Correspondence
uprisings on the West Bank and the bloody hijacking of an Israeli civilian bus, died of natural causes-natural, that is, for the Middle East-in Tunis. A vampire was slain in Orljan, Yugoslavia by...
...Golly...
...The "worse yet" is Myers's invention...
...First, the Church has been in much worse straits than current ones many times in the past...
...Thus Clint Eastwood could not appear...
...I suspect it is he who is the chauvinist...
...In Charles County, Maryland, Circuit Judge Graydon S. McKee III upheld the animal control board's edict that Mrs...
...Fumento ends with a mean quote from Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr...
...This may not be exactly what Tompkins described in her attack, but it nevertheless is a presumption of superior insight...
...indeed, such a list could contain no name that was not in some sense approved in advance...
...I am instructed to do minimal research, and addressed as if I were a kid (my editors are my "elders") I can imag ire no apter confirmation of Tompkins's argument about Marxists' arrogance toward those they would "disabuse...
...Myers delights in Jane Tompkins's blast at Richard Ohmann and myself for condescension, moral smugness, etc...
...The belief in vampires is widespread in parts of Yugoslavia, though Yugoslavians still doubt the reports of the English author, Evelyn Waugh, who while serving as a British intelligence officer in Yugoslavia during World War II insisted that Tito, the Communist leader, was in truth a woman...
...I did not suggest that the Japanese are "chumps" because a declining dollar robs them of their investments...
...The Vatican, like other corporate home offices, will benefit greatly...
...Jane Tompkins was indeed critical of some varieties of academic marxism, "Charging thatAmerican pacifism since the Vietnam War has lost its conscience abandoning the principles of nonviolence, Lewy, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, critiques four leading pacifist organizations...
...Undeniably, a military genius might gain victory for the side that has been outmaneuvered and is even politically bankrupt, but surely it is wiser in fighting a war to assume that the other side may have the military genius you yourself would like to head your army...
...my disappointment on reading Tom Bethell's twaddle ("Trading for Dollars," TAS, March 1988...
...Consider, by way of example, that defender of "the moral authority of great writers," D. G. Myers, who chooses easy entertainment value over serious clarification...
...But this is illogical...
...But Michael Fumento's piece rivals anything I have ever seen for sheer malice...
...Would he like to see the U.S...
...Fortunately, though, Gitlin also took the occasion to divulge his canon of post-Modernist greats: Monty Python, Donald Barthelme, David Byrne (of the the Talking Heads), Twyla Tharp, Don DeLillo, "and especially the epilogue of Berlin Alexanderplatz," I am less interested in these as specimens of Gitlin's taste than as specimens of his reasoning...
...All Lazere has proved is that my account was not contrary to Tompkins's attack...
...Excluding the last, however, perhaps the ghost of Stonewall Jackson might have something to say on the subject...
...A vampire was slain in Orljan, Yugoslavia by her mother...
...Has it occurred to him that his VCR is also depreci ating, and much faster than the dollar...
...Zumwalt's tour in South Vietnam, he patrolled rivers that had been sprayed by Agent Orange...
...And I thought the Democrats had screwy economic theories...
...it mixes words whose tones and meanings toll the passing of an age, rather as one hears the surf's crash and pebbles' clatter on Dover Beach in Arnold's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...
...A pause.] Now I would like all of you to ponder the followingwhen does the dropping of feces become writing...
...B. EEBDMANS PUBLISHING CO...
...However, I would suggest that both the Professor and Mr...
...Had Myers paid attention rather than swooning into insensibility at the spectacle of one leftie bashing another, he (she...
...Funky...
...the 1863 Chattanooga campaign), then co command in the East (viz...
...Safire wanted me to be left with this idea...
...so do maxims...
...Second, in demographic terms, the Church now truly is "universal...
...There is another respectable body of American opinion: that in doing so we have already given ourselves a degree of unfreedom...
...the reverse cannot be argued as convincingly...
...No doubt General Grant's abilities as a commander were essential to final victory...
