Editorials/Holy Shiite/The Moscow 313
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS HOLY SHIITE by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. (Editor's note: This column was written two weeks before the hijacking of TWA flight 847.) In the course of this column I shall perhaps make...
...Established to promote democratic values in the world, the Endowment saw that barring conservative and neoconservative books from an exhibition titled "America Through American Eyes" smacked of intolerance reminiscent of the intolerance 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 practiced in backwater America when a local reactionary tries to ban from the school house the books of, say, Kurt Vonnegut...
...For such a modest statement 1 was treated to a vituperative of the utmost hostility...
...This barbarism is a matter of policy...
...Thus they chose not one but two monographs on Rolling Stone magazine...
...No government adhering to Western culture would allow its soldiers to act as they are in Lebanon and to go unpunished...
...His real modus operandi has been to cock an ear and to listen to the decibel level of those yelling at him...
...But it is a good bet that by then the Israelis will have turned over their prisoners...
...Reagan instinctively defers to these people, not because he agrees with them but because they shout the loudest...
...He campaigns, one might say, outside the Beltway, but once in office tries to appease those within it...
...In these days of international tension, is it not best that our publishers assist them...
...THE MOSCOW 313 Comity reigns anew in the lit world...
...Today, militiamen of the Shiite Areal movement collaborate with the Lebanese Army's overwhelmingly Shiite Sixth Brigade to battle PLO fighters, mostly Sunni Muslims, in Beirut's Palestinian camps...
...Today, of course, there are no more elections for Reagan...
...Believe me, they see no politics whatsoever in choosing Jane Fonda's Workout Book or in their multitudes of books about feminism, the black experience, the environment, and peace...
...All of which brings to mind one more argument on behalf of the final decision of the Association of American Publishers...
...The scene is particularly grisly, the violence being utterly unrestrained and often quite cowardly...
...There is even evidence that they tried to give conservatism as they understand it a fair shake...
...Moreover, the Association is returning the Endowment's pieces of silver...
...Did they not include CrossCountry Skiing Right by Hall, Courtside" The Fan's Guide to Pro Basketball by Hoenig, and The L.L...
...The Association of American Publishers has handed down its decision on that controversial list of American books to be exhibited at the venerable Moscow Book Fair...
...They had to think about those who would be at the fair...
...In Washington, of course, the loudest shouters (by far...
...Ambulances are being barred from combat zones while Palestinian combatants and civilians alike are left to bleed to death in the street...
...but remember I am only doing what is right, which, as Mark Twain once observed, does have a vast potential to astonish...
...Reagan has demonstrated the simple point that getting elected to high office in the United States can be a purely passive affair...
...These Shiite soldiers are not running amuck, and the civilian casualties are not accidental...
...The next time that we hear charges of United States or Israeli brutality and amorality, remember what has taken place in these Palestinian camps...
...In the course of this column I shall perhaps make the most daring judgment heretofore uttered by a syndicated columnist in many a moon...
...All his political life Reagan has Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Some years ago I made bold in the pages of Harper's magazine to observe that if Israel were nonexistent internecine warfare would still fever the Middle East...
...Maybe President Reagan will have affixed a yellow ribbon to the American flag...
...We now know that casualties were being wantonly exaggerated, but Israel and its major ally, the United States, suffered an immediate diabolization...
...Where are the journalists who not so long ago were sending exaggerated reports of Israeli brutality to their papers back home...
...I am sure it will cause consternation and indigestion in some departments, and champions of far-off lands will rush in with charges of moral imperialism or some other metamorphic preposterosity...
...And of course the Republican office-seeker types can have their jobs with their nice big offices, limousines, and hallway deference from the bureaucrats...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 7...
...There was an enormous and absurdly obvious letter-writing campaign orchestrated against me, and a Harper's writer at work in the Middle East was put under house arrest...
...Conservatives are frustrated by this, but for most of them it is not too" bad...
