfare on Laotian tribesmen...
...As explained during 1971 in the Review of Politics: [T]he total percentage of emigration from Northern Ireland from 1951 to 1961 was 10.1 percent for Roman Catholic males...
...At its 1972 founding it was called People United to Save Humanity, and, well, here we all are...
...Robert Goodman, the U.S...
...My favorite big story is the story of the economic recovery...
...That Catholic community was split as never before between its constitutional and its revolutionary wings, and the constitutional side--represented by the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP)--was seen to be losing its force to the revolutionary nationalists of the Provisional Irish Republican Army...
...after an important military career...
...In the 1930s George OrweU saw the same partisanship blinding journalists, and it alarmed him "because," he wrote, "it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world...
...On finance, we had provided s million for the Harland and Wolff shipyard, "where the employment is almost 100 percent from a single religious community...
...for Roman Catholic females, 8.8 percent m females of other denomination, 3.0 percent...
...You have yours, and I have mine...
...They will treat its political leaders as pols not its "activists...
...We should," he has said, "look to the Third World for an answer" to American problems, which he claims are uniquely invidious, for instance: "a psychological conspiracy" against blacks, "a role adopted by the F B I . . . to stop the rise of a black messiah...
...A lawyer for Miss Mostyn filed a $3.25 million lawsuit against the U.S...
...If the Rev...
...By the year's end the recovery had become the healthiest since 1964 as employment grew along with real income, the Gross National Product, and productivity...
...a wholesomelooking fellow in jogging attire displayed him like a trophy from the hunt...
...Imagine an American journalist duly querying "the people" on what precisely they would like to know...
...Other groups would view events quite differently...
...Vice President Garry Adams of Sinn Fein during October 1982 proved the first elected member of the new, Britishsponsored Northern Ireland Assembly...
...The Rev...
...Did he take pictures of how Lieutenant Goodman was rendered comatose...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
