Editorials/Jesse's Baffled/Welcome to America
Jr, R. Emmett Tyrrell
JESSE'S BAFFLED Think about the recent Democratic presidential skirmishes. Did "Jewish leaders" set out to make Jesse Jackson "a pariah"? Were critics of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's recent...
...Last month, for instance, while reporting on the National Organization for Women's diktats to poor Walter Mondale, the news organizations repeatedly spoke o f " t h e women's movement" as though it were a movement representing the views of American women...
...From his lurid analyses of our domestic condition, abounding as they do with gruesome tales of huddled masses and rich exploiters, it is apparent that his lot is with the fabulists of socialism...
...Rather she is a mainstream American woman with normal expectations from government and society...
...Now the Rev...
...They were standing crash helmet to crash helmet and speaking in conversational tones...
...We must be patient with these welcome guests...
...Yet for reasons that remain inscrutable to me very few American liberals want to call themselves socialists...
...Words that mean one thing back home frequently have an entirely different meaning abroad...
...In terms of comparative bigotry, is it more "racist" to close one's account at an Arab-owned bank than to use ethnic slurs in "casual conversation that had no political or religious overtones...
...Many bystanders were no doubt affronted but were too outnumbered and too afraid to register any protest...
...The leader, a man in his thirties with a cropped beard, wore a crash helmet, and he said his name was Bob Bible...
...By all odds she is now the woman most competent to run our government, and she remains a Democrat...
...So gifted are our pols at according solemnity to what are in effect piffles and to distorting the meaning of plain English that many of our most seasoned political observers are frequently confused...
...In the modern Democratic party you are most inescapably what your chromosomes and your bloodlines dictate...
...San Franciscans took it meekly on the jaw, as the 50,000 to 75,000-strong phalanx came cawing and crowing and shrieking down the street...
...There was something really depraved about this collective act of defiance--an attempt to represent choice as victimization ("We demand massive federal funding to end the AIDS epidemic"), and to neutralize opposition by selective appeal to Christian virtue ("Bigotry is Immoral...
...He spoke of "the white press," its "Aryan arAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...He lifted his bullhorn to his lips, and his admonition "Read the Bible people...
...Eloquence demands persuasiveness and clarity...
...As Michael Kinsley wrote a few weeks ago in the New Republic, yuppies are downwardly mobile, finding it increasingly difficult to live in the style their parents took for granted...
...Jesse Jackson's recent international travels, as he himself says, "finding another way to call somebody nigger...
...Thing is, we've got 50,000 people here," one said, very close to Bob...
...Their goal, it seemed to me, was to arrest their downward mobility by manipulating government...
...By now Bob was surrounded by five very large cops in motorcycle gear...
...Tourists can be woefully confused by foreign customs...
...We've got this problem with people who might get violent...
...The AFL-CIO protest parade was just beginning to file down Market Street, and so we went to watch it for a while...
...b y R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . Somehow its theoreticians believe that they can make these matters the credentials for political participation and thereby improve the body politic, ameliorate antagonisms, and eliminate baseness...
...Doubtless in time the intelligent tourist will master these difficulties or be deported...
...In response there was a steady chant: "Gay Rights Now...
...The Rev...
...She would rebel at being lumped into the so-called women's movement because, unlike our journalists, she recognizes it as an ideologically biased misnomer minted by her political opponents on the left...
...God bless America...
...Jackson was passionate, but his utterances were always stupendously muddled, and he persuaded very few to change their ideas and accept his Third World view of things...
...Jackson is in the dumps, but let us hope that his invidious campaign represents the end of such vulgar and dangerous procedures...
...Today he is a peace activist...
...Of course, all these claims were preposterous, even the last which confuses volubility with a quality that demands more than mere passion...
...She didn't elaborate, but you couldn't help noticing the adidas-shod, pale-pink-preppie shifted yuppies in among the blue collars and the railroad hats...
...Imagine the frowns that would darken the faces of NOW's exalt~es if Mr...
...The results confuse journalists and t o u r i s t s alike...
...Moreover it must be borne in mind that America is in the midst of an election year, hence some of our words will have no meaning at all...
...Gomorrah for a Tomorrah !" "That's the good thing about America," said Bob Bible...
...Yet liberal pundits and fellow Democrats saw only his skin and so they showered him with huzzah huzzahs, pronouncing him a hero to his race, an inspiration to the down and out, a prophet of the politics of race, color, cregd, national origin, and whatever esoterica lay ahead...
...On the day before the convention began I bumped into Lili Osborne, Eric Hoffer's friend, a block or two from Moscone Convention Center near Mission Street...
...He was boomed as an intellect, a moral genius, and the most eloquent candidate in the race...
...The only exceptions were three or four men from Long Beach, who stood on a corner carrying tremendous, sail-sized banners ("No...
...A Frenchman may create a row when the toothpaste he orders turns out not to be an adhesive for his dentures...
...Marx...
...read the typical yuppie placard...
...Actually the term is a misnomer as inaccurate as it is misleading...
...Beware...
...Yet he is not even termed a left-wing civil rights leader...
...Read the Bible While You're Able...
...Reading his bitter and woebegone pronouncements last month brought to mind a favorite maxim so right for our brassy times: Whom the gods would destroy they first make famous...
...Maybe they've had their day, I don't know...
