THE ALTER NATIVE
Wellesley, Sir Arthur
BUCKLEY Continued from Page 5 is that they're booring, and it is important, I think, that when one edits, let's say a college paper, to edit the college paper so that it will be read with...
...Now take for instance the New Left's opposition to the draft, which coincides also to the opposition to the draft on the New Right...
...TYRRELL: What of your style...
...BUCKLEY: Oh, sure, I couldn't agree with you more and incidentally it's definitely in the American tradition the tall tale...
...And what we do is make up that deficit by an annual fund appeal which so far has kept us afloat...
...We feel your magazine is written elegantly and with wit...
...100,000 is a substantial circulation and with any such circulation in England, for instance, you can make money...
...TYRRELL: Is it true that originally you intended NATIONAL REVIEW to be a journal of conflicting and diverse ideas...
...We've always had deficits large deficits which I think is true of every journal of opinion in America, even those subsidized by the CIA...
...A lot of people feel that if you see anything amusing in politics, it's like laughing in church...
...TYRRELL: What of the future of NATIONAL REVIEW...
...TYRRELL: As the founders of emetic journalism, THE ALTERNATIVE would like to know how you founded conservative journalism in America...
...But what you have is an enormous discrepancy between the cost of publication and the cost of subscription...
...He distinguished between opportunism and sectarianism...
...He asserts that the report rests on three fallacies...
...BUCKLEY: The only people who could discontinue it are its supporters, but our circulation is higher now than it ever has been...
...It's become quite a pile of junk since you left it, is this so...
...He went broke, and sold it to a mad man called, what was his name...
...There are a lot of people who don't like me by the way...
...Did you establish one specific style...
...Parrish disagrees...
...The big common unions of the 'thirties, the common fronts of the 'thirties, were distinctively errors in opportunism...
...But it was always projected as a conservatively oriented periodical...
...Our deficits range from $125,000 to $250,000 a year, and are made up by three or four thousand people sending in checks...
...And finally launched it...
...I worked with the American Mercury for about three months, three very hectic months under William Bradford Huey...
...So that it isn't simply a matter of whiplashing people into trying to write in a particular style as it is selecting people who can write naturally in a real style...
...First he says, married college students, older people with most material necessities already bought and paid 6 competative paradigm against which you can't survive for psychological reasons unless you keep your price as low as their price level...
...Parrish notes that the number of people reached by government food-subsidy programs in 1966 equaled the number of people classified as poor in 1964...
...You'd need more than that now, by the way quite a lot and it turned out to be extremely difficult to raise, extremely difficult to raise...
...And it's extraordinary to say this in light of the fact that there didn't then exist a really conservative journal of opinion, at least one that was in any sense journalistically inclined...
...He was sort of an obsessed anti-Semite and so on and so forth but he I quit when Huey sold it...
...Sectarianism is when you don't want to work with anybody because he isn't exactly (sibilantly) like you...
...Now it's owned by some fundamentalist out in Texas...
...Too many right wing college papers, I think, tend to fill their magazines with articles on price controls by a remote professor of economics somewhere, without any journalistic flair...
...The crime rate is soaring up a third from only 1960 to 1964...
...So it can be done...
...It's part of the American way of saying things...
...BUCKLEY: It was there sort of as a memory...
...I tend to feel that most of the people on the New Left who oppose the draft, oppose the draft simply as a useful way of opposing the Vietnam War...
...This," he considers, "hogwash...
...I think that journalistic flair ought to focus on the events of a particular college rather than to try always to speak sub specie communalis...
...In the early 'fifties you worked with it...
...The estimate that there are at least 30 million poverty - stricken Americans originated with a 1964 report from the President's Council of Economic Advisors...
...TYRRELL: Had the character of Mencken lingered at all...
...The New Republic in 1932 was available to its readers for six bucks, now a 300% increase in the cost of living since then and it's available for eight bucks...
...There are x number of readers we don't have because they can't stand what they consider to be our insouciance...
...Second, poor people actually pay much less for their goods than do the rich, because many durable items automobiles and appliances for examples can be bought used at a fraction of their original price...
...households are below the poverty line, and the percentage continues to decrease," writes Dr...
...The AMERICAN MERCURY was a leading journal under H.L...
...As you probably know, the principal difficulty of the journals of opinion is not so much that they don't have a substantial circulation...
...But I think that what Lenin used to call the sin of opportunism is something one needs to watch out for...
...And if you keep your eyes trained to the ridiculuous dimension of politics, you can, I think, be instructive in discussing politics...
...TYRRELL: What of the AMERICAN MERCURY...
...The Economist is a very prosperous journal, so is the New Statesman, and Nation, with considerably less circulation...