...James C. Simmons San Diego, California (continued on page 51) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 9 notes that the modernist forces now control most institutional strongholds in the North American and European Church, but also that the "revolution" has betrayed many of its early pious supporters, some of whom are now active "counter-revolutionaries...
...Myers is identified as a graduate student of criticism, but his article reads more like fiction than criticism...
...and then chortles that "Gitlin and Ohmann didn't know what to say in response...
...The Japanese "only" have money, and the U.S...
...Similarly, anyone who helped coauthor such a vacuous piece of fluff as America Can Winnot America Can Reform, get your facts straight, Mike-can also be dismissed...
...Neither should she gripe about my sources, which were as authentic as the repeated, though refused, requests for an interview with Ms...
...Kaiser apprises us of my "reckless disregard for the truth" without attempting to cite a single such transgression...
...Yet the Chairman asserts that no one on his staff talked to Mr...
...It wasn't long ago when conservatives talked balance in the federal budget and our current account...
...This is what Lincoln did when he launched the Emancipation Proclamation...
...Bethell says that because the Japanese put the dollars they receive for consumer goods into U.S...
...I haven't seen anything so comical since Republicans started asserting George Bush's televised temper tantrum with Dan Rather demonstrated his virility...
...d) that I'm-all for studies of how people watch television, and have, in fact, been involved in some such research...
...That's about all Myers gets right...
...b) that contrary to one of her charges I don't regard emotion as lowgrade stuff harnessed to low IQ's...
...Yes, Michael, and the sun rises in the east also...
...If he did, I do not know this to be the case...
...How fitting that Mr...
...Is Mr...
...Thomas Demski has been ordered by the city to haul down the American flag that he flies round the clock owing to neighbors' complaints that its nocturnal flapping constitutes "noise pollution...
...Fumento's main criticism of CDI was that it has an "ideological slant...
...Fumento's reckless disregard for the truth (except, maybe, "Yccch...
...Safire's book had left me with a certain idea, i.e., that we Americans do not fight well in unideological wars, I was not saying, nor did I intend to say, that Mr...
...Further, were one to hear that a Little League umpire was favoring the team his son was on, that would not be news...
...The list is little more than the reverse of an Index Expurgatorius, and what it indicates is that Gitlin seems to experience culture at one remove, through a glass of ideology...
...While I do not pretend to know the cause of the Zumwalts' medical conditions, I must say I find strange the assertion that accidental deaths caused by one's own side in a war somehow compromise the morality of fighting in an otherwise just war, impugn the motives of this nation or of Admiral Zumwalt specifically in Vietnam, or have a damned thing to do with an article on CDI...
...Marokus asserts the facts disprove my notion...
...GRAND RAPIDS, MICK 49503 812 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 51 which shy away from all political controversy...
...at the very least, then, it can be described as accurate...
...Doesn't that describe our trade deficit, incurred buying consumer goods...
...Funky's characterization of my credentials...
...It is cheery to think so, and there's more than a chance it's true...
...and that it...
...Funky casually suggests that I support traditionally Democratic positions...
...My notes indicate their responses were less direct 'than is being claimed, but I'll agree that each of them delivered a response if it makes them less unhappy...
...A sampling of Myers's further errors: He claims, "There were as many sessions on `Chicana' writers as on Shakespeare...
...MLA Marxists' Malaise As a former university English professor, I would like to endorse D. G. Myers's conclusions in "MLA Malaise" (TAS, March 1988...
...Now they embrace deficits...
...Safire are wrong in their premise that Lincoln was unable to steer the Union toward victory until after he had fully accepted the ideology of Abolitionism...
...Fumento's errors of fact and perverse interpretations: his unspoken assumption that our continuing to run in the arms race will guarantee "freedom...
...Milton Friedman's distinction, which Mr...
...The rest of Lazere's letter speaks for itself (I shall let readers decide which of us it is who deals in "repulsive malice...
...Instead, he uses the letters section as a forum for pot shots at Admiral Zumwalt, at the use of Agent Orange defoliant, and, apparently, at war in general...
