Presswatch/Ultimately Unfortunate
O'Sullivan, John
PRESSWATCH r ULTIMATELY UNFORTUNATE by John O'Sullivan When ABC decided to postpone—and even to consider canceling—a projected miniseries on a hypothetical Soviet occupation of the United...
...In the Times story on West Germany's new conservative youngsters, two points were likely to mislead the in-cautious reader...
...But isn't innovation what America is all about...
...by deploying MXs in closely spaced silos, compounding the problems of "fratricide...
...Accordingly an ABC executive prudently announced John O'Sullivan is the editorial page editor of the New York Post and a columnist for the Times of London...
...PRESSWATCH r ULTIMATELY UNFORTUNATE by John O'Sullivan When ABC decided to postpone—and even to consider canceling—a projected miniseries on a hypothetical Soviet occupation of the United States, entitled "Amerika," it admitted that among its reasons was that the Soviets had warned that its showing would en-tail "unfortunate" consequences for ABC...
...It's the first time that Joe has tried switching, (continued on page 46) TAKE ANY 3 FOR 99C EACH (values up to $106.95 with Trial Membership) 11 M K) ,ticG, AAHCAI!.4J rh1 Ulf E JLEF.S q IMIHIAt...
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...And the form they have chosen is a satire on that literary expression of American self-improvement—the "how to" book, to be found at the checkout counter in super-markets (How to Profit from the Coming Nuclear Holocaust, or the coming inflation, or the coming slump, or whatever...
...If SDI doesn't work, MX is killed and who needs MX...
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...Social science" is an umbrella term for various academic disciplines like sociology which never submit their conclusions to the test of falsifiability...
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...So ABC had an opportunity to demonstrate its attachment to high principle...
...dumbness squared...
...Unfortunate" is, in such contexts, a wonderfully sinister word...
...Sure it's different...
...No offense to Dieter who is doubt-less as personally ambitious, well-dressed, and anxious for good grades as any Manhattan yuppie, but that remark sounds less like a conversion to conservatism than the first step on the "long march through the institutions...
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...The implied Soviet threat seems to have been nothing worse than a refusal to allow the ABC news program, "World News Tonight," to be broadcast from Moscow during the month of February...
...It carries echoes of those suave villains in Hollywood thrillers who veil the crudest threats in the silkiest adjectives...
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...the lucrative contracts of economic detente which persuade Western businesses not to of-fend politically...
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...But when we break down the figures for the "established parties," what do we find but the largest segment of sup-port, 38 percent in fact, going to the Social Democrats—now much more leftist than in the halcyon days of Helmut Schmidt...
...A focus on pre-WWI society...
...In the above case, the original sense of various useful and attractive concepts like justice and conscience had, in effect, been abolished...
...I may try it for a while longer," says Joe with a grin...
...The people, politics and creations of an age...
...1f lip THE HISTORY BOOK CLUB THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 25 either sexually or across ethnic lines—but he's just one of many cases in what sociologists are learning to call a major social trend toward middle American multi-ethnic bisexuality...
...To be sure, there has been criticism—notably,, an eloquent protest from the Secretary of Education, William Bennett...
...Diocletian And The Roman Recovery, by Stephen Williams...
...The method used is to detect some new social trend and then to demonstrate its existence by stringing together anecdotes about individuals who exemplify it and quoting them extensively on it...
...Human Life in Russia has long been unobtainable...
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...So the cause of her death was ultimately alcoholism...
...and, finally, the curious lack of real indignation at ABC's conduct...
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...And there can be little doubt that, if the U. S. government had made such a threat, that is exactly what ABC would have done...
...This found expression in a New York Times editorial which condemned "Amerika" as "conspicuously feeble...
...The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman...
...Book shipments will be charged to your account at low Members' Prices, plus postage and packing...
...The MX strategy has not yet made such sense as evidenced by the resistance to acceptance in the Congress and the public forum...
...From Alexander To Cleopatra: The Hellenistic World, by Michael Grant...
...I), by Fernand Braudel...
...Peter Piper, 46, a pickled pepper picker, has still to be convinced . . . etc...
...NC Ab1A Some years ago, Professor F. A. Hayek noticed that the word "social" had acquired an entirely new function...
...and Constantine Fitzgibbon's When the Kissing Had to Stop...
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...Similarly, insofar as any definite meaning can be attached to the phrase, "social justice" means dealing with people without any regard to their personal merits...
