The Great American Saloon Series/Quaffing in Massachusetts
Mysak, Joe
long way, baby. Jesse couldn't calculate her way out of a clothing boutique, much less deliberately entrap an unwilling hero. She is simply afraid, of Jake and of her powerful mother; and the...
...All t h i s . . , l i g h t . . . I feel like a mole...
...The drinking in Massachusetts, as Barrister Reed would note later that evening, is not for wise men or sad Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer...
...There is simply no developed interaction, for good or ill, between Terry and Jessie...
...We begin the night with eight or nine 16-oz...
...Here were men who knew what they were about, dispensing and downing the exalted product of brewery and distillery...
...There's something wrong," I said to native guide Reed...
...now he's a lifeguard with the face of a butterball...
...But strangely enough, Bethell apparently thinks that under Smith there were "no actual policy goals to aim for--government programs to be developed, changed, or abolished...
...In particular, the Department has sought to discourage expansive readings of the Constitution and federal laws that do violence to the intentions of their authors, and ultimately the will of the American people...
...The paralyzing wistfulness seized me...
...In truth, there is hardly a saloon in the entire state that knows it is meant to be dark...
...It has refused to endorse compulsory busing and successfully encouraged the adoption of magnet schools and other remedies for school segregation...
...Hackford a disservice...
...Think about it...
...Nevertheless, it is not without a certain entertainment value...
...On second thought, I might be doing Mr...
...Putting them down with collegians grown belligerent on the night air is not civilized drinking...
...Go to the drinking in Massachusetts...
...At the other end of the scale, but no less impressive, is a place it will take a bit of doing to find...
...By the third night, you are dredging up anecdotes about the American History seminar with Prof...
...You look great," my friend offered...
...I realize, of course, that we can't ask a contemporary film to postpone gratification--I'm sure that would be very harmful to all of us...
...the kind of place with ice in the urinal...
...After all, the Olympics are coming, with the venerable ideal of physical competition between peoples of different nations, languages, and political ideologies...
...Tall Boy Carling Black Labels--certainly a sign of desperate men...
...Moreover, Bethell fails to observe that in objecting to the demands of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission-this was the context of Bennett's attack on reverse dis= crimination--Bennett was doing as Justice months earlier had done...
...Presumably, the glory of the Games is that despite our mental disagreements we are all bodily the same, able to share at least that much common ground...
...Smith has...
...Here were men unconcerned with the subtle ironies and recondite meanings, with William James, with the status details of the right shirt...
...Also thanks to Smith, the Department of Justice has initiated important policy changes in a number of areas, including antitrust and civil rights...
...Here was an actual saloon concentrating on the essentials...
...Bethell correctly notes that Bennett, a.friend of mine, made a "principled attack" on "reverse discrimination...
...It can be no coincidence that the reported rate of crime has declined over the past three years...
...It is hard to imagine how such a Smith as Bethell creates could have been able to achieve the conservative legacy that his successor will in...
...gone are the economic theories of the populist Left t h a t focused on the wrong questions...
...It may be the only way to learn what Coleridge meant by dignity: the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations...
...But nonacademics can also help carry the fight...
...The first night out, you're still raging in biliousness or roaring about sports...
...In fact, the best saloons are as dark as theaters...
...It is 13 degrees, and the ice-encrusted swimming pool beckons mightily...
...Good mahogany bar, brass rail, apparently the first General Electric air conditioner ever installed in a bar in America, and pornographic tiles in the bathroom...
...As for Rachel Ward, she is a marvelous specimen who might even be able to act, if she had a part...
...The place is expensive, but it is also conducive, even soothing...
...The drinking in Massachusetts...
...Furthermore, the Department of Justice has successfully appealed to the Supreme Court in opposition to the tendency of the federal bureaucracy to expand the civil rights laws beyond the (continued on page 46) 32 THE AMERlCAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984...
...The best I could come up with in all my tours of duty in the state was a kind of paralyzing wistfulness, which set in shortly after reality broke like a flare over the dark and scarred romantic battlefield one night, suddenly illuminating my futile pursuit of a fairy princess...
...In the film noir, physical attraction and lovemaking were background--it was the psychological give-and-take that got dramatized...
...Bethell criticizes the Civil Rights Division within the Department, which is headed by William Bradford Reynolds...
...There's so little conflict between the lovers because there's so little relationship, except of course the interrupted sensual one...
...and the only conflict between her and Terry is that he tries harder than she does not to be their pawn...
...The resources devoted to criminal law enforcement have dramatically increased since 1981...
...Smithwick and the Hive" (TAS, March 1984) is Bethell's reckless attack on Ronald Reagan, William French Smith, and the Department of Justice...
...How does one explain, for example, the party at Wellesley...
