Editorials/The Pope's God/Gruesome Interludes
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS THE POPE'S GOD This white-haired polyglot Pope who travels the world is, we are told, a "peasant intellectual Pope." That is the judgment of Mr. William McCready, the...
...Now on spiritual questions I claim no expertise whatsoever, but I do know something about politics...
...Then He sets up the kind of progressive socialist regime that brings poverty to the Third World and incompetence plus economic stagnation to our world...
...The God they serve either does not answer men's prayers, or He responds only after a terrific row has been kicked up down below...
...Now comes Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute and the author (most recently) of Freedom With Justice.' In the August 1983 issue of Catholicism in Crisis he wrote: "The socialist idea, as an idea, is dead...
...Why in a televised debate would a man who claims adherence to the higher humanCAPITOL itarianism throw a full mug of water at an opponent...
...Gloria Steinem reiterated her belief that feminism is an integral part of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985...
...Surely some of the middle class and the rich came by their hellish baubles honestly...
...Next George Gilder, and here we have the opening sentence of Wealth and Poverty: "The most important event in the recent history of ideas is the demise of the socialist dream...
...William McCready, the Chicago sociologist whose books include Ethnic Drinking Subculture...
...When will they be appeased...
...he lived under it...
...They have taken to driving their Volvos and Saabs down Massachusetts Avenue, parking by the side of the road, lighting up their candles and protesting injustice, fully prepared to take the consequences in terms of social ostracism, maybe even a police record...
...The first half-hour of a recent "CBS Morning News" show had it all...
...They could just as well have been discussing problems facing the Secretary General of the United Nations...
...and, for that matter, it is amusing to see the American journalists puzzle over him...
...Often we hear of how many minutes a cigarette slices from the lives of the smoker and his neighbors, but the innocent passengers on this plane lost hours from their lives and could have lost their lives altogether...
...If they are indeed evil and corrupting, why is it that the theologians of liberation devote so much time to prescribing them for the poor...
...Banzhaf did this claiming that a District of Columbia fire regulation justified him...
...The discussion of technical economic issues interests French socialists very little...
...Anyway, this is a Think Piece I have been thinking about for ages, and it starts off with a collection of quotes from writers I admire greatly, and usually agree with, but this time I am not so sure that I do...
...That is the judgment of Mr...
...Obviously the Pope's concerns are not political but spiritual...
...And this violence is not new...
...At about the same time Robert Nisbet, another AE1 fellow and the author of Prejudices, wrote in a review of Paul Johnson's Modern Times that the author "is correct in taking comfort in the death of any serious belief in socialism.., in the West at the present time" (New York Times Book Review, June 26, 1983...
...Worse still, Pope John Paul II's unfortunate experience with the authorities in his native Poland has left him with a "horrendous bias...
...After all it is his job to convey faithfully the teachings of a plainspoken carpenter from the Galilee of long ago...
...Time recently ran a long and eminently readable series on the Pope, but they dwelt on such mundane matters as women in the priesthood and the claims of local custom on Church ritual...
...Often these critics are advocates or even practitioners of that masterpiece of incoherence, liberation theology...
...Do you recall when one of these anti-cigarette hypochondriacs became so violent on a commercial jet that its pilot had to land the plane far from its destination...
...First the amiable and intelligent Bill Kurtis read an unobjectionable version of the news...
...Future Tocquevilles may be able to do something elegant with this datum...
...revolutionary's violence "offends God...
...Finally, a cigar-smoking professor was assaulted by his hysterical opponent during a debate on "smoker's rights...
...He is absorbed with issues that are somewhat out of this world...
...Harper & Row, $17.95...
...You might say that this is the "A" team of conservatism, all saying the same thing, and, 1 believe, all whistling in the dark...
...What is ironic about the enthusiasm of our hypochondriacs is not only that their fears come at a time when our lives are growing longer and freer of affliction, but that they are making our lives needlessly grim...
...Liberation theology's advocates and other religious forward-lookers obviously seek earthly power...
...It is a theology that cannot make up its mind about material things...
...God...
...For a certitude he has a bias against Communism...
...the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism...
...Murray Haydon's implant--a brief description of the diseased heart's appearance after its removal, and my appetite was gone...
...EDITORIALS THE POPE'S GOD This white-haired polyglot Pope who travels the world is, we are told, a "peasant intellectual Pope...
...Dreams always die when they come true...
...Let us put aside their morbid absorptions, and remember too that some of these hypochondriacs are not concerned with health but with imposing their obsessions on others...
...This bizarre potion justifies violence against the middle class and the rich in pursuit of transforming the innocent poor into members of the middle class...
...The critics' concerns are not the Pope's...
...Though Mr...
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...Though I mean no impiety, I must confess to being vastly amused by this confrontation between the Pope and the critics...
...For a certitude, smokers should respect nonsmokers' wishes, but so hysterical is this man over a cigar's danger to his health that he was induced to breach the peace...
...It was originally published in this magazine in 1976 [then The Alternative...
...It is above all to build the good society as he sees it-to reform man, avenge the poor, punish the rich (or at least riches...
...Are all the well-off the enemies of the poor, and thus deserving of an occasional car bomb...
...WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES This month I was planning to go down the road to the South African embassy, which has been the scene of tremendous displays of candlelit courage by the American nobility...
...Wall Street Journal editorial, October 31, 1983...
...Banzhaf appeared proud of assaulting a man thirty years his senior, he is somewhat portly, and would caution him against overexcitement...
...I do not blame CBS for bringing us these gruesome interludes...
...John Banzhaf (and as you may be the parent of a prospective law student be advised that he is a Professor of something called Law and Legal Activism at George Washington University's National Law Center...
...What they are driven by is moral ambition: they want to create a new man in a new society...
...To scorn the Pope as a peasant intellectual is to carry irony to the point of incoherence...
...Possibly his lungs were saved, but at what cost to his cardiovascular system...
...Consider that enemy of public THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 smoking, Mr...
...He declares that the by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...It is a supreme hope of mine that Harvard will one day fight free of the secular humanist and socialist murk...
...Well, there you have Kristol, Gilder, Novak, Johnson, Nisbet, and (I presume) Robert Bartley...
...Today transfer payments account for approximately 158 percent of the income of the poorest 10 percent of the population, yet the progressive bishops are hollering for more...
...He beatifies a nun, who in life shunned politics for prayer...
...There is irony in the criticisms of this stupendously competent man...
...Next 1 witnessed another ten-minute report on breast cancer, and yet another appetite was imperiled...
...and, by the way, how much income redistribution is enough...
...The Pope gazes beyond...
...First of all Irving Kristol, who needs no introduction: "The most important political event of the 20th century is not Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...The Pope's God is more my kind of God...
...But just as I was preparing to set forth, notepad at the ready, Investigative Reporter at your service, I was struck down by the flu and now find myself reduced to composing one more Think Piece, which 1 know you were looking forward to...
...George Gilder, Harvard Year Book, 1981...
...The sobering answer is that it could...
...These are tokens of life, harbingers of a strenuous and productive day...
...If not, how are the innocent to be spared the mayhem and murder of the liberating theologians' random terrorism...
...Ernest van den Haag, had been duly assured that his cigar was permissible-especially as he believed it would demonstrate his opponent's violent side...
...The idea called socialism is dead...
...France has abandoned itself quite legally to a kind of lay Puritanism, moderate in its first steps but extreme in its ultimate objectives" (Jean-Francois Revel, Commentary, June 1982...
...The others put their trust in political action and state power...
...Then came a grisly report on the unfortunate Mr...
...by Tom Bethell Finally, "We've been watching the French busily debate culture and politics for some months, and we can now report the result...
...Surely the law does not authorize a citizen to assault another, and could a solitary cigar in a well-ventilated studio really impair Mr...
...He puts his trust in prayer, good works, and God's love...
...Moreover, those Christian sophisticates Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...I still may try the embassy later, but I'm afraid I already missed Preppy Night, when the protestors were wearing skiing gear and their skis were strapped to their Volvo tops in readiness for the long weekend in Vermont...
...Now if you will bear with me, here are a few more quotations, these rather closer to the mark...
...and it was...
...Clearly his fears are excessive...
...We must not let the obsessions of the few depress us...
...Could a Jew's firsthand experience with Nazism be used to depreciate his admonitions against Nazism...
...As for me, I am going to have to choose between telecasts of the morning news shows, abundant as they are with gruesome reports of corporeal misfortune, and breakfasting upon crisp English muffins glowing with nutritious honey from the meadowlands, a delicious egg, and coffee brewed for an Emperor's palate...
...Banzhaf's health...
...Obviously there is an audience out there that finds tales of disease and death very absorbing, notwithstanding the fact that Americans are now so healthy that the real health problem facing each of us is how in the fullness of time to expire gracefully...
...In furthering his views of public health, IDEAS he endangered rational and orderly inquiry, personal freedom, civility, law and order, plus Professor van den Haag's cigar and clothes...
...though his victim, the distinguished professor of jurisprudence at Fordham University, Dr...
...This is the opening sentence of an essay, "Socialism: An Obituary for an Idea," that is reprinted in his Reflections of a Neoconservative...
...but from the tube flicker images, macabre and hysterical...
...She lives in Denver, Colorado, ant~ is thus as free from bias against Communism as from midnight visits by Communist secret police...
...If they are not evil and corrupting, what justifies pilfering them from the middle class and the rich...
...now denigrating this peasant Pope spend inordinate amounts of wind exalting peasants, particularly the ruder specimens...
...GRUESOME INTERLUDES Note for the record that as the nation's longevity increases so does the citizenry's morbid preoccupation with health and disease...
...I believe, however, that their preoccupations are not only illogical but also quite morbid...
...Mitterrand's objective is not primarily economic...
...That is the judgment of Sister Amelie Starkey...
...America has, over the past thirty years, had quite a bit of income redistribution...
...And if he is correct in his assumption that beyond earth there is a spiritual order beckoning, he is on to something much larger and more important than his critics recognize...
...Why in a Republic full of doctors and nurses to say nothing of therapists should people want to be entertained by tales of cancer and disgusting operations...
...He goes to South America, urging spiritual salvation for everyone, poor and rich...
...Apparently it is preferable for one's "husband/lover" to find the tumor first-clinical training is urged...
Vol. 18 • April 1985 • No. 4
