The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS e"Hymietown"? Did one of the giants of this great and democratic Republic in mid-February refer to the Big Apple as "Hymietown" and to Jews as "Hymies"? Well,...
...Then it hit me--Walker Percy...
...For example, some area public elementary schools are distributing a coloring book to their students explaining that nice boys and girls don't spray paint the walls or throw rocks into classroom windows...
...Stevenson for reawakening us to a tragedy that national policy has all but closed its eyes to...
...American imperialists suffered a shock when it was reported that Democratic presidential candidate Hugh Bagley was arrested on traffic violations five days before the New Hampshire Democratic primary...
...Well, between campaign appearances during which he regularly induced New Hampshire school children to chant Mussolinilike, "I am somebody," the Rev...
...Yuri V. Andropov had become the first leader of an industrialized nation ever to die of a cold...
...Konstantin U. Chernenko succeeded him as General Secretary, and it will surprise no one to hear that he almost always wears a hat, even while sleeping with the comely Mrs...
...Burr is offering he has not said, but rumor has it he will personally accompany the winner to a service presided over by the Archbishop of Indianapolis, Indiana, a violent opponent of every sort of capitalist indulgence and a gentleman whose legs hold up a monument weighing upwards of 21 stone...
...This is the same wishful thinking that led another recent candidate to promise he would" cut taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget...
...But there is hope...
...Lehrman thinks we can give every family a $10,000 exemption, tax the remainder at 10 percent, and "produce the same revenue as our present system...
...Citations to or copies of references should be sent to me at the address below...
...Jackson to be especially sensitive to racial and ethnic sensibilities...
...oOn February 1 President Reagan proposed a $925.5 billion budget for fiscal 1985...
...would consider Catholicism "interchangeable" with Christianity...
...lnsley Warden, Louisiana I would add to Lewis Lehrman's discussionof the flat tax that the taxpayer's personal exemption should be set by the welfare technocrats at Health and Human Services to correspond with the poverty level at a given family size...
...Only on the last Sunday of the month did he finally admit that he had indeed used slurs in speaking of Jews...
...Fannie Glass of Cruger, Mississippi says that it is after a rainfall that she most "misses having some dirt to eat...
...According to the Times story, "For generations, the eating of clay-rich dirt has been a curious but persistent custom in some rural areas of Mississippi and other Southern states, practiced over the years by poor whites and b l a c k s . " _9 In religious news The American Spectator's renowned publisher, Mr...
...Certainly the tax system, the federal judiciary, and the monetary system need reforming but they will never be significantly altered under our present constitution...
...In Reykjavik, Iceland, Finance Minister Albert Gudmundsson has been charged with keeping a dog...
...Was there a huge moral outcry in the media...
...Stevenson elucidate...
...Here are situations and conversations in which, I thought, only Binx Bolling, Will Barrett, or Tom More might find themselves...
...In Caldwell, Idaho, Miss Verna Simons was charged with second-degree manslaughter for dragging a gentleman from her car along Interstate M. The Ku Klux Klan has expelled the number two Kluxian of the Chickasaw, Alabama klavern for inviting blacks to join in a local march and for employing a black lawyer to obtain a parade permit...
...Indebted, mayhap, to Emily D., yet marvelous just the same...
...Professor Richard F. Duncan University of Nebraska College of Law Lincoln, NE 68583-0902 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 7...
...My check stubs show that the federal government took 6.7 percent (of the first $35,700) for social security alone...
...God bless Mr...
...Ex-President Jimmy Carter flew to Australia after another painful stay in Emory University Hospital where he had hemorrhoid surgery in the presence of one of the finest brain surgeons in the state of Georgia...
...That is almost $200 billion above Jimmy Carter's last budget-and we still hear gasps over the "Reagan cuts...
...He is portrayed as the American Churchill, though he gibbers rot such as: "We can move from the slaveship to the championship...
...My employer paid another 6.7 percent...
...The exemption would help government revenues be self-limiting...
...It is not...
...In addition the Internal Revenue Service withheld about 26 percent for a total of 39.4 percent of my pay going to the federal government...
...Ahem, only the Washington Post pursued the matter...
...I am primarily interested in serious literary references (such as the reference from the journals of Andr~ Gide quoted above, and stanza 4 from Galway Kinnell's poem "There Are Things I Tell to No One...
...Rather than admit that there are dignified blacks around like Navy Lieutenant Robert Goodman and his admirable father, they heave up a "Step 'n Fetchit" revised for the 1980s, a vulgar opportunist whose oratory is composed of infantile rhymes and whose claim to statesmanship is a series of inane slogans and cheers as apposite to political problems as advertisements for patent medicines are to curing leukemia...