...Presumably, negating Soviet warheads is a plus because Soviet weapons which are destroyed cannot be launched at us...
...and Ukraine...
...The trend may concern yuppies, or right-wing West Germans, or anything at all...
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...Lord cogently argues that the MX is an indispensable component of our retaliatory deterrent force to a Russian first-strike and that both MX and Minuteman ICBMs can now be adequately defended by both passive and active measures...
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...The President's SDI strategy makes a great deal of sense...
...The entire incident might almost have come from the first episode of "Amerika" in which it is outlined how the U. S. gradually falls victim to a bloodless Soviet takeover...
...that the corporation, already anxious about "Amerika's" spiraling costs, would naturally take the Soviet protest into consideration when deciding to cancel the program...
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...It might be easier to hold interviews with those Soviet journalists like Vladimir Posner trained to mimic liberal terminology and American television techniques...
...And as for the advantages of merely "being there," they are doubtful in a controlled society of Potemkin institutions where the cynical Russian proverb "no one lies like an eyewitness" makes greater sense...
...rubbish . . . absurd...
...The article by Carnes Lord, "The MX in an Age of Defense," is of the first importance in the ongoing SDI debate...
...it belongs in every collection of .books on the U.S.S.R...
...An opinion poll of young West Germans between the ages of 16 and 20 showed that 25 percent of them expressed sympathy for the radical Greens—but a much larger 71 percent sympathized with the established par-ties...
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...That doesn't look like death from alcoholism...
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...For instance, the phrase "social conscience" means blaming everybody else (under the sobriquet "society") for whatever ill happens to be under discussion...
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...What Conquest and Manchip White have done is to put the known consequences of earlier Soviet occupations into fictional form...
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...The MX issue remains unresolved, unless one is willing to accept Lord's closing canonical pronouncement that whether the U. S. proceeds with strategic defenses or whether arms are controlled (and perhaps whether anything else) "the maintenance of a survivable and effective ICBM force throughout the rest of the century will remain a fundamental requirement of American policy...
...Why not simply use these same defensive weapons and the many more defensive missiles or RV killers we can buy with the funds we would otherwise spend for the offensive negators and protect the nation's value even better...
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...Passive defense can be greatly enhanced by such means as hardening the missile silos by as much as fifty times by a revolutionary technique to make them virtually in-vulnerable...
...As such, his work is one of the earliest histories of the Gulag, wherein the Archipelago consisted of an entire nation to be punished...
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...It felt no such assurance vis-a-vis the Kremlin...
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...But members of the Ku Klux Klan can expect a brighter future in the red dawn: "Trials will be held in Washington and in the South in which men totally without KKK sympathy or background will be branded as such...
...CORRESPONDENCE '(continued from page 7) Trident submarine launched missile (the D-5 SLBM), stealth bombers, and cruise cannot perform this mission (an assumption that should draw much fire to Mr...
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...Offensive missions other than attacking Soviet ICBMs are apparently, from Lord's analysis, already adequately per-formable by our submarines and bombers...
...We now find the word employed as follows: "The cause of international terrorism is ultimately the West's failure to find an answer to the Palestinian question...
...For instance, Dieter Wulf, a 24-year-old psychology student at The Free University in Berlin "who had been deeply involved in the campaign against the missiles," delivered himself of this opinion: "I decided this year that I didn't want to be a peace bureaucrat...
...Quite the contrary...
...Ultimately" is used to obscure this simple and obvious fact...
...Since we know there are such people as laid-back reactionaries and smartly dressed liberals, the fact that young West Germans now study hard and wear jackets and ties should not persuade us that U.S.-German friendship is safe and sound...
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...and by retrofitting some Minutemen with advanced MX guidance technology to increase hard-target accuracy...
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...Adding up the support'for the Greens and the SPD, we discover that 63 percent of West German youths now support parties committed to radical leftist values...
...Peter To John Paul II, by Nicolas Cheetham...
...So they are counseled to use their lawn profitably "by keeping chickens and, perhaps, a pig...
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...If SDI works, Soviet missiles do not arrive on U. S. targets and who needs MX...
...Documents America's greatest battle...
...Having been first emptied of content, these concepts were then filled up with meanings amenable to socialist thought...
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...nonsense...
...No very great journalistic advantage was promised...
...So if a trend is being reported, the story should contain some harder evidence that it is a trend in reality—and not merely in the reporter's copy...
...Disraeli, by Sarah Bradford...