...No, because I recognize that in a democracy they are permitted to put out a point of view, regardless of its relevance, or in the case of the above groups, irrelevance...
...Send for free, illustrated 40-page brochure H- 80 Vantage Press, 516 W. 34 St., New York, N.Y...
...asserting that if Admiral La Rocque's ideas prevail, "my children will not live out their lives in freedom...
...David Isenberg Washington, D.C...
...Lazere proves this too...
...would have heard the responses Ohmann and I did, in fact, deliver...
...Their breath was fairly taken away...
...and no poets at all...
...Imagine...
...continued from page 9) It is all very well for D. G. Myers to make sport at the Modern Language Association's lefties-fairest of game in more than one way-but then why not add to one's "moral authority," since that is what criticism is supposed to aspire to, by getting one's facts straight...
...He neglects to mention that instead of a Treasury bond the Japanese may elect to buy American real estate or businesses, which because of the declining dollar are very attractive bargains vis-a-vis the yen...
...Isenberg is also correct in asserting that a lobbying group having a bias is hardly a news item...
...Having attended most of the sessions he reports on, I can attest that virtually every sentence in his article is either unfactual or distorts the context of quoted statements in a thoroughly dishonest manner...
...Modern mediaa benefit popes and presidents at the expense of congresses and bishops' conferences...
...PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "GuenterLewy's careful study of the ways in which four pacifist organizations have abandoned their commitment to nonviolence helps explain much about the wider policy debate over Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and Central America.-It is essential reading for anyone who truly cares about the pursuit of peace and freedom...
...If this is all the blurring of cultural distinctions amounts to, I don't think it merits the "serious clarification" which Gitlin takes me to task for not bringing to it...
...This argument takes place at such a level of generalization that it is hard to know where to grasp it...
...10001 M rs...
...If Myers had done the minimal research worthy of a graduate student at Northwestern, he would have counted five on the former and eight on the latter...
...Lazere calls my account of Tompkins's attack "ludicrous," but adds that the attack was harmless in any event...
...Bethell quotes approvingly, between Mexico's foreign debt, taken out "to live high on the hog," and ours is as vacuous as Mr...
...Tompkins's praise was tempered with some disagreements with Gitlin, Ohmann, and me, but Myers's claim that "Gitlin and Ohmann didn't know what to say in response" is nonsense-both responded at length, as did Ellis and I, in an amicable manner and agreeing with many of her criticisms of the more arcane and doctrinaire varieties of marxism, as the enclosed text and audiotape verify (note, for example, Gitlin's statement that he is not a marxist...
...Gitlin argued in his paper at MLA that since the Second World War there has been a "blurring of the boundaries" between high and low culture...
...He quotes me indirectly (without credit) as saying, "Worse yet, conservatives are beginning to develop cultural criticism of their own...
...Do the military facts of the Civil War period, especially the military defeats sustained by the Union armies after the Emancipation Proclamation, disprove the notion I suggested, and which, if I am not mistaken, I also said the facts cannot prove...
...Moreover, it is true...
...If any of your readers are really curious about the goings-on at the CPSC, please let them know that voting records are available to the public, as are speeches, opinions, and dissents...
...She points out no factual inaccuracies in the portrayal of her voting record because there were none...
...Some years ago, Irving Kristol offered the maxim: "We must be cheerful, even when we're not happy...
...But what if one discovered that a player on one team was doing everything in his power to help the other team win...
...my point was that the political polarization of cultural criticism between left and right is a healthy trend but that it has been a factor in the resistance to the incorporation of mass culture criticism by English departments, many of AUTHORS WANTED BY NEW YORK PUBLISHER Leading subsidy book publisher seeks manuscripts of all types: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scholarly and juvenile works, etc...
...Question: Who are those unnamed individuals impersonating the Chairman's aides quoted so extensively by the unidentified author...
...I'm sure he received a pat on the head from his elders at The American Spectator for having mastered their substitution of repulsive malice for reasoned analysis and their confusion of adolescent snickering with witty repartee...
...Ah, sir, now there's your story...