...He is glad to be called a civil rights leader, but surely this is only part of the label...
...But then yuppies do not really have trade Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Around him was a tremendous din of catcalls and whistle-blowing...
...He contributed in part to Hoffer's composite portrait of the "true believer...
...Show God you appreciate it by reading the Bible...
...After all, in recent years, his fellow Democrats have raised such rude calculations as ethnic heritage, race, class, sex, and even "sexual orientation" to the level of political and philosophical imperatives...
...The Rev...
...Her husband Selden, a Stanford graduate, had joined the longshoremen in the 1930s, believing, as people then did, that the revolution would originate with the working class...
...Wouldn't it be a good thing to have your own p a r a d e . . . " As the cop spoke (and there are no name tags on these San Francisco cops), Bob put his bullhorn up again and called out, "Repent...
...Mondale's candidacy will be strengthened by a feminist running mate...
...They will be disappointed, for such delicacies are taboo over here...
...marching along with it, protesting Reaganism with it at the outset of the Democratic Convention...
...WELCOME TO AMERICA The wonder of America" combined with the prospect of an Olympiad uncorrupted by the Soviet bloc's stateowned stallions and geldings is now attracting a vast throng of tourists to our shores...
...This seemed odd, since trade unions and military spending are clearly symbiotic...
...Jackson, a man who is usually rather ebullient and quite cocksure...
...Was he still more baffled in the days following his interview when he found himself being scorned again for speaking in crude and invidious terms...
...Let us hope that they have a swell time, but caution is in order...
...Eric, of course, had been a longshoreman (he died in San Francisco last year), and Lili told me that she herself had joined the Seafarer's International when she was a tuna- and sardine-packer in Monterey...
...Some paraders came by with a street-wide sign: "Enola Gay Faggot Affinity Group...
...In Central America last June he actually spoke of the International Monetary Fund, which pours billions of dollars in loans into the Third World, as an institution that has "raped Latin America o f its resources," andhe called the Panama Canal an American "badge of disgrace...
...Actually so devoted to government interloping has the American liberal become that it is more exact to call him a socialist, albeit a socialist who knows not the writings of Dr...
...Jackson was raised from the neighborhoods of Southside Chicago and made into one of the most famous personages in the Republic, perhaps the world...
...came reverberating loud and clear across Market Street...
...Mondale had invited UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick aboard...
...Your rights are protected...
...Strain grows on the man who has been called by so many and who even called himself "the conscience of the Democratic party...
...It's sad that unions are no longer representative of what they set out to be," Lili said, gazing out at the marchers...
...Gay Rights Now...
...union interests at heart...
...Very few of the opponents of Ronald Reagan are termed left-wing, though most of these so-called reformers have moved steadily left for years until some are downright radical...
...Consider the Rev...
...In point of fact, even many blacks who voted for him did not share his views, for he was the most left-wing candidate ever to play a large role in a major party's nominating process...
...Liberalism is another term bound to confuse our guests...
...Diverse and individualistic, American women cannot be subordinated by a movement, and no serious pollster has shown that the feminism of NOW characterizes 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 American women...
...Jackson is being shunned for ignoble utterances, and it perplexes him...
...No wonder the Rev...
...I am no psychologist nor even a reader of palms, but I detected a note of bafflement in the Rev...
...Intervention in Central America...
...rogance," and the "white women" of the National Organization for Women who in convention assembled pilfered his historic idea of a female running mate "and did not even invite me to come there...
...not self-consciously joining the working class, like Selden Osborne in the thirties, but tumbling into it willy-nilly...
...In most of their countries a liberal is a citizen who eschews government involvement in private lives...
...No U.S...
...Nonetheless he still gives interviews, and in an amazing one with a Los Angeles Times reporter last month he reflected on all that has happened to him since he forsook his self-help outfit, People United to Serve Humanity, in quest of the Democratic nomination...
...Gastronomes visiting us from some Asian countries, for instance, may order a hot dog and expect to sink their teeth into a warm spaniel...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 7...
...Somewhat like guests at a masked ball they come to politics wearing disguises...
...In fact our talented pols regularly hoodwink the Republic's great news organizations into uncritically passing along euphemisms, misnomers, and loaded terms useful to their schemes...
...By parading under labor's banners, they epitomized the rhetorical confusion of the convention...
...My guess is that he was, and with reason...
...but she is no feminist...
...Yet can he ever be expected to penetrate the meaning of our contemporary political ceremonies and oratory...
...Furthermore no reliable polls support NOW's claim that Mr...
...In America there is almost no area of private life that the gringo liberal deems off-limits...
...that is, by becoming certified as victims and thus eligible for inclusion as one more group in the Recipient Sector--the Democratic party's constituency...
...The so-called women's movement is nothing more than the feminist movement...
...Today, after years spent debasing democratic values, the Democratic party is the party of race, color, creed, national origin, and an amplitude of other barbaric considerations...
...I need to preach, don't I?" Bob said...
...Jesse Jackson files an affirmative to all of the above, and hopes that his fellow Americans will find these questions very enlightening...
...Homo...
...You haven't been reading the Bible...
...All his favorite foreign countries are socialist, some being decidedly totalitarian...
...Next came the gay/lesbian protest parade, coming down Market Street in the opposite direction...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
