The Hoosier Pulse/Where It's At
Owen, Kent
THE HOOSIER PULSE . ......................................................................... ................................................................................ WHERE IT'S AT Social...
...Didn't his blustery antics show he was alarmingly deficient in common sense...
...What is needed is proof that an office-holder is not so far removed from the circumstances of ordinary people that he cannot under-stand their concerns...
...And just as French political culture underwent an amazing transformation in those Against All Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares...
...It would be easy and cruel to remind some of their more inept dithyrambs written about the agricultural prowess of Cuba, its "direct democracy," and its support for human rights...
...Landgrebe wanted to do it without fuss...
...U.S...
...Trafficking in votes has long been considered one of the county's more thriving businesses, out-ranking crawdadding, professional horseshoe pitching, and the settling of breach-of-promise suits...
...Much ado was done about faulty grammar and spelling in the sample briefs Manion submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee and his inexperience in the federal courts...
...It was known...
...Still and all, it seems a momentous concern to many charged with satisfying the public's right to know...
...These reactions are commendable, as is the growing realization that Cuba is yet another country that solves its internal problems by resorting to the Gulag...
...We would do well to remember what Revel wrote in the September 1, 1979 issue of L' Express: The task of coldly judging Cuba has not been easy...
...Landgrebe, who died at age 70 on July 1, was the representative from Indiana's Second District, after Charles Halleck...
...That it should have any impact on the outcome of a congressional election exceeds the ken of those who understand the importance of recreational corruption to a southern Indiana county with few advantages...
...Le Monde put the matter superbly: Of course one must make diplomatic allowances for such a tide of compliments...
...Be-sides, it is bad for the Hoosier character because it worsens our self-absorption, which is nearly total anyway, especially during the basketball season...
...On July 12, an editorial appeared on Mitterrand's trip to Moscow and his conversations with Gorbachev...
...The latter is produced by frequent expressions of fellow-feeling, usually in the presence of the afflicted, the infirm, the destiTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 29 tute, or the lowly...
...In this usage the phrase suggests "the common touch," the effortless ability to seem down-to-earth and at ease with a cross-section of humanity...
...Manion, innocent of distinction in either his law practice or a single term in the State Senate, was made the whipping boy of those who challenge the President's resolve to appoint judges of his jurisprudential kidney...
...Suddenly, when the rest of the world least expects it, a disturbing eventfulness sweeps across Indiana, making the Hoosiers seem for the nonce more noteworthy than God meant them to be...
...Whether this challenge to free-enterprise balloting will tip the balance in November depends on the electorate's capacity for righteous indignation, which is ordinarily an indulgence of the enlightened middle class, a group not abundantly represented in the Eighth District...
...They could then be mailed out as our "investigative journalists" get dry behind the ears .. . 'This month, in honor of the silly season in America, we leave our own media to their summer diversions (mass murder of judicial nominees, the ceaseless struggle against SDI, the lust for an arms control agreement, the demand for more and bigger summits) and turn to three outstanding articles in the foreign press...
...He cutan odd figure in the House, and is most notoriously remembered for his adamant support of Richard Nixon to the last: "Don't confuse me with the facts," he told the press...
...While Hoosiers can scarcely claim a corner on common sense, they make such a fuss about it that it's a rare politician who doesn't boast of owning it in uncommon amounts...
...made him seem decorous as a Viennese head waiter—nothing to speak of that he said or did went beyond the limits of polemical fair play...
...For all these lofty standards, can there not be other, equally sound measures of fitness...
...Can a lawyer whose outlook is based on the workaday experiences of average people and businesses apply the Constitution, the statutes, and the common law just as capably as one whose educational and professional back-ground has obliged him to deal with clients of more elevated circumstances...
...WHERE IT'S AT Social science has yet to find a cure for it, let alone a way of accounting for its outbreaks...
...Seth Denbo would have enjoyed it all hugely...
...It is tempting to write off Earl Land-grebe as an inconsequential three-term congressman who was woefully and pathetically out of his element in Washington...
...Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95...
...Self-serving publicity would have been profane...
...He had to look out for any boy who had fought for his country...
...seven years—changing its ideological skin from gauchiste to center-right—it may very well be that we are in the midst of a similar change, at long last...
...Of course, it was no time at all before Landgrebe was sent packing by the voters...
...The spectacle was not edifying...
...House of Representatives sub-committee...
...M. Giscard d'Estaing—who genuinely admired M. Gierek and who believed he could persuade THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 31...
...In the eyes of astuter politicians, Landgrebe's charitable services made little sense: How could a congressman devote himself to helping people (many of whom didn't even live in the Second District) when he should have been working at getting along with those who could get him re-elected...
...The United States Senate recently disposed of the nomination of Daniel Manion of South Bend to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals...
...From the Hoosier perspective there is something to be said for that quality as needful in a judge as judicial temperament: namely, common sense...
...She was not alone, and the embarrassing thing is the tone of surprise in so many commentaries, as when the Washington Post tells us in an editorial that it is now okay to be anti-Castro...