...He goes on to suggest that the Japanese are the chumps because a declining dollar erodes the value of their bonds while we're prospering because we now have all these VCRs and TVs...
...Maxine Swaine have all but one of her twenty-two dogs surgically "debarked" to quiet the racket...
...Allen Funky replies: It's good to see that Ms...
...Dawson...
...I deduce from Myers's pathological antifeminism that the author is a male...
...Bethell's Deficits I subscribed to TAS for some sanity...
...11 GUENTER LEWY D. G. Myers astutely says that the forum I presided over on mass culture criticism was "the highpoint" of the Modem Language Association convention in San Francisco last December...
...American touchiness continues...
...Beckwith's explanation of why the U.S...
...Donald Lazere Professor of English California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispq California D. G. Myers replies: Let the record show that Todd Gitlin and the others responded to Jane Tompkins's attack on Marxist critics at MLA...
...But when Lincoln made his political move the talents of his new commander had not yet been proved...
...So you had better try to win your war politically...
...But is this really the important point at issue...
...In their letters, neither Gitlin nor Donald Lazere attempts to refute the substance of my article...
...That certain military defeats, like the one at Sharpsburg, followed the Proclamation, in no way advances my critic's argument...
...If "Jane Tompkins is throwing bombshells," as Myers claims "a friend said" (presumably a friend of Myers, not of Tompkins, who tells me she found Myers's account ludicrous), none hit anyone on the dais...
...Pacifists Strike Back Thanks for the vastly amusing article on the Center for Defense Information by Michael Fumento ("The Center for Defense Misinformation," TAS, April 1988...
...Rather, a Union victory (which was not given even "some promise" by the January 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, coming as it did only a few months after the stalemate at Sharpsburg, a few weeks after the Federal defeat at Fredericksburg, and only a couple of days after Sherman and operations in the Vicksburg campaign stalled at Chickasaw Bayou) was made possi ble only after General Grant's accession first, to command in the West (viz...
...Carol G. Dawson Vice Chairman U.S...
...In other words, my account was not true...
...Myers also grinds his neoconservative axe on the "Politics and the Discipline" forum, distorting statements by Catherine Stimpson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., while ignoring the main thrust of that session-substantial evidence of the resurgence in campus racism and sexism as well as the concerted efforts of fundamentalists to suppress academic freedom and censor books like Wizard of Oz and The Diary of Anne Frank...
...CORRESPONDENCE...
...And in Long Beach, California, Mr...
...As far back as the 1979 MLA convention in San Francisco, the last I will ever attend, nonsense reigned supreme in the Alice-in-Wonderland anti-intellectual climate generated by the thousands of milling academics...
...is so much richer because it now has all those boom boxes and VCRs...
...Left Perspectives (published by the University of California Press) and the articles in it by co-panelists Todd Gitlin, Richard Ohmann, and especially Kate Ellis, whose presence Myers rudely ignores...
...Now as to the idea Mr...
...Every group has a slant...
...Friedman's and Mr...
...But I was disap pointed that The American Spectator, which has a fine reputation and which I generally enjoy, would publish an article so biased, misleading, and full of error...
...The excesses of the extreme right-wing, however, don't seem to bother Myers or The American Spectator...
...and (e) that I think all kinds of people, even Ph.D.'s, or especially Ph.D.'s, make use of culture, "high" and "low," for all kinds of purposes, including learning and having fun...
...Product Safety Commission Washington, D.C...
...The fact that Fumento is in a snit over CDI and none of the others shows us his bias but fails to establish CDI's guilt over alleged "misinformation...
...Tra-la, tra-lee-what deficit...
...Isenberg does a better job at criticizing my veracity, and I shall never be able to look William Lind (coauthor of America Can Win) in the eye again...
...Funky could have done better than to rewrite inaccurate stories about the Consumer Product Safety Commission which long ago appeared in other publications...
...Muggeridge ends her book with a moving chapter titled "Roman Remains_" A splendid finish to a lamentation...
...Beckwith should expostulate less and think more...
...RET...
