The Nation's Pulse/Party Time
Evanier, David
dams? Sagan senses the problem; thus to give them a little heft, he hints that the extraterrestrials are involved in a kind of search for the creator. The heavens declare the glory of God, says the...
...Really...
...Even those who agree with it...
...He said of Louis Farrakhan in 1985: "Basically, Rev...
...There is no time to wait for Sagan's in-conclusive data...
...Louis Farrakhan is simply an anti-Semitic `blip' on the screen of our lives put there by the media, some overreactive Jews and Mayor Koch . . ." You can see this guy's whipped himself into readiness to love Jesse Jackson...
...In our century, one need only look at Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to find The Baton and the Jackboot, as Berta Geissmar called her account of working with Wilhelm Furtwangler under the Nazis, and the Taming of the Arts, as Juri Jelagin called his 1951 chronicle of being a musician in Stalin's Russia...
...That sort of thing...
...I think I ended up voting for Hart who I hated...
...In a gentle reminder of her gender, Bella Abzug concluded her remarks by reciting a song: "I am woman/watch me grow/see me standing toe to toe...
...This kind is a favorite among front groups...
...the deleterious impact of welfare programs, Social Security, and military spending on capital formation...
...And what do they hear...
...magazine kiosks where I eagerly followed the literary world...
...What do you think of the Sandinistas...
...20036 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 31 remember a Senator cozying up to him on a TV panel show, trying to put an arm around Jesse, and Jesse shuddering, pulling out of the grip, making shooing motions with his fingers...
...And Botha is on the way out...
...On the way out I spot a woman holding her fur coat and waiting for her limo...
...For these artists, their art's the thing, and wider questions of state and polity—the place of their art and thought in a wider political and social context, and the inGGTaxation and the Deficit Economy is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in reforming our economic policies.» -JAMES C. MILLER III, Director Office of Management and Budget PACIFIC INSTITUTE TAXATION AND THE DEFICIT ECONOMY Fiscal Policy and Capital Formation in the United States Edited by DWIGHT R. LEE Foreword by MICHAEL) BOSKIN Twenty-two distinguished economists examine the harmful effects of taxation on personal and corporate income...
...We are winning...
...A friend of mine, craftier than Navasky, answered: "Well, you know, at this very moment, someone is clipping pages from the Nation for ANNOUNCING...
...The line is open 24 hours a day and your message will be delivered the very next day...
...I recently overheard a conversation in which someone mused aloud about the mystery of the Nation publishing pieces favorable to Polish Solidarity...
...After his outburst, I dipped into it and found to my embarrassment that I was in over my head...
...that its politics did not reach into the back of the book and determine so many of its book reviews and literary projects...
...The cry is for artistic freedom, for the right of the creator to work, untrammeled by any externally imposed conditions, especially those imposed by the state and by society...
...Looking back at the120 years of struggle, and journalistic integrity, we cannot look backwards and go forwards lest we stumble...
...I asked her...
...The normal rate is $9.75-this is a discount of over 50...
...Seeing Jackson up close is interesting...
...Proposals for reform include stringent constraints on the fiscal process, economic deregulation, tax reduction and simplification, and reductions in both transfer payments and military spending...
...It isn't...
...Look, I was delighted just to get dressed up, wash my hands, come out and have a nice time...
...By calling the number below, you can send a message directly to your Senator urging support for President Reagan's tax reform plan...
...In the Middle East another predatory people is busy stealing other people's land in the name of an alien theocracy...
...A colleague, an ally, in tough causes and against formidable foes in and out of government, a dear personal friend...
...Glancing through recent years of the Nation, here is what the rag can muster on a regular basis: Alexander Cock-burn, Robert Sherrill, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Lens, Andrew Kopkind, Fred J. Cook, Todd Gittlin, Edward W. Said (a member of the PLO's Palestine National Council), and Communist party hack Gilbert Green, who wrote about—you guessed it—the FBI's "forgery by typewriter" in the Hiss case...
...A chic crowd, wandering back and forth between the two bandstands (one for music, the other for heavy stuff: Jesse Jackson, Bella Abzug, George McGovern), munching cotton candy, popcorn, chili, plenty of booze...
...I don't read it cover to cover every week, I mean...
...I'm probably an easy conquest...
...Did you enjoy it...