...shown a mastery of a certain style of symbolic government...
...all 313 selected by the Association's felicitously named International Freedom to Publish Committee will be there...
...Admittedly, a few thoughtful and even a few elegant books appear on the list...
...But can books like this compare with the really important books that are published in the Republic...
...These selectors are not total greenhorns...
...Everyone can see at that point that his critics are lying, that they probably do not themselves believe what they are saying, and Reagan does not even have to respond to their mendacious accusations...
...Still sometimes in foreign affairs you have to take some action, and here Reagan has brought to the job precious few convictions...
...This way he has won four elections, two to the presidency...
...When Christian militiamen massacred opponents in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, the recriminations grew still more intense...
...Bean Guide to the Outdoors...
...Well, fellow know-nothingniks, cast your eyes on Beirut...
...As I say, those who selected these books are somewhat limited...
...Yet now we can return to the old courtesies--for a while...
...A very cunning sort of censorship might indeed have been contemplated...
...I was called a typical American know-nothing...
...Nonetheless, judging by President Reagan's deplorable press conference on June 18, and his equally deplorable decision ten days earlier to abide by the unratified SALT II agreement (the one "signed" by Carter's kiss on Brezhnev's cheek), the following can be said about Reagan with little fear of contradiction: He is only the latest in a succession of weak Presidents...
...He uses conservative rhetoric--he has found that over the years this appeals to a majority of the people--and then he waits for his opponents to accuse him of ideology, right-wing extremism, neglect of the "real world" in favor of "simplistic solutions," and so on...
...Arthur Darack's classic How to Repair and Care for Home Appliances is bound to be popular with Muscovites, as will The Home Energy Decision Book ingeniously conceived by the Sierra Club...
...Palestinian civilians are being carried off to prisons and to summary executions...
...His opponents have been endlessly frustrated by this performance...
...and, grisliest of all, helpless Palestinians are being pulled from their hospital beds to be murdered in cold blood...
...That is Reagan's pragmatic bottom line...
...My judgment may indeed shock many...
...The Washington Post makes more noise than Human Events...
...And very effective it has been...
...But even Philistines make mistakes...
...These are not just books chosen b\ ideologues of the left...
...or failing that, nothing much of substance will have happened...
...But against the intransigent Kremlin bosses or the determined Amal Shiites, this symbolic style does not and cannot possibly work...
...They fret about health and opt for The New Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Collective-and remember the list is for a book fair in the capital of the socialist motherland...
...That is my daring judgment...
...Moreover, without Israel the area would be even less stable and less hospitable to WestAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by ern influence...
...Recriminations of the utmost ferocity followed, replete with charges against the Endowment for "intimidation" and "censorship...
...They are the choice of Philistines...
...But the selectors know no better...
...A book about American freedom and prosperity could be a dangerous thing...
...They have every right to be furious over the Endowment's charge of ideological imbalance...
...An Arabist even placed my name unlovingly into a book arguing that we Yanks are bigots and ignoramuses when it comes to our pronouncements on Islam and the Arabs...
...Just as movie critic Pauline Kael could in the early 1970s vow that she knew no one who voted for Richard Nixon in his 1972 landslide, those who selected this list have read nothing in years that might jar their fatuous sensibilities...
...And of course, as Reagan no doubt realized, the conservatives will still vote for him because they don't have anywhere else to go...
...His response is to go on TV and act the injured innocent (his favorite role...
...All this, despite the clearly observable fact that the PLO makes war on civilians a matter of policy and obviously was positioning its forces in the midst of civilians, for instance in hospital courtyards and in schools...
...Most of the books on the list are so vulgar, infantile, and unintelligent that were conservative books added even Mikhail Gorbachev might shun the approved 313...
...It contains books booming all the enthusiasms of the left-wing shanty intelligentsia plus attacks on Administration policy and America in general without including alternative books...