...Todd Gitlin Professor of Sociology University of California Berkeley, California...
...Gitlin's is the more serious letter, but what a reader unacquainted with the previous stages of the discussion could make of it is beyond me...
...0 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988...
...become a banana republic, the means of production owned by foreign powers...
...Arguably, the survival of the West requires the Church...
...There's nothing one can really say about Mr...
...For the important thing to note about such' a list is that none of the names on it is really very surprising...
...He] further warns that the alliance of pacifists with the New Left and antiwar groups gives them political and religious clout -'peace at any price'- that could endangerAmerican interests...
...Dawson was a founding member of YAF way back when, but my story was on the current situation at her agency...
...Pope John Paul II understands what amazing tools have been given him in satellites and television mini-cams...
...The war was finally won only after the North got its military act together under the totally non-ideological leadership of Grant...
...New authors welcomed...
...A typical moment came during a symposium on language and literature when a panelist, a bright young man from a large East Coast university, insisted: "Writing is a series of marks that conveys meaning...
...Like many other scholars of the left, Gitlin presumes that certain ideological positions have been established as "knowledge," and blithely goes on as if someone who doesn't know that much knows nothing...
...He had to do what he as Chief Executive could do: gain the political advantage...
...So does the American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hudson Institute, National Strategy Information Center, Center for International Security, Committee on the Present Danger, American Security Council, High Frontier, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Heritage Foundation, National Institute for Public Policy, Foreign Policy Research Institute, etc...
...Do I get mad because the press fails to identify these groups as right-wing, national security sycophants...
...Marc Beckwith Tempe, Arizona Tom Bethell replies...
...We sure got the best of that deal...
...But the MLA long ago caved into eroding standards and left-wing politicization...
...For Shame It's easy to see why the author of the article "One Flew Into the Cuckoo's Nest" (TAS, April 1988) wishes to remain anonymous...
...he is only out to join in the bashing of left academics that has become tiresomely repetitive among the herd of independent neocon-intellectualoid minds...
...Beckwith suggesting that such assets should not be sold to foreigners...
...Is this the same Admiral Zumwalt whose son Elmo III and grandson Elmo IV are dying slow, premature deaths because, during Lt...
...Roy Marokus, M.D...
...Leaving aside their insurance policy, the promise of their Savior never to abandon them (a piece of the Rock, if ever there was one), Catholics and their well-wishers can find much to be cheery about...
...becomes a "banana republic" because foreigners are encouraged to buy property and assets here...
...I await Mr...
...By 2,000, 70 percent of Catholics will live in the developing world...
...Lamentations serve a function...
...Edmonton, Alberta Lionel Abel replies When I wrote that Mr...
...and even if it were true, Tompkins's attack was not true...
...Now Dr...
...Safire may not have wanted me (or anyone) to form: is it correct, or incorrect...
...is not about to be "rolled back...
...As one of the founding members of Young Americans for Freedom, I can only be amused when Mr...
...But one of the central points of my article was that CDI is being treated by the media as if it were without bias...
...Robert Blair Kaiser Mammoth Lakes, California Michael Fumento replies...
...But dying in this manner is no way for Elmo Jr.'s children to "live out their lives in freedom...
...As a journalist of some thirty years (for Time, CBS, and the New York Times), I have seen a good many hatchet jobs...
...I reported that Tompkins had argued that Marxist scholars act as if they were morally superior to the rest of us, and that this argument was deemed unanswerable...
...Even in the best of future circumstances, however, many changes will remain, as the cost of undoing them would be prohibitive...
...Bethell says the Latin American deficits are incurred for "home consumption...
...his successors will not forget it...
...Surely, Mr...
...Even if he had been right, isn't it feasible that at this point there might be more original things to be said about Chicana and other contemporary culture than about Shakespeare...
...Of course, Myers is too simpleminded to acknowledge that there is a wide diversity of marxist and feminist theorists or-to address any of their substantive points or disagreements among them-let alone to recognize some value in anything they say...
