America in the Looking Glass: A British Visitor's Summer Reading
Cranston, Maurice
BOOK REVIEWS AMERICA IN THE LOOKING GLASS: A BRITISH VISITOR'S SUMMER READING by Maurice Cranston It is not easy in America to know what is going on in America. In Western Europe you can read...
...Colleges do not exist to "deal" with these "vital issues...
...France has experience of state-run industries going back to Colbert in the seventeenth century—America has none...
...In a concluding essay written specially for this volume, the author says, "To anyone who reads the methodological urgings contained in the essays of this volume, written over almost two decades, and who simultaneously looks at what passes for 'economics' in the professional journals of 1980, there is only one evident conclusion...
...Professor Bloom dates the worst of these developments from the protest movements of the swinging sixties, and the reforms in education that were introduced by panic-stricken legislators at the time to appease the protestors...
...television is Talking Tombstones, 2 by Gary Gumpert, who has the advantage of being something of a humorist as well as a professor of communication arts and sciences in the City University of New York, and who forces his readers to laugh and weep with him at the lamentable state of the media...
...channels is almost always U.S...
...news, and since it is mostly bad news it does not give an exhilarating picture of American life...
...Having been the target of much student abuse in the sixties, senior professors have not unnaturally lost some of their zeal for teaching...
...Dr...
...government forsaking that of protecting life, liberty, and property in an effort to become apromoter of universal happiness...
...The very first program I saw was a feature about the home front of World War II in the U.S.: the focus of attention was on the cruel internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast and the tormenting of blacks in race riots in Detroit, and the 'Watching Television, edited by Todd Gitlin...
...He calls the socialist government of France, which came to power in 1981, an "abject failure" and he draws attention to the defects of that regime without any sentimental attempt to excuse them...
...It is hard to resist that feeling, reading such a book as Jan Morris's Manhattan '45,5 that America was a nicer place in 1945 'Manhattan '45, by Jan Morris...
...6The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom...
...Pantheon Books, $19.95...
...Yet, Brennan and Tollison assert in their preface, "As a founder of the burgeoning subdiscipline of public choice, as a moral and legal philosopher, as a welfare economist who has consistently and at times almost single-handedly defended the primacy of the contractarian ethic, and as a public finance theorist , Buchanan' s work has had worldwide recognition...
...one cannot foresee all the unforeseeable things that occur in human experience...
...One difficulty in writing about the future, of course, is that it is unknowable...
...NP101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 41...
...Of course he has angered the left with his policy on Nicaragua, but since that policy has been well sabotaged by his friends, his enemies have not needed to develop arguments against it...
...indeed the only bias I have been able to perceive on American TV, since arriving this spring to spend three months as a visiting professor in California, is one that leans to the left...
...To the impartial observer, the pork-barrel politics and the sheer provincialism of so many national legislators are not easily made attractive...
...The first answer that may be thought of is changes in American education...
...De Gaulle, of course, out-maneuvered the politiciens by appealing directly to the people, and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 39 Mr...
...J. R. Ewing and Bobby are living persons for millions for whom Mrs...
...ply them...
...aynard Keynes was never a socialist, yet theorists of the American left like to speak of themselves as "Keynesians" even when they espouse socialist ideas and ideologies...
...But when he tried to buy favor from that other old horror, Khomeini, with a cake and kept it a secret from Mother, there was a terrible drama in the kitchen...
...They must be judged in terms of their true ends...
...and Other Tales of the Media Age, by Gary Gumpert...
...Preface, index...
...But people should not expect too much of the college...
...The singular achievement of the U.S...
...Apparently such teaching is thought today to be inimical to the ideal of cultural pluralism, and American or European history is kept out because there is no time to give equal attention to the history of other continents...
...Lekachman wants, is perhaps a measure of the sheer unworldliness of liberal intellectuals...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...It is arguable that the rot set in much earlier, but at any rate it seems to be generally agreed that the rot is there...
...The presence of the writer and editor is intrinsic to the medium and their thought is part of that which appears in print...
...It is no wonder that people are anxious...
...17.95...
...In print, editing is, by definition, always assumed...
...They were all an elite...
...but such robust methods are hardly likely to be recommended by American radicals or acceptable to those of Sweden...
...If it is not true today, one must consider what changes are responsible...
...American brains go into business, independent research, even academia...
...Besides attributing errors of judgment to M. Mitterrand, M. Fabius, and the rest, he suggests that there were certain historical and social factors, peculiar to France, which made that failure almost predictable...
