Correspondence
who were incarcerated in a local dog pound. In Charleston, South Carolina, the Rev. Henry Scott announced in mid-sermon that he was immediately quitting the pulpit because a Vassar College "witch"...
...Leon Kass), but to contemplate the implications of Margaret Mead's only hope to overcome what Steven Gold-berg proved to be "the inevitability of patriarchy...
...is no different from pornography available in most big cities: a very low percentage of it is violent...
...Unless both partners keep their mouths tightly closed, kissing can lead to perilous exchanges of precious bodily fluids and should be banned outside of marriage As a conservative, I am also too "regrettably impotent" to make "The Continuing Crisis," let alone the Johnny Carson show...
...But although I would like to see several clones first made of Tom Bethell, Bill Ricker, and other writers in the last issue of TAS, I still believe some cautionary reflections—and perhaps careful ad hoc prohibitions—are in order relating to any technology that might lead in the course of time to the creation, on any single continent, of multiple genetic copies of Bob Tyrrell...
...As for Roderick Miller's very intriguing observations, Gee Whiz, he can rest assured I wouldn't even thinkabout anything so shockingly ickypoo as oral sex...
...Further, writes Gilder, "Porno-graphic movies around military centers reek with attacks on women . . ." Pornography available around such "centers" (bases...
...But Gilder may be buying into the curious hermeneutic method practiced by Andrea Dworkin and other feminist apostles of censorship, who somehow discern expressions of male "violence" even in the wholesome and solitary poses assumed by Miss April...
...Right, George, you yank them right outof touch with the gentle, nurturing androgyne that lurks in all of us...
...Some, I might add, show a more minimalist, Beckettesque appreciation for the absurdities of life and language, like the drill instructor who kept a maladjusted private in my platoon digging all day in the Parris Island sand, having told the private he could stop as soon as he'd dug half a hole...
...but from my three years in the Marine Corps I can't recall a single boastfest that featured rape and torture (though perhaps Gilder means "violent" in the highly figurative Dworkinian sense...
...Now I lie around on the couch fantasizing I am James Webb and grouching about the feminization of Marine Corps training...
...According to Lefever, "one must distinguish the essential Niebuhr from the socialist-pacifist Niebuhr of the 1920s and also from the failing and confused Niebuhr of the mid- and late-1960s...
...Could that book have been Sexual Suicide, and was that poor cretin George Gilder...
...Al-though I have the greatest respect for Ayn Rand and other libertarian thinkers who seem to have influenced Miller, I believe they erred seriously in accepting the claims of socialists that they either care about others or help them...
...That he is a current member of the conservative hagiology and regularly appears in such publications as The American Spectator is indicative of the regrettable impotency of the traditional right...
...Spock, and after 12 weeks of beatings at their hands, with relentless rant of punts and cussies, and orders to yell "I am so pissed off I could say 'peachfuzz' " at the top of my lungs as I jogged circles around the marching platoon in the 100-degree heat, I have to admit I became a liberal Republican wimp, in love with Joan Baez, and agape at the splendor of John V. Lindsay, but I got over it...
...The very straitlaced author was ridiculed mercilessly, the audience truly guffawed, and Johnny Carson's polite but incredulous questioning made the scene even more ludicrous and embarrassing...
...Sure, a certain amount of sexual bragging goes on around a bar-racks...
...Well, you cause loud men in Smokey-the-Bear hats to subject the feminine principle to a torrent of abuse: "Virtually every sentence, every description, every lesson embodies this sexual duality, and the female anatomy provides a rich field of metaphor for every degradation...
...Michael Stanford Charlottesville, Virginia George Gilder replies: Hey, you guys, give me a break...
...I can only say the palette of the bioengineer becomes more potent every year and many surprises—good and bad—can be expected...
...Therefore I do not believe it is either desirable or necessary to begin my celebration of the morality of capitalism by rejecting the Judeo-Christian values that have been upheld by most capitalists in almost every capitalist economy...
...I think it was...
...Though in fairness perhaps he simply doesn't know that socialists are much better at denying self-interest than are capitalists and his religious beliefs probably make him confused...
...Perhaps Gilderlavished such a token on his drill instructor...