...While Fumento might find Bill Gertz's derogatory comments about CDI noteworthy, others, who are aware of the Washington Times's own marked bias on defense issues, are unimpressed...
...Here is why he has not convinced me: I come from a school of thought which holds to the view that a war must be won politically...
...and by the tactical/strategic victory of Sheridan (chosen by Grant) over Early in the Shenandoah Valley during the latter half of 1864...
...nor any country singer or "mandarin" novelist like Alexander Theroux or W. M. Spackman...
...Furthermore, the authority of, and public identification with, the Pope will be enhanced by technologies that crave pictures of identifiable leaders in dramatic situations...
...More interesting than Mr...
...Bethell's views are condescending and chauvinistic but understandable: it hurts to think America's economic house is as disorderly as our Latin neighbors...
...In the category of getting the facts straight, those who know me would be puzzled by Mr...
...I did suggest that such an unstable unit of account will discourage foreign investment in the U.S...
...Might be worth checking...
...And as the facts indicate, this he did...
...Third, the "revolution" in telecommunications and information-services will encourage unprecedented organizational centralization and "corporatization" (while rendering unnecessary geographical centralization-i.e., physical proximity...
...One might hope that one point where intellectuals of the left and right could agree is in deploring the ideological muddle and blandness of most American education and mass media...
...c) that I don't regard myself as a Marxist (as both Tompkins and Myers would know if they had read more than a fragment of my work...
...Bethell's theories...
...Treasury bonds there's no problem: an American citizen's money has simply been transferred to the U.S...
...An objective observer of the Commission's record would have no difficulty in identifying who among us adheres to conservative principle...
...My intention in organizing the forum was precisely to air some of the disagreements between leftist cultural critics and non-leftists like Tompkins...
...What is at issue here, though the reader might not guess it, is an attitude toward cultural values...
...Finally, considering the far greater number of groups who support the national security orthodoxy, CDI's work is proof of the Pentagon aphorism that in a target-rich environment one can always have an impact...
...HS JEFFERSON AVE...
...but Myers deliberately neglects to men CORRESPONDENCE tion that her criticisms were in prefato ry contrast to her praise of my new an thology American Media and Mass Cultu>e...
...Is this the same Admiral Zumwalt who gave the orders to spray that Agent Orange...
...that one name under which this blurring goes is postModernism...
...GEORGE WEIGEL Cloth, $19.95 At your bookstore, or write: WM...
...I would point out to Admiral Zumwalt, to Government Lawyer Fumento, and to the editors of The American Spectator that as Elmo III is fighting a cancer that is caused by one of our own instruments of war, he may be dying proof of his own patriotism (I will not say here what kind) and proof of the patriotism that has been forced upon little Elmo IV...
...While Abolitionism gave coherence to some aspects of Northern war aims, the threat posed during the 1864 presidential election by candidate George McLellan's "Peace" Democracy indicates that it was not the top dog in the Civil War ideological arena...
...Of course, it has a slant...
...Treasury via a Japanese intermediary...
...In the wild, certain species mark their territories by the dropping of feces and urinating...
...crossing the Rapidan, May 1864...
...by the final coalescence of Union command strategy and departmental operations under Grant in 1864-65...
...There are larger matters at stake between Jane Tompkins and myself than can be crammed into a letters column, but for the record, I said (a) that Tompkins, who has written an impressive study of nineteenth-century popular fiction, was building herself a straw elitist...
...For when he turns to me, Lazere adopts the .paternalistic tone of a professor rebuking a below-par graduate student...
...On every occasion, eras of decay, worldliness, and corruption have been succeeded by periods of rejuvenation and renewed spirituality...
...Abel on Safire on Lincoln I do not wish to be disrespectful of Professor Lionel Abel in his review of William Safire's Freedom (TAS, January 1988...
...The parts of his story not based on old news clips are attributed to anonymous aides of the Chairman...
...Everyone in the room sat there seriously pondering the question...
...Thus even these days, with so many of its buttresses asunder, Catholicism's future sometimes seems to lie before it "like a land of dreams...
...So what...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