...A lady from the South, Mollie Ivins of the Dallas Times-Herald...
...college circuit in 1982, Mr...
...Like most of our Israeli fifth columnists, Midge isn't much interested in what the goyim were up to before Ellis Island...
...AMERICANS FOR TAX REFORM 1800 "M" STREET, N.W., SUITE 475 WASHINGTON, D.C...
...cloth, $34.95 FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH Available at bookstores 177 Post Street, Dept...
...the Nation at that age was a badge of defiance...
...This is not to say that gifted writers do not appear in the pages of the Nation...
...In other words, I cannot connect the Nation of old, with all its political faults, with the Stalinized journal it is today...
...We must be the people who care for children in the dawn of life . . . poor people in the pit of life . . . for the stranger on the Jericho road...
...And we find even more: a true and horrifying story of bloody repression stretching all the way from Germany to Siberia...
...Sagan's visibility came initially from his considerable abilities as a popularizer of science...
...The disco radicals and limousine liberals wander in the direction of the noise...
...Studs Terkel: "Truth spoken to power . . ." George McGovern: "the veteran angels of our nation...
...I've never seen it," she said...
...The 120th anniversary issue of the Nation is available for anyone who wants it...
...Culture is—despite everything we fear—free to go its own way, often prospering in the marketplace and always immune to gross government sanction.fluence of that context on the content of their art—are left unexamined...
...A long, long way to go...
...Like you know, I'm from Berkeley...
...The sad result is the transformation of Carl Sagan, popularizer, into Carl Sagan, moralist...
...Do you hate the Nation...
...I really support them...
...For the greater part of these data should be the human situation itself...
...but Carl Sagan will only believe him if an ETI tells him so...
...Many, and perhaps most, artists are content to use their public freedom for private artistic purposes, and to leave wider questions of the relationship between culture and politics to those who find the subject interesting...
...Since the Republican victory in 1980, there has been fear, supported by remarkably few facts (or so it seems to me), of a similar, Only one question remains to be asked...
...Which brings to mind the saddest thing about the occasion...
...The first reaction is that culture here too, despite all appearances to the contrary, is con-trolled...
...530 pages...
...A Catholic instructor, spotting the mag among my books, lashed out with amazing fury that it was a rag...
...Nasal Southern twang, dry wit, salt-of-theearth type...
...We say that culture, and high culture in particular, ought to be pure and holy...
...I always vote for . . . you know actually the most interesting candidate...
...Please call today 1-800-325-6000 Operator # 56 You may send an up-to-50-word message of your own ($4.95) or the text already on file at Western Union ($4.00...
...He said, "Yes, we've accepted your piece...
...Please call now...
...It is a central part of our tradition that mere knowledge must be guided by understanding, and both by wisdom...
...that if I read it I didn't understand it, and he doubted I read it anyway...
...From the standpoint of government, the answer is pretty clear, though rarely spoken out loud: Everywhere in free countries, those in charge of politics seem quite happy to bask in the reflected glory of the great accomplishments of the past, to take credit for an attitude of generalized benignity toward new culture as a whole, and to allow those troublesome creatures we call artists and thinkers a pat on the back and free rein to achieve their goals as best they see fit...
...According to Benda, the treason of the intellectuals was not that they were disinterested ivory-tower theorists, but that they were not disinterested enough...
...But he's saving it all up, you can be sure...
...Buddey's at campuses across the country was combination of faculty and students on A series of famous dashes mentator Max Lerner 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 historical reasons, or literary ones, or whatever...
...For years the American people have paid higher taxes as a result of special interest loopholes...
...I mean, I could have put together a better party if they'd asked me...
...Good things occasionally squeeze their way into the magazine...
...Just whom does this situation in the democracies satisfy...
...If we have to fall back and regroup we'll meet at the Dairy Queen in the Delray shopping center...
...We expect them to come up Commerce Avenue in down-town Dallas any day...
...But any appeal to the specifically human in Contact is con-fronted with "courageous thinking," that is, thinly rationalistic solutions to all questions of morality and values...
...in China, we still hear from all over the world the cry of the artist crushed unto death by despotic governments...
...You will not get here the jargon of academic types...
...All three become clouded by the simple accumulation of facts...
...John's College in Annapolis for spending the semester reading Thomas Wolfe in the library, I was walking along 42nd Street by the Manhattan library, by the David Evanier's article on the World Muslim Congress also appears in this issue...