...Chesterton in the February issue...
...Two examples of the "tawdry rhetoric accompanying tawdry thought" adduced by Mr...
...I would appreciate the assistance of Americ'an Spectator readers in uncovering more of these literary references...
...oWhat we have here is a pack of typical American mountebanks being aided and abetted by Liberal racism, that esoteric prejudice that restrains Liberals from treating black Americans with the same respect accorded whites...
...Alas, Stein fact is stranger than Percy fiction...
...And according to the New York Times, Mrs...
...But no, I'm being too harsh...
...Thus the Rev...
...F.R...
...When it's good and dug from the right place," Mrs...
...Why did he refer to Jews as "Hymies...
...Simplistic suggestions about tinkering with this or that only deludes people into thinking the present setup is workable...
...I have re-read Orthodoxy since Mr...
...From scenic Islamabad, Pakistan comes word that rioting male students, indignant over the government's attempt to segregate them from their cuties on public buses, have killed a bus conductor in the northern city of Lahore...
...Buckley Camden, South Carolina Poor P o l l s Kudos to Tom Bethell for another great demolition job--this time on those pretentious hucksters and their contrived "polls" ("Entrail Reading," TAS, January 1984...
...He thinks Chesterton writes "laboriously" and "is intensely tiring...
...Brookhiser are Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man...
...Thank you...
...Glass attests, "dirt has a fine sour taste...
...Jackson, and the country's greatest creator of art deco nudes, Playboy's Mr...
...The Winter Olympics took place in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, and American commentators were not fooled by totalitarianism's smiling face...
...My guess is he could placate the Liberals by explaining that it is essential for a black presidential candidate to use anti-Semitic terms if he is to have any hope whatsoever of attracting antiblack voters...
...Stevenson...
...From the outhouse to the courthouse...
...My congratulations to Mr...
...From the guttermost to the uppermost...
...Of their 1980s Step 'n Fetchit the Liberals will believe anything...
...Those "well-respected" and "authoritative" national polls have about as much credibility as still another declaration by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops...
...Ever larger numbers of perfectly sensible black people are moving into the American middle class and are as free of racial oppression and of racial prejudice as a Rockefeller, yet the civil rights mountebanks insist on portraying the Republic as a land seething with degenerate white supremacists...
...And when he invokes the (by Orwell condemned) "typical intellectual's stratagem, namely linguistic innovation," hasn't the tactic become so dishonest as to amount to linguistic neology...
...Is he suggesting that the oldest and largest body of Christians is historically not...
...Jackson is admired for just those assets he lacks: eloquence, liberality, learning, and integrity...
...Since 1924 it has been malum prohibitum to keep dogs in this ancient city, and even untidy wives are viewed unfavorably...
...Patrick Nagel, died of a heart attack at a celebrity aerobics benefit to raise funds fgr the American Heart Association...
...What is more, this unsavory little piece of hypocrisy has taken place during a time when we are all being harangued by pontificators like the Rev...
...Here we saw the same media establishment that ran James Watt out of government for a very ambiguous sally avert its gaze from yet another anti-Semitic episode involving one of the Republic's civil rights mountebanks...
...Ronald Burr, is responding to the clergy's repeated expressions of concern over world poverty by auspicating a contest, "Find the Fattest Bishop...
...He associates with race fanatics like Black Muslims, and despite his holy certificate he winks often at the truth...
...His criticism is like that of the dandy--his distaste for Chesterton's "tawdry rhetoric" is simply a matter of Brookhiser's personal stylistfc preference, and not one "tawdry thought" is in fact shown to be tawdry...
...Edward Peters Claremont, California The J o l l i e s t o f J o u r n a l i s t s All praise to Richard Brookhiser for bursting the bubble that was Chesterton ("The Everlasting Bore," TAS, February 1984...
...oThe Saudi Arabian newspaper, AlJazirah, urged Arabs to donate to the presidential campaign of the Rev...
...Brookhiser's surprise that G.K...
...More bothersome is Mr...
...Nagel, who at the time of his expiry was a full 26 years short of his average life expectancy, had worked out for about 15 minutes before the fatal seizure...
...Conlee is the plastic surgeon who sued the McGhan Medical Corporation after many of the company's inflatable breasts began to leak once he had implanted them in his patients, and now 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 a local Solomon has awarded him more than $I 1 million in damages...
...May I assure the condescending Mr...
...Jackson indignantly dismissed charges that he had used such slurs during a powwow with reporters at Washington National Airport's Butler Aviation Terminal...
