Editorials/The President's Ambitions/The Big Chill
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS ............................................................................................................................................................................. THE...
...Moreover, it was idiotic...
...The same fate has befallen others: absurd misfits, victims of ghastly disease and medical breakthroughs, popular entertainers, and occasionally, individuals of singular, possibly creditable achievement...
...should have become clear by now that "differences" between a free market democracy and a totalitarian slave state cannot possibly be "resolved" by a meeting between their heads of state...
...It presumed that the history of the freest country in the world was a history of oppression...
...By the late 1970s two-thirds of the American people, ac-counting for three-quarters of the national wealth, qualified for minority status...
...Recall, if you will, the fleeting popularity of such In 1984 64 percent of the Republic's non-whites opposed preferential treatment, according to the Gallup poll...
...Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader," seems to be the obligatory media protocol...
...In purely objective terms there is no reason for Americans, even the dopes among us, to be fascinated by Mr...
...It is one thing when great personages create history...
...For a President who is now well into his second term Ronald Reagan has piled upon his desk a prodigious mound of work—and still some call him lazy...
...In his 1980 campaign statement he said, "We must not allow this noble concept of equal opportunity to be distorted into federal guidelines...
...I hope this is the beginning of a stupendous athletic career, but his induction into the Football Hall of Fame is still a long way off...
...Skinner's rats...
...Affirmative action was one of the most repugnant notions ever dreamed up by reformers in a free society...
...What I cannot understand is that a sizable percentage of the adult population, especially the university-educated segment, retains my teenage outlook thirty years and many summits later...
...So would his Kingdom...
...Paradoxically, however, the number of educated people in the West who are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 9...
...William (The Refrigerator) Perry is- now ravenously sought after by every organ of the media, not to mention corporate promoters...
...The idea that conflicting ideologies produce forms of government whose coexistence ensures world tension was some-thing that I would not have thought of at that time, nor would anyone have suggested it...
...Perry, we are told that the public is just wild about him...
...Now he and his assistant presidents worry about how to change an executive order dating back to 1965 that is used as the basis for affirmative action...
...The sense of personal responsibility, personal achievement, and personal worth was replaced by the knowledge that something other than talent and hard work would decide one's condition—namely, government decree...
...Perry...
...Others have been advanced, of course...
...Gorbachev really is likely to have concluded that all that stuff about thebellicose Reagan was indeed propaganda and nothing else...
...Something unexpected might happen to a Bad King and he would become a Good King...
...Affirmative action is but another piece of reform that reveals the reformers' deep contempt for democracy and for the ordinary people of the land...
...Then they are moved on to THE BIG CHILL 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 some other subject of fascination...
...We are physical presences to be arranged from above according to race, color, creed, sex, and so forth...
...I remember the national hysteria over Michael Jackson...
...Before undertaking this column I requested the views of several learned observers of the American scene—what did they think of "The Refrigerator...
...He shouted no songs that will endure and did little else that was admirable to an intelligent mind...
...Indeed, summits tend to be dangerous because they inevitably reinforce the (well-founded) Soviet suspicions that senior American officials are a weak and gullible lot, endlessly willing to respond to threats with mea ea/pas and further propitiatory offerings...
...Certainly the Eisenhower of the second administration did not have such vast ambitions...
...All are policies of the utmost importance, signifying as they do momentous changes in policy...
...That is what is so disconcerting...
...Reagan might have more wisely remained in Soviet eyes the mysterious solitary figure on horseback, riding about his ranch with a blade of grass between his teeth, a missile in his holster, a black hat on his head, and an unfathomable look in his eye...
...Soon even a Madonna undraped and featured in the pages of our leading porn magazines attracted little attention...
...And, as for most of the other national wows, there are often compel-ling reasons for finding them repugnant—for instance, their lack of talent, their unenviable predicaments, their prosaicism...
...diverse phenomena as Michael Jackson, Margaux Hemingway, or Barbara Honegger...
...Always someone or some-thing must be found to rave about and to make these facilities profitable...
...Yet there is one decision being fevered over that ought not to be on the President's schedule: affirmative action for federal contracts...
...Now here is a profoundly dreary view of humanity...
...The presence of cameras and microphones can create such hallucinations, but only for a while...
...Since his first inauguration he has opposed government programs requiring preferential treatment on the grounds of race and sex...
...Every day—in fact every minute—television networks, radio networks, newspapers, magazines, and still more communications systems await the arrival of some great event or personage—anything to utilize their facilities, to intrigue an audience...
...What created these absurd hysterias is the existence of a huge communications network pervading the nation and waiting somewhat desperately for stories to be echoed and re-echoed through it...
...In all history, this is an unparalleled condition...
...Now we are more deferential...
...The nation's attention span is dwindling faster than the ozone layer or the Atlantic coastline...
...Now is this a genuine news story or is it a contrivance...