...Such tasks took time and energy, but somebody had to attend to them, because, as Earl Landgrebe supposed, that's what the people wanted their congressman to do...
...None of this says Judge-Designate Manion is an exemplar of this virtue, only that his background may have prepared him to be a judge in ways that have their own merit...
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...The media were quick to point out that he was the son of the late Clarence Manion, once dean of the Notre Dame law school, a founder of the John Birch Society, and an outspoken patriot whose radio and television series, "The Manion Forum," were the forerunners of "Firing Line," "The McLaughlin Group," and various local dog & pony shows...
...Thus, people like Mary McCarthy should be embarrassed when she meets Valladares...
...The Soviets gave the president a very good reception...
...Seven men and one woman allegedly conspired to buy eighteen votes in the 1984 general election, which Rep...
...Now this sort of thing is hardly unheard of in Crawford County, but it is seldom of enough interest to warrant serious attention beyond the county limits...
...R At t Y OUtt ACTIVIST pus G SOURCE VO I O'U are m m,t7 is always . F SO pve pour st IDisg electcoosorva Vousdiog Fathers...
...McCloskey eventually won by four votes in a recount supervised by a U.S...
...The fact remains that M. Mitterrand's remarks went far beyond due politeness and raise at least two questions...
...Yet by all rights, the United States should have come to realize this many years ago...
...If it were left to a Hoosier of middling sensibility, he might say nowhere is it written that a federal judge must be a law journal editor, a Supreme Court clerk, a senior partner in a major metropolitan firm, an established leader in a state bar association or the ABA, a veteran of the federal courts—in fine, a person of such conspicuous distinction that the sheer weight of professional respect-ability must render him ripe for a judgeship...
...The man had simply failed to evolve...
...Instances abound...
...The same held true for his unyielding support of those who fought in Vietnam and his determination to bring the war to a successful conclusion...
...What the press and maybe his colleagues missed in Earl Landgrebe was his energetic belief that a legislator was there to help his constituents: to find out what happened to Ernest Bonine's Social Security check, why Orville Schenkel's son-in-law was in jail in Zamboanga, who in the Agriculture Department was holding up Minnie Manyunk's acreage allotment certificate, what the Job's Daughters from Chesterton should see on their spring trip to Washington...
...When a Purdue history professor, Floyd Fithian, beat him in 1974—the first Democrat to hold the seat since the ad-vent of the tractor—he returned to Valparaiso to run his trucking business, as much an exile in his time as Nixon himself...
...and his absence of ac-credited scholarship in the approved journals...
...There are times like these when, as if set in train by sunspots, random occurrences urge themselves to-ward us...
...Although the dean was hardly a model of subtlety and discretion in his opinions—Westbrook Pegler and Fulton Lewis Jr...
...Jean-Francois Revel, at the time editor of L' Express in Paris, devoted an entire issue of the magazine to Cuba and wrote the lead editorial, entitled "Cuba: The End of the Myth...
...Is it not illusory to believe that when an important decision has to be made such ties will be taken into ac-count by the other side...
...The former can often be evinced as an all-purpose heartiness or a pleasant blandness that borders on the nondescript...
...Way back in 1979, a collection of Valladares's poems appeared in France (Prisonnier de Castro), with an introduction by Pierre Golendorf that ex-posed the horror of Castro's prisons at the same time it documented the remarkably favorable treatment accorded Castro by the French press during the 1978 Youth Festival in Havana...
...It didn't take long before word got out that Charlie Halleck, exalted past master of congressional arts and sciences, was shaking his grizzled head and muttering about the failings of that damned truck driver from Valpo...
...The French president had been quite effusive in his comments about the Soviet dictator ("a modern man . . . representative of one of the world's largest peoples and fully aware of the realities of the present and the tasks of the future . . .") and about his desire for peace ("the emphasis that M. Gorbachev constantly places on detente is genuine...
...Others would have alerted the media well in advance to such errands, counting on plenty of photos and coverage to attest to their vast generosity of spirit...
...In the catalogue of qualities looked for in a judge, there ought to be a provision for it...
...Already stringers for many of the planet's over-circulated papers are stalking the hilly terrain, lusting after cosmic insights...
...The deadlocked Judiciary Commit-tee sent the nomination without endorsement to the full Senate, where after parliamentary stratagems, nomination-bartering, thrusting and feinting in the cloakroom, Manion was con-firmed...
...After all, he had stood up for his President when that kind of courage was reviled as foolish stubbornness, when what he knew as loyalty to a wounded leader was scorned as bad judgment...
...Dan Manion had worked with his father and thus was presumably culpable of the same hard-nosed, tough-talking anti-statism and anti-Communism...
...PRESSWATCH Armando Valladares's book, Against All Hope,' has attracted a lot of attention here: Stephen Rosenfeld and Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Suzanne Garment in the Wall Street Journal, and others, have all been deeply moved by this ac-count of a man who survived twenty-two horrible years as a political prisoner in Cuba...
...The first comes from Le Monde, in Paris, which is probably the most-improved foreign publication (the most-improved American newspaper is the Washington Times, which has become a nationally significant publication since Arnaud de Borchgrave took it over...