...If we want to understand this from an analogy, imagine a detective interviewing a murder suspect: D: "What is the cause of your wife's death...
...So he—not some abstraction like Western diplomatic failure—is responsible for the murdered child or the policeman's amputated leg...
...This was interpreted by various "experts" to show a "stabilization" of radical values, some persistence of older leftist views from the seventies, perhaps a decline of radicalism, certainly no "extension" of it...
...The first was that the word "conservative" was used to mean a number of quite different things—including (a) politically conservative, (b) personally ambitious, (c) self-centered, (d) anxious for good grades, and (e) discreet in dress and behavior...
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...A fictitious example of the genre: Joe Sixpack, 32, an unemployed turntable operator from Des Moines, Iowa, recently started dating a gay native American...
...A comparable transformation has overcome the word "ultimately" in re-cent journalistic comments on Middle East terrorism...
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...And by a happy coincidence, it also includes a recent book describing life in a future Soviet-occupied America: What to Do When the Russians Come by Robert Conquest and Jon Manchip White...
...Lord's argument of active defense of U. S. MX ICBMs in order to preserve them for the Soviet ICBM-killer role necessitates a successful SDI system of ICBM killers in the first place, rendering unnecessary ICBM killers of an offensive nature which are replete with problems of early launch, empty holes, and other ambiguities of targeting...
...Nor do several such since you cannot argue from the particular to the general...
...But the idea of "Amerika" at least is not conspicuously feeble...
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...If that's an improving trend, things must be even worse than we conservative pessimists thought...
...A single anecdote or a clever quote does not in itself demonstrate the existence of a trend...
...It had been transformed into a prefix meaning "not" or "un...
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...Underlying this moderation is the anti-anti-Communist view that, though the appearance of knuckling under to Soviet pressure is, well, "unfortunate," ABC has after all only decided not to do what it shouldn't have been doing in the first place...
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...Its crucial contribution is to posit the thesis that the transition from offensive deterrence to the multi-layered defensive deterrence envisioned by the SDI will extend over decades and that, consequently, the maintenance in the interim of a survivable ICBM offensive deterrent force "will remain a fundamental requirement of American policy throughout the rest of the century" as an integral element of a combined offensive-defensive strategy...
...And "social worker"—well, I need say no more...
...The Soviet authorities will have little use for real KKK members . . . but those who have specialized sin anti-Semitism and have any journalistic or demagogic flair may come to some arrangement, and be retrospectively proved not to have been KKK men at all...
...This sort of argument comes under the general heading of the complexity fallacy of which John Gross has said: "Complexity is the last refuge of the scoundrel...
...I predict a great career for "ultimately" in the liberal claptrap...
...The rise and fall of such usages is an interesting topic for study...
...Huxley's Brave New World 1984, of course...
...we Hake it available with the hope that the lesson of the Ukrainian Famine will not be lost on our times...
...That is, of course, nonsense...
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...This arranged marriage of form and content produces some wonderfully funny straight-faced advice to Americans in their various political, occupational and domestic roles...
...If we would have the capability with a successful defense, of negating Soviet missiles or re-entry vehicles in the first place, why use them to protect offensive negators...
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...a criticism which, shrewd24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 ly interpreted, supports the authors' argument...
...This last point particularly enraged a Soviet reviewer who indignantly declared that "the lampoonists should know that the `white cloaks' do not even dream of greater freedom than they already have in today's America...
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...Indeed some of the examples, if they really indicated a trend, would be deeply worrying...
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...A recent front page story in the New York Times on a new conservative trend among young people in West Germany illustrates the flaws of a form of reporting that is now very fashionable on all sides...
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...Maoists and Trotskyists are warned flight is their only sensible course...
...Not everyone agrees...
...ABC had hoped to arrange such broadcasts to attract higher ratings in the dull winter months...
...Since I have not seen "Amerika," which has not yet been filmed, I cannot say if that view is reasonable...
...On this occasion, however, the word meant what little it said...
...The second misleading point was the hard scientific evidence of German opinion...
...Lord but which we will also assume true for debate's sake...
...Examines the many facets of Queen Victoria's favorite Prime Minister...
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...There is a well-established literary tradition in which a hypothetical political future is invented in order to illuminate and criticize political trends in the present...
...Lord then borrows on the President's SDI strategy to suggest that MX be actively defended by multiple layers of defensive systems—which are also negators or killers of Soviet ICBMs (and submarine launched missiles...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