...For sheer barbarism, often of a distinctly ignoble character, it would be hard to replicate the scene anywhere, though Cambodia in the recent past and Afghanistan today do come to mind...
...On their behalf let me add that they are not as intolerant as their list signifies, though it contains books attacking Henry Kissinger without including any of Kissinger's quite formidable memoirs...
...Reagan's technique has been to ignore his opponents...
...We were lowered in the eyes of some not very perceptive people to the level of amoral aggressors...
...Meanwhile, Syria stands by admiring the show and Arab diplomats fly about trying to effect yet one more end to hostilities...
...There is rape and pillage...
...turn out to be the liberal left, whose positions are consciously or unconsciously congruent with international socialism as a matter of course...
...They know that the more they rage at Reagan, the worse they will look...
...The Endowment had made a $50,000 grant and asked that the Freedom to Publish Committee expand its list, cutting nothing...
...Some are flattered to find the President at least using their arguments and (so modest are their expectations) they are satisfied with that...
...If they do that they will be in big trouble Ask Don Devine, James Watt, Brad Reynolds, etc., etc...
...Where is the outcry from the civilized world...
...Once in office, of course, it is a different matter...
...Not one conservative or neoconservative tome is to be added to mollify the brutes at the National Endowment for Democracy who had objected that the list failed to reflect the diversity of American intellectual life...
...Do you recall the shocked reproaches that greeted Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 19827 Some Westerners compared Israel to Nazi Germany-such buffoons would never hold up a Communist state as a standard of brutality--as civilian suffering was described in profuse detail...
...These are people whose tastes have become very pedestrian...
...The Soviets regularly ban American books from their fair...
...Well, Sabra and Shatila, along with Burjal Brajneh, are precisely the scenes of today's brutality...
...More bombings and hijackings may have occurred, and certainly will in the future if they haven't by the time you read this...
...Reagan can't wait for this to happen...
...The unavoidable fact is that Israel, the United States, and all the nations of the West are morally superior to the brutes at work in Beirut today...
...Abundant as it is with progressive humanitarians, its disagreements can be astoundingly brutal and its foul play as brazen as that of Nero's Rome...
...In fact, this tawdry list of generally uninteresting and unintelligent books goes a long way toward explaining why so many foreigners can so eflbrtlesslv maintain their sense of cullural superiority over us...
...They will be permitted to strut as though important on the Washington stage, provided they don't try to alter the general policy direction that was laid down in the Carter years...
...Our reluctance to speak out against their atrocities tarnishes that superiority, but the superiority is there for all to see...
...CAPITOL IDEAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , ~ . . . . . . . , , , , , , , , ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 . . . . , ~ . . . . . , , t 7 7 . -. . . . . REAGAN CAVES IN by Tom Bethell This is written on "day seven" of the latest hostage seizure, so of course I don't know how things will look by the time you read this...
...Blood is again being shed in Lebanon, though the lsraelis are nowhere to be seen...
...This is not the Israelis against the Arabs, nor even Christians against Muslims...
...It is from these camps that Palestinians are being kidnapped and murdered, not by Christians or by Israelis, but by ShiRes with the apparent acquiescence of Syria...
...Or Sam Donaldson will be continuing his gloat about how Reagan has "grown" (i.e., adopted his view of the world...
...But the adamantine fact is that, notwithstanding all the propaganda heaved at the West, our moral standards are generally superior...
...and I am well aware that columnizing has long been practiced by such audacious fellows as William E Buckley Jr., who incidentally has just set sail upon the Pacific in one of his superannuated boats, and Garry Wills, who does not need to ply the waters to become all wet...
...There you are expected to do something from time to time, although here again Reagan's instincts have served him well in domestic policy: If government gets out of the way, and in particular gets its greedy hand out of people's pockets, then the economy will do well and everyone will love you (except for the frustrated dirigistes, but they are a minority...
Vol. 18 • August 1985 • No. 8