...He presents his argument clearly and cogently, and if it fails in the end to convince the reader, it is because Mr...
...If America could export its unemployed and unemployable, its welfare clients and its criminals to Sweden, the Swedish model of a semi-socialist state might work better in America than it would in Sweden...
...Hence it is virtually impossible to accept Mr...
...Macmillan, $19.95...
...Lekachman prefers to look at Sweden, where there are stirring examples of full employment existing under a semi-socialist regime...
...The assumption behind television's editing practice," Professor Gumpert writes, "is that practically all content can be reduced to the essential and can be rearranged for effectiveness...
...4 American radicalism seems to have nothing to address to the present...
...Of course, the media do not speak with a single voice...
...It is also something that the United States most conspicuously lacks...
...LibertyPress LibertyClassics Wi- AT SHOULD ECONOMISTS DO...
...Simon and Schuster, $19.95...
...Reagan is in the White House...
...I t must be said, however, that Amer- icann undergraduates arrive at college knowing very little...
...In certain respects the situation is less favorable...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...Constitution in school, and who were taught nothing about European history and very little about their own...
...Radicals tell us that things could be better in the future...
...The American media have a duty to keep America's leaders on the straight and narrow...
...As a measure of that recognition, Buchanan was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics...
...Lekachman's final message of hope for American liberalism as set forth in the last six pages of his book is that Governor Cuomo should be chosen the next President of the United States...
...The author of the essays is almost the only one in step or else he writes under some delusion that he is something that he is not...
...the media forgetting the diffusion of information to become the authority in faith and morals while luckless schools are expected to replace absent parents in the upbringing of children, and universities are called upon to solve the vital problems of the contemporary humanity...
...admittedly a self-appointed duty of a conscience that may feel guilty about the drivel it makes it its business to provide day in, day out for its long-suffering public...
...In this respect he may be seen as the successor to Rousseau, who set out the means that were needed to constitute an ideal state and then went on to develop a theory which proved that it could not be done...
...The viewer is even denied the pleasure of witnessing a conflict of ideas...
...However, that evidence comes from England and France, and Mr...
...Lekachman suggests, as Keynes would never have suggested, that that full employment could be the first of a series of objectives in a program to unite "an anti-conservative coalition" in post-Reagan America...
...But come to America, and you find a press and electronic media that is at once opinionated and oddly uninformative, and a throng of mediocrities on the payroll of American government and politics, like extras on a film set, keeping the real actors hidden...
...If they do that well, they succeed, and if they fail (as Professor Bloom thinks they do) it is because they fail in their proper duty...
...Reagan (if it is to be called conservative) notably reduced the rate of unemployment in America (to 6.2 percent in May...
...If I am not as dismayed by it all as is Professor Bloom, it is because I suspect that many schoolteachers of today are so alienated and downtrodden that they could not be relied on to impart an invigorating education to their charges...
...The experience of Europe proves the reverse: "Anti-conservative coalitions," such as those of Mr...
...Several of the essays are published here for the first time, including "Professor Alchian on Economic Method," "Natural and Artifactual Man...
...Oxford University Press, $17.75...
...There is something wrong with most American high schools today...
...One is reminded of jockeying for vested interests among the politiciens, as Charles de Gaulle called them so scornfully, in the Fourth Republic of France...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...The pressures of the place, its competition, its pace, its hazards, even the fun of it, demanded special qualities of its people, and gave them a particular affinity with one another...
...stated message of the program was that the liberty America was fighting for was liberty only for some...
...Reviewed by Richard Brookhiser in the July 1987 TAS—Ed) than it is in 1987...
...Even in superior colleges, I meet students who have never read the Declaration of Independence or studied the U.S...
...The Swedes rid themselves of poverty in the nineteenth century when they rid themselves of their poor through emigration to the New World, and the Swedes who remained grew rich by selling weapons to combatant nations while remaining blissfully neutral through two world wars...
...Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand are just faces and names...
...they exist to transmit culture and advance knowledge, and nothing more...
...There can be no denying that American academics have come to think of themselves, and to judge one another, as scholars rather than as teachers...
...What Miss Morris says of New Yorkers, I would think, looking back to the year 1947 when I first visited America, to be true at that time of Americans in general...
...Michael Harrington is one of the few who do not shrink from the name...
...The Carnegie Foundation's report on the "undergraduate experience" in America, edited by Ernest L. Boyer,' is as dull a book as such "empirical compilations" tend to be, but it serves to confirm that undergraduate education has been crowded out of its traditional place in American university life as research and graduate supervision have become the prime concerns of the professors...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPressIL ibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...W hat passes for news on the main U.S...