...In antitrust, the Department now employs sound economic analysis to determine whether a company's actions work to the benefit of consumers...
...What's going on here...
...The "party" at Wellesley turns out to be seven demure lasses living in a large, powerful house straight out of Town & Country who want to have a cookout...
...As I recall, I sat there thinking, when did life get to be so complicated...
...And like Bethell, I believe there is, as he calls it, an ideological "war in progress...
...I mentioned lighting...
...During the past three years, the Department of Justice has opposed racial employment quotas in Boston, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Detroit, Memphis, and now Birmingham...
...Indeed, the Department unambiguously opposes busing and racial quotas...
...Perhaps his film does say something about Los Angeles, or about a certain aspect of Los Angeles...
...The obligatory duet on piano-organ and dulcimer, named "Tapestry," wailed away in the corner...
...Jeff Bridges seems to have prepared for the role by building up a newly muscled physique...
...just give me credit for having seen it coming, when one fine day you turn on your telescreen and watch the magnificently endowed competitors parade out onto the stadium-sized,mattresses, ready to'begin the All-Gender Division of the 1996 Olympic Sex Games...
...or the Eire PU b , a Boston workingman's bar President Reagan once stopped in for a beer--a fact proudly attested to by numerous photographs of the event and a bronze plaque...
...For one thing, there are too many pink cheeks around...
...QUAFFING IN MASSACHUSETTS The presence o f millions upon millions of college and graduate-school students sets the tone of the drinking in Massachusetts, and it is a rare man who can drink there and leave with a shred of dignity intact...
...When Terry finally confronts Jessie back in L.A., they are both so busy clawing at each other's clothing they don't have time to discuss the life-and-death situation they are in...
...Since one couple succeeds and the other tragically fails, the point is well made that fast sex does not lead to fast trust, understanding, or evendestructive manipulation...
...Such unspectacular dumps, of course, 'are relatively unknown in the great state...
...Men and women unable to carry on a conversation, much less marry one another, will seek a new understanding through public displays of erotic prowess...
...The Department is aggressively committed to the principle of nondiscrimination...
...It goes for such an esteemed spot as the Golden Dome, a cozy place near the state house filled with pols and journalists and damned few delinquents, and for Clarke's, a place where the preps line up to get in...
...Also thanks to Smith, the Department of Justice has encouraged debate on one of the most important issues of our timeIthe role of the courts in a democratic republic...
...Might be...
...Perhaps by witnessing a contest between the finest representatives of either side, we can begin again to grope toward mutual respect...
...doggies...
...But plenty of good things have...
...Yet not everything is dismal...
...BetheU applauds the appointment of such academics to government positions as Donald Devine to the Office of Personnel Management and William Bennett to the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...The goal of antitrust policy in Washington today is not to prop up failing businesses or to attack all others as too big, but to ensure competition and efficiency, and lower prices for everyone...
...Reading Bethell, a conservative might conclude that no good thing couJd be coming out of Civil Rights...
...so has organized crime, both in its traditional and newer forms, and particularly as both are engaged in drug trafficking...
...All these things take time, because they occur between human beings, not bodies...
...The drinking in Massachusetts is, for the most part, like the New Women in Manhattan: shallow, insincere, and prone to hysteria...
...I had just come out of a 14-hour hangover proving the truth of Franklin's saw, he who drinks fast pays slow, and was gasping like a fish THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 31 on a hot dock...
...Here it's the other way around...
...Bennett freely points out that he got the idea for opposing the EEOC from Justice, and Justice is pleased to have this most able ally--alas, our only one in the federal government so far...
...herit...
...In the spirit of full disclosure, I have worked for more than a year as a special assistant to William French Smith...
...The next thing I know I am sitting in one of the 1,700 places called "College Inn" across the state, at a table filled with suspicious coeds ~. I vaguely remember the place having green all-weather carpeting, garden furniture, lighting more suited to a store selling Scott's Turf-Builder, and a leering bartender who dispensed dusty bottles of Bud...
...The only thing we can be sure of here is that she has parts...
...I thought I had left such scenes behind years ago...
...If athletes need only understand the rules, not each other, then Hollywood and the Los Angeles Organizing Committee may very well converge...
...And it is this legacyIthis product of the Smith years at the Departmerit of Justice--that must be weighed in any reasonable evaluation...
...More indicative of its character, however, was a little exchange I happened to witness one fall afternoon...
...The Parker House in Boston is great in the way classic, old-time hotels are great: heavy wood, polished brass, plate glass, thick oriental rugs, comfortable black leather barstools, an army of waiters and various attendants, and displays of food fit for a Cunarder...
...It is all a bit jarring...
...Bethell, however, refuses to do this, preferring instead to judge Smith by his perception of Smith as " t h e country club lawyer who earns a ton of money, spends an inexplicable amount of time on the golf courses of Palm Springs, and thinks of Washington as a place where you have an opportunity to drive about in a chauffeur-driven limousine if you have the right White House connections...