...Sometimes, there is indeed evidence of the beginnings of such intervention: government support of art during the Carter Administration, for example, was marked by conscious attempts to use art to further political and social goals...
...On the part of these artists, there seem to be two reactions, rather than one...
...President Reagan thinks that this is wrong, so in 1985 he proposed a major overhaul of the tax code, eliminating loopholes and lowering rates for the rest of us Americans...
...I've been hearing about this party for so long, I just thought: party, you know...
...The left's current idols...
...And Reagan has just a few more days...
...1, San Francisco, CA 94108 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 33...
...But for those who have lost faith, who cannot accept the consolations of philosophy, or who will not learn the lessons of history, the promise of delivery through a transcendent science seems to be the only hope left...
...Do not faint in the face of adversity as they try to attack and undercut the liberal or the progressive movements...
...She is a propagandist for these predators (paid for...
...It is fair to say that artists are of several minds about these matters...
...The New Republic's better...
...Senate, and the lobbyists and special interest groups have launched an expensive campaign to continue their free ride (a ride we pay for...
...Men of honor such as Emile Capouya and M. L. Rosenthal were literary and poetry editors...
...It is easy to see why this formulation is so attractive No less than anyone else, the creator of culture feels he has a right to demand this autonomy, not merely for his art and thought, but for his very life...
...We've all been synchronizin' our Rolexes...
...The heavens declare the glory of God, says the Psalmist...
...Billing is direct to your phone or credit card...
...My first publication...
...Even today, poetry editor Grace Shulman has independence, and so does art critic Arthur C. Danto...
...I had a very nice time," she said...
...paper, $14.95...
...I went into a phone booth and called the Nation editor, Carey McWilliams, holding my breath...
...But there are other artists—whether they are better or worse artists is both a difficult and an important question—who cannot rest content with the easy pluralism it is the glory of democratic societies to allow...
...There was a time when, however you disagreed, a disinterested and passionate commitment to art and culture could exist alongside loony hopes that the Soviet Union's next five-year plan would not involve torturing millions of innocent people...
...An affluent crowd, some in punk hairdos, cowboy boots, earrings (for men), granny glasses...
...As I spread my loving arms/across the land/but I'm still an embryo...
...My earliest memories of the Nation are bound up with my own coming of age...
...Brickner is understanding...
...At 18, bounced out of St...
...Marcos has gone...
...A frigidaire is the only image that comes to mind...
...Sagan's role in the modern trahison des clercs is similar to the phenomenon described by Julien Benda...
...Candor demands too that we recognize the enormity of what happened to culture under the Cultural Revolution in Mao's China...
...They know that...
...PARTY TIME Alger Hiss was there...
...Here's Mollie: "Y'all know they been tellin' us for a long time that the Red Tide would come lappin' at our borders...
...Even the Nation is aware of such things...
...Michael Novak recently wrote: "Once a liberal journal, the Nation in recent years has become to journalism what Lyndon LaRouche has become to politics: extremist, hateful, slanderous and reckless of the dignity of others...
...We ain't gonna fire till we see the whites of their eyes...
...Here the political process is open, benign to a historically unprecedented degree, and almost al-ways slow to anger and retribution...
...When I was 13, I spent a summer at a military academy in upstate New York...
...We are winning...
...The Western Union operator can look up the names of your Senators for you...
...And here are Jackson's words, surely the most overrated rhetoric around: "Thank you, Nation, for the heritage, thank you for the integrity, thank you for the relevance, thank you for the consistency...
...Today, with Nazi Germany vanquished, a more vegetarian regime ruling Russia, and a proto-capitalist policy Samuel Lipman is publisher of the New Criterion and music critic of Commentary...
...both are in some sense hostile to the status quo...
...Oh well, you know he doesn't read the damn thing anyway...
...THE NATION'S PULSE...
...According to a Newsday report that day, the talk of the party will be Gore Vidal's article, "The Empire Lovers Strike Back...
...I think someone talked me into it at the last minute...
...I love the Nation...
...Later, in fact, I actually did read the Nation along with the New Statesman, and while I don't recall the Nation ever having the unalloyed brilliance of such New Statesman writers as Conor Cruise O'Brien, Paul Johnson, Kingsley Mar-tin, or Malcolm Muggeridge, nevertheless I still think it's true that under Carey McWilliams the Nation had a certain quality...