...See also Charles R. Kesler's essay, "The Closing of Allan Bloom's Mind," in the August 1987 TAS—Ed) 'College...
...Constitution, classical philosophy, and the Scriptures, but proclaim instead "openness," "relativity," and "utility," leaving a void that pop culture and fashionable philosophies have contrived to occupy...
...Among his other books are The Limits of Liberty and, with Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent...
...If one watches American TV one finds no evidence of this...
...America is getting to be a very peculiar place, with nobody wanting to enact his own role...
...But the age of radio is over, and television is visual...
...There are other such factors which could help socialism to succeed better in France than America...
...Lekachman does, however, have one idea that is undoubtedly Keynesian: that full employment should be the goal of public policy...
...In Western Europe you can read about it in newspapers that have correspondents in Washington and New York, and it is usually the very best journalists who get those jobs...
...it needs scripts, and the word is supreme...
...Callaghan and M. Fabius, gen3 Visions and Nightmares: America After Reagan, by Robert Lekachman...
...So far as American politics are concerned, this may not be entirely the fault of the media...
...television has not been to make fact into fiction, but to have made fiction into fact...
...292 pages...
...A state-directed economy, which is the centerpiece of any socialist system, requires above all a highly trained and sophisticated professional elite in the service of the state...
...they seldom go, where all the best French brains go, into la fonction publique, the grand French name for the bureaucracy...
...Miss Morris writes: To be a citizen of Manhattan was an achievement in itself—it had taken guts and enterprise, if not on your own part, at least on your forebears...
...Harrington feels able to recommend the introduction of socialist measures here...
...Harrington does not show that America is really any better placed than France to make socialism succeed...
...Lekachman does not envisage the possibility of the Governor being unwilling to be drafted, and if drafted to do what Mr...
...Especially since the last congressional elections, the troupe on Capitol Hill has been able to steal the limelight from the star in the White House but not to offer a shining display of democracy at work...
...In the world of video, effective editing means that the alteration of time and space is hidden, and the result represents the 'fictionalization of the real.' The symbolic nature of the visual image is overlooked, and the human presence behind the photographic icon is disregarded...
...Or you may meet an American official abroad who can tell you what is happening, and again it is generally the ablest functionaries of the U.S...
...The characters who appear in American soap operas have come to assume more complete, rounded, and authentic personalities than the inhabitants of the real world...
...whereas the conservative administration of Mr...
...French culture and French traditions encourage the spirit of system and uniformity whereas American culture and traditions encourage independence and enterprise and pragmatism...
...Notes on the History and Direction of Public Choice," and "Public Choice and Ideology...
...Harrington's sociology, so to speak, is at odds with his socialism...
...they are more responsive to stimulus...
...In Tocqueville's famous account of American democracy, the American mother was seen as the custodian of morals, a pure-minded matriarch who watched over the behavior of the menfolk...
...Only Mr...
...erated massive unemployment where there had once been full employment...
...Lekachman, Mr...
...The Carnegie Foundation book ends with the following complaint: "We often had the uncomfortable feeling that the most vital issues of life—the nature of society, the roots of social injustice, indeed the very prospects of human survival—are the ones with which the undergraduate college is least equipped to deal...
...As much is at any rate suggested very forcefully in Allan Bloom's best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind' American educational institutions, Professor Bloom asserts, no longer transmit the traditional values of the U.S...
...Moreover, the present generation of American students is much more sensible, serious, and good-mannered than those of twenty years ago...
...Unlike Mr...
...It is not simply that there was less crime, less drug abuse, and all the rest of it, but that there was a spirit of hope and national pride in the populace which is not there now...
...Harrington takes a hard look at the socialist experience of England and France, and he does not pretend to like what he sees...
...So authors of books about TV can be relied on to take a sour look at it, or rather a sour attitude towards it, since it is by no means obvious that they actually look at it...
...Harper & Row, $19.95...
...words are secondary, and if they are required at all, writers are hardly needed to supMaurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...
...It is because he thinks such impediments to socialism do not exist in America that Mr...
...Part of his indictment is that the technological possibilities of television enable its 27ttlking Tombstones...
...This may be because so many of them are working their way through college, which is something European undergraduates hardly ever do...
...Books, for example, are almost invariably hostile to television...
...Since most traditional subjects might be considered discriminatory—Western algebra having to be taught at the expense of Chinese algebra, American music at the expense of Indian music, English literature at the expense of Nigerian, and so forth—traditional subjects seem to have been discreetly dropped altogether, and classrooms are given over to exchanges of opinion on such subjects as sex and South Africa, so that students may arrive at college having never heard of Aristotle or Aaron Burr, but with lots of ideas about condoms and sanctions...