...It's in Brighton, and its only name is BAR, although now I seem to recall a shamrock _9 painted over the door...
...Nor is tllere any explaining the 80-mile drive through the interior to see the only girl at Mt...
...But Bethell fails to point out that Justice, under Smith, made such an attack as early as May 1981...
...In Officer, the young Navy pilots and their girls are just as precipitous about getting into bed, but the film has an admirable distance on the drawbacks of such haste, as both couples climb back out having to face the task of getting to know each other...
...I mean, really...
...There is more to this conservative legacy, much more...
...I look forward to the logical extension of this trend--when the classic ideal of physical culture meets up with our highly advanced view of sex as a muscle-straining performance standing in for the now-defunct mental debate between the sexes...
...In civil rights, the Department consistently seeks remedies othei" than busing for school segregation and remedies other than racial quotas for employment discrimination...
...Today, thanks to Smith, the Department of Justice is attacking crime in a significantly more concerted manner than at any time in recent years...
...This goes for places like 33 Dunster Street, off Harvard Square, which is filled with old oak, books, and anachronisms walking in from The Big Chill talking about relationships, needs, and reassurances...
...But don't let that stop you...
...Shenton, and loudly correcting someone else's French...
...Let's see how many of those couples are still together in ten years...
...Such primitive conditions typify the rookie nature of the drinking in Massachusetts...
...I also believe that judging success in this war requires taking a look at what our side is actually doing...
...Smith is wealthy, but the rest of the description is a mean piece of fiction...
...The Department has recommended for the bench individuals who believe that the courts should read and apply the law, not make it...
...For another, too many perfect smiles over white turtlenecks set off by midwinter tans...
...He used to be a butterball...
...William French Smith: An Exchange Tom Bethell has written a column that raises the question of whether liberal journalists aren't the only ones who favor fancy to fact...
...It is simply there, an automatically assumed fact of life, no plot development required...
...Hollywood seems quite convinced that communication is no longer possible between men and women--so the reason for distrust no longer needs to be explained, dramatized, or examined...
...A jug-eared old woolhat sitting at the end of the bar asks the bartender, "This might not be that On Golden Pond, would i t ? " The bartender finishes swabbing out a glass, pulls thoughtfully on his cigarette, and replies, "Don't know...
...But Taylor Hackford's 1982 hit, An officer and a Gentleman, dealt so well with the subject that I expected better...
...For another, too many brows unmarred by rejection and worry, grinding and scrambling, hesitancy and inadequacy...
...Yet, as in Moscow, Lake Placid, and Sarajevo, there is this bodily common ground...
...Holyoke who voted for Reagan...
...And plainly there is more to Smith than money...
...As he does with smith, so Bethell does with Reynolds: He fails to ask what the man has actually done...
...Yet throughout Massachusetts the saloons are dreadfully, cheerfully as bright as Mom's kitchen...
...One cannot properly drink there in gloom and despair, sit with the Churchillian black dog and tensely try to put to flight the demons...
...On the television we had been watching a movie featuring a pioneer woman leading her children through the wilderness, losing her husband to a cholera epidemic, shooting a grizzly bear, fighting off a pack of ravenous wolves with nothing but an oar, hacking apart a bullmoose with an axe--things like that, all within about a half hour...
...I leave it to the reader to name and classify the events...
...Like Tom Bethell, I am a ionservative and a contributor to this magazine...
...I don't like to drink in a place I can read a book," a friend once said...
...Isn't this a pretty fair account of the sexual ideal held up in much of today's entertainment...
...And it is as freighted with meaning...
...It has opposed a racial set-aside program in Dude County, Florida...
...And the Department has taken positions in the federal courts in favor of principles that limit the reach of the judiciary...
...This, I gather, is what the ads and reviewers mean by "steamy"--straining muscles, gleaming perspiration, and bulging veins in place of the subtleties of mental conquest and submission...
...It comes as readily off the tongue as the tennis at Wimbledon, the racing at Churchill Downs, the sailing at Newport, the riding to hounds...
...The second night you're talking philosophy, but find the conversation peppered with inexplicable references to deck shoes and waterfowlembellished canvas-web belts...
...Violent crime has been a constant target...
...You really do...
...After the correct amount of gasoline is consumed, six guys in their by Joe Mysak boxer shorts stand in a snowbank incinerating weenies on a gas grill...
...The battle of wills has become a physical display...
...It's all sweetness and light with them now," said Reed over the justly famed double cheeseburgers at Charley's Kitchen, near Harvard Square, nodding toward a loud table of preps and prepettes...
...Those were indeed excellent choices...
Vol. 17 • May 1984 • No. 5