...Benda objected to intellectuals who engaged in politics instead of following the truth unswervingly...
...On the brighter side, the Nation recently sponsored a tour to the Soviet Union...
...The Buckley School of Public Speaking offers practical instruction designed for leaders (both reigning and rising) in the fields of business and industry, sales and management, and in the various professions -- men and women who desire to improve their public performances_ Intense three-day seminars taught by Reid Buckley and a group of outsta ors help you: OVERCOME ANXIETY • DEVELOP INDIVIDUAL STYLE • BUILD YOUR BEST CASE FACE THE MEDIA • STAND UP TO CROSS EXAMINATION • BE UNDERSTOOD PERSUADE YOUR AUDIENCE ...AND BUILD A NEW SENSE OF CONFIDENCE THE SCHOOL'S FOUNDER Novelist, critic, outdoorsman, editor, lec has spent thirty years in the public arena...
...Brickner continued: "Ladies and gentlemen, a man with whom I now find myself more in synch than I find myself with many...
...I ATTENTION ALL TAXPAYERS...
...I leapt into the air...
...what totalitarian states kill by violence, our governments attempt to direct by genteel manipulation and open co-optation...
...Off to the side are portraits of writers who once graced the Nation's pages: Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, William James, Emily Dickinson, John Dos Passos, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Upton Sinclair, James Agee, Willa Cather...
...Do you like the Nation...
...Jackson stands there...
...It's an embarrassment, the kind of dreck writers take from the bottom of their garbage cans and give to editors who don't pay much or stand for any-thing...
...But here, in the wonderful countries of the West, we do not live under political tyrannies...
...President Reagan needs our help...
...yeah...
...They wanted togive up their true calling for public influence...
...and that is what all this nonsense is about...
...Editor Vic Navasky is a crafty fellow...
...Yet another attack on Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, if it isn't pure anti-Semitism it may be because so much personal envy, sexual ambiguity, and self-hatred hide behind it: All in all, Poddy is a silly billy...
...Few takers...
...I"ucliley School OF PUBLIC SPEAKING Taught by a man accustomed to victory on the battlefield THE SCHOOL'S APPROACH...
...William Sloane Coffin, former Daily Worker staffer A. B. Magil, former Guardian editor James Aronson, Marvin Gettleman, Martin Duberman, actor Edward Herrman (who played stuffy Alger in the TV special), Penn Kimball—all celebrating the 120th anniversary of the Nation at the seventh regiment armory in Manhattan on March 18...
...but I mean I'm not involved .. . why are you asking...
...But here we are in 1986, and in the grand old dank and lonely armory some 3,000 people are wandering back and forth in the noise, between Joan Baez or a noisy band on one stage, and on the other...
...The President's proposal is now in the U.S...
...It goes by the style of the autonomy of culture and its independence from the depredations of politics...
...Though we do not have state power tonight, we are right, and our spirits ought be lifted, for we are winning...
...No outhouse to the White House tonight...
...and the special political and bureaucratic interests that dominate the fiscal process...
...who did I vote for...
...Rabbi Balfour Brickner gets up to introduce Jesse Jackson...
...Y•" ? "You read news you can't read anywhere else...
...The highlight was a trip to Lenin's tomb...
...Do you think Jesse Jackson is anti-Semitic...
...Duvalier has gone...
...No one does...
...AMERICAN DOCUMENT There is a popular and attractive formulation of the desirable relationship between culture and politics...
...I do, but I was tempted to vote for him because he was at least different, and...
...While Sagan and Elizabeth Arroway are figuring out what's good for us, lots of other folks—those who have spouses to choose, children to raise, far-reaching decisions to make—have already been at work on the question...
...Happened to be right (which enraged me at the moment more than anything...
...I should read it...
...And he does: "Maybe some don't know that when Reagan was tramping around on Nazi graves, Jesse Jackson was visiting the graves of my kin" At this point right near me a young lady actually spoke up in a crisp British voice: "I don't think they'd appreciate having him there" by David Evanier An old lady snapped, "Shut up," to the young lady...
...This article, in somewhat different form, was a contribution to a panel discussion on "Culture and Politics The New Criterion," held at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in New York on January 20, 1986...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