...BUCKLEY: Yeah, quite a while ago...
...BUCKLEY Continued from Page 5 is that they're booring, and it is important, I think, that when one edits, let's say a college paper, to edit the college paper so that it will be read with interest by at least that part of the college community that reads that kind of thing...
...He notes that "poverty intellectuals" now claim that there are from 30 to 80 million poor people in the United States...
...It's sort of Platonic activations of one's own maturity...
...Our real problems, Parrish affirms, are reflected in statistics on crime, illegitimacy and delinquency...
...BUCKLEY: Well, within a certain framework, and we do publish different views of lots of thing McNamara, marijuana and so on, and so forth...
...There had been several intervening editors Henry Hazlitt, Eugene Lyons, and Lawrence Spivac...
...But what we did was set up a stock company and go out and sell stock and debentures and eventually sold about $350,000 worth...
...John B. Parrish, Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois...
...But the reason it doesn't sell for more than eight dollars is because Life magazine and Look, and so on, are available for eight dollars and they set up a THE ALTER NATIVE by Sir Arthur Wellesley Poverty: Hungry People or Bloated Rhetoric...
...And there's nothing worse than people who can't be funny trying to be funny, or people who can't be serious, trying to be serious...
...Measured by consumer goods yardsticks, less than 5% of U.S...
...BUCKLEY: I think that they are programatically similar in some respects...
...These problems will either be solved or the nation will descend into chaos...
...BUCKLEY: I think that people should write in the way that comes naturally to them...
...So although Mencken was alive when I worked on the Mercury, it was after he had had his near-fatal strokes...
...And that under the circumstances I find myself, and some of my colleagues disagree with me, declining to join some of those abolish the draft committees, even though I do believe in abolishing the draft...
...One exception to this I suppose is what seems to be a genuine fear on the part of members of the New Left of big government, something which is rather new and very refreshing...
...How did you go about founding NATIONAL REVIEW...
...By 1970, ten per cent of all births will be illegitimate...
...99% of all families have electric or gas stoves...
...If we could charge $18 a year we'd be a prosperous journal of opinion...
...Do you think there is a place for his type of thought today...
...Whereas the sin of the error of opportunism is that, let's say, if everyone else is in favor of socialized medicine be he Stalinist or Marxist or whatever and you're in favor of public medicine, then you make common cause with him...
...The Editors of National Review always have their own laws of which one of mine is don't try to write like Murray Kempton unless you can...
...But he agreed to stay on as editor, it being understood that he would have plenary editorial powers which he continued to exercise up until a point where he was fired and somebody else was brought in who also continued to have plenary powers, but then he was fired about 1955...
...88% have telephones in their homes...
...But we can't do that and keep the marginal subscribers, and it's the marginal subscribers that are of course the ones you want...
...Parrish offers statistics to the contrary: 95% of all families enjoy a minimum adequate diet, or better...
...Finally, 98% of all children are born in hospitals...
...And it is the poverty William Buckley speaks of in this issue of The Alternative the poverty of confidence...
...BUCKLEY: Well, I think that the trouble with Menc Continued on Page 8 for, and those families simply having a bad year, are not hopelessly mired in poverty, even though they may have earned less than $3000...
...TESICH: Wouldn't you feel that exaggeration has to be one technique, and that by exaggeration you can point to things you can't point to in any other way...
...And then it went into straight anti - Semitism and it became completely junkey...
...99% have electric refrigerators...
...Somebody, reviewing a book on Goethe, wrote in National Review: "Sometimes upon reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny...
...92% have televisions...
...How do you establish a style...
...Mencken...
...And National Review therefore does attempt to look at politics as something which has a ridiculous dimension...
...We figured we needed about $400,000 to $450,000...
...BUCKLEY: Well, it was an incredibly hard thing to launch...
...All statistics are for 1965...
...Are the goals similar and should young conservatives work with the New Left...
...So I think that accidental congruities between the positions of the New Left and the New Right tend to be more accidental than genuine philosophical congruities...
...TYRRELL: The New Left often giddily attests to having similar goals with the New Right, and suggests the New Right work concomitantly with the New Left...
...Todays low-income 'new poverty' buyer has a purchasing power 25 times greater than that of the rich buyer of 1923...
...TYRRELL: How do you estimate Mencken...
...Third, most medical and other social services can be obtained free or inexpensively...
...If today we have a widespread problem of poverty, it is the poverty William Faulkner spoke of the poverty that induces writers to write not from the heart but from the glands...
...This report defined as "poor" those families with an income of less than $3000 per year...
Vol. 1 • May 1968 • No. 6