...Selfishness leads to demands for unearned benefits and thus—as by an invisible hand—to socialism, which is the fundamental economic evil in the world...
...But I have to agree with George that for drill instructors the female anatomy is a rich source of metaphor...
...Gilder claims, "One of the favorite stories told on return to base from liberty is of the violent abuse of a whore...
...His review of the new Niebuhr biography by Richard Fox, and the new Niebuhr anthology edited by Robert McAffee Brown (TAS, April 1986), is too obviously one-sided in its characterization of Niebuhr's political loyalties and ideas...
...but so is the male anatomy, and that of numerous animals—hell, the whole language is a "rich field" for D i's, many of whom are virtual Joyices of invective...
...How do you do this...
...This scourge of the women's movement remains deeply committed to barefootedness and pregnancy...
...I merely maintain that it is ubiquitous and thus fails to explain anything interesting about the heroic achievements of capitalism, which depend on imaginatively serving others in the marketplace...
...The occasion of these hallucinations is an attack on the U.S...
...I spend most of my time these days writing about technology and regard its prospects as overwhelmingly favorable in nearly every domain...
...Finally, Mr...
...If we do so, Lefever claims, Niebuhr's record "adds up to a profile of a thoughtful neoconservative, a (continued on page 49) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 9...
...gladly and voluntarily making large financial gifts to the instructors...
...Since I went to Parris Island in 1958, when the Marines still made maggots into men and the Drill Instructors were all General Patton clones (only younger), yet to be mushed out by Dr...
...His attempt to reconcile capitalism with the ethics of altruism in Wealth and Poverty was an excellent demonstration of moral poltroonery typical of conservatives...
...Huh...
...Henry Scott announced in mid-sermon that he was immediately quitting the pulpit because a Vassar College "witch" had put a spell on him fourteen years ago...
...Now, the first clause of this sentence is self-evidently inane hyperbole...
...Hazing Gilder George Gilder on the right is easily the paranoid equivalent of any quasiintellectual specimen on the left...
...His recent TAS article, "The Bioengineering Womb" (May 1986), taken from Men and Marriage, revised from Sexual Suicide, may have had as many as five sentences that were true...
...RET...
...As to these letters, I have changed a bit since 1958, but I did not become a biologist...
...The weirdest of Gilder's assertions is that graduates of boot camp "end up...
...When you want to create a solidaristic group of male killers," writes Gilder, "you kill the woman in them...
...I am not paranoid on these points...
...As for my moral poltroonery, I do not deny the importance of self-interest...
...A Vassar College spokesman notified the venerable New York Post that "It is not the policy of Vassar College to confirm or deny the existence of witchcraft...
...Marine Corps...
...It often happens...
...False Niebuhr Despite Ernest W. Lefever's warning against the sin of selectivity in recounting the life and thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, one must turn the charge back against Lefever in his confident identification of Niebuhr with the neoconservative movement...
...but now he calls for a "real feminist movement," and in what is perhaps a quixotic attempt to woo a few converts away from the unreal one, he proceeds to borrow from some of the most febrile of radical-feminist fantasies...
...That says it all...
...I don't recall handing over my first paycheck to Staff Sergeant Mike-sell as a little thank-you for twelve weeks of physical torment and black humor at my expense...
...Or could it be that George has about as much experience of military life as he has a chance of leading a new feminist movement...
...I vaguely remember seeing on "The Tonight Show" several years ago an author of a book about American sexual mores or something assert that the country was going to hell because of rampant oral sex...
...Such minds as this deserve recognition...
...CORRESPONDENCE...
...Merle Cave of Paso Robles, California, when asked to comment on the death of his brother, Verne, who choked to death on his own eyeball after a female drinking partner recklessly placed it in his mouth, observed: "An eye for an eye is one thing, but two for nothing is something else...
...Roderick L. Miller Victor, New York Who is George Kinder-Kirche-Kuche Gilder trying to impress...
...My speculations in this short chapter were in-tended not to expound the details of the science (I refer the curious to Dr...
...Miller must have mistaken me for Tl uman Capote...
...He had the misfortune to be sitting next to alleged comedian George Carlin, who saw easy meat...
Vol. 19 • September 1986 • No. 9