...The inactivity of the high school provides an opportunity for the college...
...Reagan has done much the same thing, coming in from the right to accomplish things that the left dreamed about but never managed to achieve, such as ending the economic recession and negotiating effectively for arms reductions with the Soviet Union...
...The old ideal of turning out good republican citizens, and well-trained minds, seems to have given way to negative education, in which nature itself is left in command...
...This is perhaps to be expected since television has not much room for authors...
...Keynes never believed that any one man held the key to salvation, except perhaps himself...
...Indeed it is clear from the recent literature that the theorists of the American left are resigned to the fact they can make no contribution to public policy while Mr...
...For example, in one such recent book, Watching Television,' it is suggested that American TV is dominated by "Reaganism" and a shift of bias to the right...
...Harrington's suggestion that what failed "abysmally" in France could work even moderately well in the United States...
...conservatives that things were better in the past...
...The students are eager to learn and to work...
...This is fair criticism, but it is not especially relevant to American TV, which is different from that of most countries in being remarkably reluctant to make room for the real...
...Lekachman should think of suggesting this...
...and thus without an impoverished minority to demand a share of the spoils, the Swedes could tax themselves to the hilt and re-distribute their incomes without losing any of the wealth-producing energies of capitalism...
...So how could, any economist, who' wanted to see full employment achieved, expect an "anti-conservative coalition" to bring it about in the future when the evidence of the past is that such coalitions raise unemployment to 11 or 12 percent...
...An absurd complaint...
...Buchanan is General Director of the Center for the Study of Public Choice and Harris University Professor at George Mason University...
...Another book which provides a disapproving appraisal of U.S...
...Better an education that touches a child's brain only lightly than one which interjects ideological prejudice...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 For myself, I like teaching in American universities better than in the European ones...
...Radio is different...
...dollars...
...By James M. Buchanan Preface by H. Geoffrey Brennan and Robert D. Tollison his 1979 Liberty Fund volume brings together sixteen essays by James M. Buchanan Off the nature and methods of economists...
...It is doubtless the mark of a free country that it can criticize itself...
...But East German TV could hardly have made a more hostile film about that particular subject, and it was not at all what one would think of as "Reaganism...
...Hardcover $8.00 0-913966-64-9 Paperback $3.50 0-913966-65-7 Liberty Fund edition, 1979 Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...This is something that France possesses, more than any other country in the world...
...Ignorance is preferable to error...
...government who are posted to Europe...
...The Next Left: The History of the Future, by Michael Harrington...
...The fact that Mr...
...It is far from obvious why Mr...
...A university education is held in higher esteem when it is paid for by the student himself and not by his father or the government...
...he calls himself in a plain frank way a socialist, and this kind of honesty makes his books more attractive than most that emerge from the American left...
...Lekachman is an economist, a noted authority on John Maynard Keynes, and a disciple of that shrewd operator, but apart from commanding a very readable style of writing, he does not have much in common with his master...
...But what, it must be asked, has Sweden in common with the United States of America that could prompt any sensible economist to consider that hygienic little kingdom as a sensible model for the American government to imitate...
...One might expect American conservatives to be more worried than American radicals about what is going to happen "after Reagan," but futurology is not a conservative science, and voices from the right are no less vehement than those of the left in protesting about what is wrong with the present...
...The TV watcher, Professor Gumpert protests, cannot tell what is real from what is artificial, and the producers take advantage of that circumstance...
...Robert Lekachman, for example, gives his latest book of essays, Visions and Nightmares, the subtitle "America After Reagan," 3 and Michael Harrington's The Next Left is subtitled "The History of the Future...
...Hence the so-called Iran-contra scandal, which had the familiar ingredients of a soap opera, made front page news, and was not allowed to die down...
...Since the American mother has taken to going out to work all day, and adopted the life-style of the menfolk, the censorial matriarchal role has been assumed by the media, for whom the President of the United States is sometimes, and sometimes not, the favorite son...
...Thus when little Ronnie hit the beastly Qaddafi with a stick, and confessed it at once to Mother, all was promptly forgiven...
...users to cheat the viewers...
...The Undergraduate Experience in America, edited by Ernest L. Boyer...
...And yet the media in America cannot be accused of flippancy...
...Oxford University Press...
...Henry Holt, $17.95...
Vol. 20 • September 1987 • No. 9