...Until now, that is...
...Intrepid correspondents, fitted out by whatever is left of Abercrombie and Fitch, will reveal that Rick McIntyre has a degree in architecture from the University of Colorado—surely a sign of un-Hoosier leanings—and that Congress-man Frank McCloskey has acquired a taste for cajun cuisine at Bloomington's Uptown Cafe, a mark of creeping cosmopolitanism...
...Attorney John Tinder, who will prosecute the luckless eightsome, had the decency to allow a year of mourning for the late Seth Denbo, fabled Republican chairman of the Eighth District, before announcing the indictments...
...Moreover, this leads inexorably to the belief that Indiana is the true center of all creation...
...At the very least, the exercise of trying to discover the presence of common sense in a nominee would prove instructive...
...she chose not to pay attention...
...He had refused to adapt himself to the political circumstances of con-temporary America...
...The gripping question of what it takes to be a congressman is, of course, echoing throughout the land, nowhere more insistently than in Indiana's Eighth District...
...That was seven years ago...
...Dastards who opine this may be CONSERVATIVE tNf ACTIOH VON mss...
...Here again Landgrebe was held to be wrong-headed, a man from another time, out of place in a complex world intolerant of his fervent convictions...
...Then there were the visits to the burn ward at Walter Reed during the Vietnam war, and letters to write and calls to make to parents of patients he had met on his rounds...
...Isn't it possible that a lawyer from a small-town practice whose work is concerned with routine, downright pedestrian cases—the kinds of matters ordinary men and women take to lawyers and, if unlucky, by Kent Owen then to court—can be well equipped to administer justice wisely and fairly...
...Michael Ledeen is senior fellow in international affairs at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies...
...No mean feat, particularly for a judge-to-be...
...His relations with Republican satraps back home were less than happy because they thought he was a laughing-stock, but even worse because he ignored their instructions...
...The first concerns the personal ties that a Western leader can establish with communist leaders...
...The preceding matters make for merely a random sample of how Indiana has dominated the news in recent months...
...He was given to such acts as handing out Bibles in Moscow's Red Square and similar God-less places...
...and about his lack of glitter as an ornament of the bar...
...Lately a plethora of news has burst upon and about us: Supreme Court decisions, presidential nominations, congressional contests, spy trials, federal grand jury indictments, en-tanglements of policy both foreign and domestic, hardships of farming, botherations of modern life...
...Like El Nino and the turkey buzzards of Hinckley, Ohio, this upsets the larger scheme of things...
...and his dearth of remarkable Kent Owen is The American Spectator's Indiana Editor...
...Whatever else he brings to his deliberations, he has already shown beyond peradventure that he can keep his nerve as well as his wits about him...
...he thought it was the right thing to do, and he respected the privacy of those he helped...
...Then, again, it just may be that one man's local angle is simply another man's neighboring saxon...
...Perhaps there should be some form postcards printed up, saying, "Welcome to the real world...
...While McIntyre, the Republican challenger, is said to be doing nicely in the surveys of those who respond civilly to pollsters, the liveliest news is that a federal grand jury indicted eight Crawford County Democrats for vote fraud...
...Such are the current symptoms of "Hoosierocentrism": the settled conviction that deep down everything is connected, in one way or another, with Indiana...
...The Crawford countian's custom of determining the market value of his franchise has usually had a direct effect only on county commissioners, township trustees, and school board members...
...Ten years were required before it was first suggested, towards 1970, that the economic failures were not solely the result of the American blockade, and that the Gulag of the Caribbean was proportionally comparable to that of its Soviet big brother and superior to those of the Latin American dictatorships of the right...
...During his years in the State Senate he had also been rather outer, too brusque and bluff to join the club, nicknamed the "abominable no-man" for his efforts to reduce the size and cost of government...
...accomplishment...
...That may have been what made Earl Landgrebe so arresting...
...Lest it be thought this is populist mysticism used to counter intellectual force and academic rigor, it should be understood that common sense implies a breadth and depth of judgment gained from thoughtful attention to what is usual, concrete, particular, and obvious...
...Despite the late Roman Hruska's defense of mediocrity in public men, there was more to be said for having a Dan Manion on the federal bench than was adduced in argument before the Senate...
...Hoosier spies (Pollard and Pelton) for Israel and Russia, the Supreme Court's decision on the Re-publican party's right to gerrymander the General Assembly as well as its decision on the limits of federal authority in Bloomington's "Baby Doe" case, the valiant struggle of William Schroeder of Jasper and his artificial heart, the role of Senator Richard Lugar of Marion County and Admiral John Poindexter of Odon, the President's national security adviser, in keeping the world safe for democracy—all these tend to prove the existence of an international Hoosier conspiracy...
...Why didn't he hire a staff that would get him a good press and then cover for him when his blunt opinions riled the smoothies...
...I am reliably informed that she exclaimed, "Why didn't we know all this...
...As a Lutheran layman of quiet but serious piety, he felt he had a Christian responsibility to perform good works...
...So he had to go, a victim of his own character...
...He believed the peopleought to know something, but not all at once...
...what is known in the light of commonday...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