...Ewin H. Barnett Ashland, Missouri I t ' s True What They Say Having lived in the Los Angeles area for only about a year (and hailing, prior to that, from the Show Me state) I read with special delight Benjamin J. Stein's "The Derationalized Zone" (TAS, January 1984...
...Thank goodness, I sighed in relief, it's not just me...
...I think not...
...From the statehouse to the White House...
...Apparently after surveying his victim's garden he attracted her hostile attention by relieving himself on some potted plants, and as her vituperations mounted something in his theretofore serene mind, to use his words, "just snapped...
...In Australia he cuddled a koala that left a mysterious stain on his shirt, causing him to smile toothily and reach for Rosalynn...
...Burr asks that each entrant weigh his candidate on a scale certified by the National Livestock Grower's Association and send the results plus a picture of the reverend entrant along with one of his recent outbursts on behalf of the world's poor and against the capitalist vice to Mr...
...W.T...
...Konstantin U. Chernenko...
...And, the gentle admonitions are printed in five different languages...
...Employing one of the most useful weasel words of the time, the moral bullhorn of Campaign '84 declared that he had "no recollection" of such a conversation...
...What rewards Mr...
...Burr at his office in Bloomington, Indiana no later than April 30...
...No more will I joke about old women who try to sweep back the sea with a broom...
...Ted Humes Phoenix, Arizona Taxes and Conservatism I don't know how long it has been since Lewis Lehrman ("A New Conservatism," TAS, January 1984) drew a paycheck...
...oThis really is a high moment in our national hypocrisy, a hypocrisy that features witch hunts for bigots led by mountebanks who view the world almost solely in racial terms, namely the mountebanks of the civil rights movement...
...After duly noting the Communist achievement of keepigg housing and medical costs to a minimum, they ripped away the Marxist facade to reveal the Red Horrors: air pollution and pandemic smoking in public places...
...That's a cavil...
...We need a constitutional convention to draw up new rules...
...Brookhiser's lamentable foray into religious cri~cism and believe he has (continued on page 40) Author's Query I am engaged in the task (both joyful and tearful) of collecting literary references pertaining to either the horror of abortion or, in the words of Gide, the "extraordinary beauty" or essential humanity of the unborn child...
...Soviet medicine suffeeed another black eye when it was reported on February 10 that Mr...
...I find him scintillating and provocative...
...Thus the agency with the vested interest in seeing the number of poor be maximized would be reducing its own budget...
...Salted peanuts is a better metaphor for that likable man: tasty in moderation, otherwise cloying...
...oOn the culture front, composer Kirk Nurock scotched plans to compose his long-awaited Sonata for Piano and Gold Fish when his Sonata for Piano a~d Dog received mixed reviews at the University Center in Victoria, British Columbia...
...Stein's article induced a strange sense of d~.j~ vu: Somewhere, I was sure, I had read all of this before...
...oIn Corpus Christi, Texas, Dr...
...is not "admired for what is weak and shoddy," at least not by t~is real admirers...
...RET C O R R E S P O N D E N C E Transcendental Journalism "Traveling the Afghan Archipelago," by Matthew Stevenson (TAS, February 1984), would cause anyone to weep for the plight of the resistance fighters were there not an exhaustion of sorrow, pity, and rage from so many other victims of the Soviet "evil empire," which is a description lapidary in its exactitude...
...He transcends journalism: "Nor could there be a better cover for both sides than a city of bazaars and narrow, cobbled streets through which intrigue passes as quietly as small boys with bare feet...
...instead I will recall Californians who hire grown men to blow leaves off the sidewalk with gasoline powered engines...
...Three days later Mr...
...David Garabedian, a lawn-care expert now on trial on charges of having strangled a woman after surveying her garden, has pleaded that he was under the influence of pesticides and not responsible for his actions...
...Brookhiser that G.K...
...In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mr...
...Mr...
...No way...
...Bagley is the only candidate whose platform calls for annexation of Mexico, though many of the candidates believe it is time for America to begin returning territory...
...Neii McCaffrey Pelham Manor, New York Having followed the career of Richard Brookhiser since his first articles appeared in National Review, I was startled by his sophomoric sundering of G.K...
...Imagine if he had premiered the piece in old Reykjavik...
...The "long, precise gait of someone who has spent a lifetime climbing through mountain passes," however, though it rivets my imagination, persistently eludes definition t h e r e . . . would Mr...
...Jack Conlee has obtained legal relief from all the laughs and shrieks his flatulent breasts have caused around town...
...Will Bob Tyrrell now hire me to write a piece on "The Everlasting Manic...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