...And so a jolly, 6'2", 308-pound rookie football player of modest accomplishments is to be the national wow, at least for a little while...
...He has participated in a few offensive plays, . caught a pass, and scored a few touch-downs...
...A certain percentage of every work force was to be black and female and leavened with other so-called minorities...
...Broadcast studios and printing presses cost money...
...Thus we witness the celebration of such fellows as "The Refrigerator...
...After Mr...
...Then it promised to compensate the oppressed by immediate advancement in education and in jobs, but without prejudicing the advancement of the theretofore non-oppressed...
...In fact, mazeltov...
...U.S.-Soviet relations have of course changed since 1955, and in ways that make the persistent faith in "dialogue" particularly hard to understand...
...Well, felicitations...
...Actually, the President does not have to change the order...
...Seen in the reformers' light human beings are hardly human and ought never to be free...
...Perry is a defensive lineman who has started in only a handful of games for his team, the Chicago Bears...
...More recently as many as 77 percent of the Republic's blacks did the same...
...There are those product endorsements, the requests for public appearances, the interviews...
...The hubbub attendant with being William Perry will of course be brief...
...According to this view, we Adapted from RET's weekly Washing-ton Post column syndicated by King Feature& were all at one with B.F...
...The promise was of course absurd, and there are today millions of Americans who have been held back because of their sex and race...
...Not one manifested any interest whatsoever, and for the first time ever I actually saw the face of my friend William F. Buckley, Jr., go absolutely blank...
...We were to be rewarded when we behaved appropriately and scorned when we were remiss...
...I think now that my reaction was subconsciously formed by fairy tales of rival kingdoms ruled by autonomous, all-powerful Good Kings and Bad Kings...
...Beyond his celebrity there is actually not very much to say about the man...
...These people tell us that the government should en-force discrimination in favor of some group , through hiring quotas...
...Jackson there was Madonna...
...As someone who works in the White House told me, Americans are oddly reassured by the prospect that, post-Geneva, Gorbachev and Reagan will at least have had a chance to get acquainted...
...It has always been thumpingly unpopular and the reformers have never exposed it to the will of the people...
...It Tom Bethel/ is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Regarding the behemoth Mr...
...It is no longer necessary, and he has confected for himself a busy enough schedule...
...That is in the nature of being a national wow...
...By contrast, from about the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties there was a widespread belief, shared by most economists in the world, and by the CIA, that Communist central planning would before too long leave market economies in the dust...
...All he has to do is to rescind it...
...These expensive communications systems simply have to be put to use...
...Well, I cannot say that I have encountered a soul who has displayed even modest interest...
...As recently as June 15, in a radio talk, he warned against "some today who in the name of equality would have us practice discrimination...
...THE PRESIDENT'S AMBITIONS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Ah, but there is...
...The exhilarating air of the free society wherein one sets out to achieve what-ever one wishes was replaced by categories to be filled and policed by bureaucrats...
...My reaction to the earlier Geneva summit was something like this: Wow, if they get together and talk, maybe they will discover that they are members of the same human race, etc...
...Ronald Reagan came into office op-posing preferential treatment on the basis of race or sex in hiring and in other matters...
...It is quite another thing when history is created by the mountebanks who have brought us "The Refrigerator...
...Even its reputed beneficiaries abhor it, for it denies them their personal achievement, revives bigotries, and is so foreign to American ideals...
...Read the stories about him, listen to the broadcasts...
...Similarly disdainful assessments of the American leadership seem to have been formulated in the Kremlin after almost every summit, to judge by subsequent events (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Berlin Wall, Afghanistan, and so on...
...Nonetheless, from the ecstatic attention he was accorded by the media and the dopes who follow popular music, one would think that he was a figure of historic significance...
...At this very hour the President and his assistant presidents are working on the Strategic Defense Initiative, plans to balance the elephantine budget, to modify the federal income tax code, and to revise affirmative action rules for federal con-tracts...
...At any rate, the fascination is always vastly out of pro-portion to what is warranted...
...CAPITOL IDEAS NO TURNING BACK by Tom Bethell At boarding school many years ago I dimly recall hearing that there would soon be a meeting between Premier Khrushchev (as he was called) and President Eisenhower...
...The reformers had developed a plan for America, and through government coercion each American would hunker down and play his appointed role...
...Affirmative action is one of those odious panaceas dreamed up by 1970s reformers who viewed all adult Americans as juveniles and all juveniles as animals...
...To the fascinating story of a fat fellow catching a pass and making a touch-down, the media now add the story of his growing popularity, a popularity that the media created and nurtured...
...On a more important point, how many other, more consequential news stories are similarly contrived...
...First, it should be clear to all by now that the Soviet economic system (socialism) does not work, cannot work, will never work, and if persisted in will reduce to starvation all countries saddled with it...
...Who will stir up the credulous clients of rock 'n' roll...
Vol. 19 • January 1986 • No. 1
