Editorials/Lifers on Capitol Hill/Save the Chickens
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS LIFERS ON CAPITOL HILL by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. T he facts cannot be denied. Our 1 Members of Congress are for the most part extremely hard working and very pretty. This latter point...
...And so, after the war, "when we saw judges in effect passing laws that legislatures refused to pass, the intent of which was to bring black Americans into the mainstream of American life, it seemed to us to be right, or at any rate, not positively wrong...
...Progress againsthorrible immuno-deficiency diseases and leukemia has been realized thanks to bone marrow experiments on dogs...
...Three months ago in Norwalk, Connecticut, police arrested Fran Stephanie Trutt, a 33-year-old substitute teacher from Queens, New York, just after she set down a potent pipe-bomb crammed with roofing nails outside the headquarters of the U.S...
...In the first year of George Washington's presidency, 40 percent of the House incumbents were given the democratic heave-ho...
...Animal rights activists in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, have been agitating for the dismissal of local Boy Scout leaders from their straight-arrow avocation because they were known to have instructed their youthful charges on how to kill and properly prepare a rabbit for supper...
...They (generally speaking) are entitled to Social Security, are entitled to Medicare, entitled to early retirement...
...Members in avoiding rock'em-sock'em opposition at election time...
...Bruce D. Price of New York City noted that the missing generation was born circa 1915-1945, which he characterizes not as a period of two wars but as a single event`the Great Calamity might be a good name...
...The PACs were set up to circumvent the limits placed on campaign donations by individuals...
...They got off scot free, most of them, and they don't seem much taken with the conflict of ideas...
...And when we emerged from the Great Calamity, most people were tired...
...By June 30 of last year, the PACs had donated $51 million to incumbents and a mere $3 million to challengers—$15 million was donated to members who had no opposition whatsoever...
...The Republic already recognizes that a humane society does not allow cruelty to be practiced against animals, but our long-standing strictures against cruelty do not satisfy the animal rights adSAVE THE CHICKENS 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 vocates, some of whom oppose all blood sports...
...He will also have to alert the Washington press corps to the absurdity of a democratic body having less turnover than Mikhail Gorbachev's central committee...
...Their days are entoiled with meetings public and private, picture-taking sessions, lunches, dinners, and a host of receptions—often several each day and some quite gaudy...
...We grew up during the Roosevelt years," wrote Gene Thornton of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, "which accustomed us to the idea that it was up to the government to provide the remedy if the wrong was obviously beyond the power of the individual to right...
...It was not until my father started a small business fifteen years ago that their theretofore benign attitude toward government changed...
...nor did it seem unjustified...
...Less debatable is the fact that experiments on animals have dramatically improved human health and happiness...
...Member's perilous brush with democracy in his initial bid for ofAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Revolve this news story in your mind...
...A number of writers expressed a certain amount of irritation with the missing generation...
...fice his position becomes a matter of lifetime tenure...
...In short, there was little energy left for—and little need felt for—a sustained exertion on behalf of what might be called conservative agendas...
...and, later, the widely heralded progress made by liberals in race relations in this country, exemplified by the civil rights laws...
...They are the Americans too young to have been caught up in World War II (though some lost a father at a tender age), too young (or lucky) to have been directly involved with Korea, and of course too old to have been touched by Vietnam or swept into the antinomian idiocy of 'the sixties' (i.e., 1965-73...
...Exhausted and smug—that about sums it up...
...The aforementioned animal rights militants are reformers of the latter sort, though I doubt that they could agree on any "one end...
...Corporations collect donations into their PACs and support the candidate of their choice...
...People wanted only to get back to a normal life and to an enjoyment of the fruits of victory...
...The congressman's life is one of ceaseless toil, and Americans ought to take pride that these sleek, beautifully coifed, well-tailored lawmakers are probably the most soigne in the entire world...
...War, it's reasonable to postulate, destroys disproportionately THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 11...
...Several people repeated these themes of Depression, war, and civil rights, although none as succinctly as Thornton...
...The massacre was part of a wilderness survival exercise that also involved rendering five chickens edible...
...In the fall election fully 98 percent of those Capitol Hill incumbents seeking reelection were re-elected, 82 percent by landslides...
...A heart hardened, though not closed, to this country's virtues was inevitable...
...Americans do not need lectures on the humane treatment of animals nearly so much as they need continued experiments in pursuit of human health...
...As late as 1946, 25 percent of those members seeking re-election were turned out...
...This past fall fewer than twenty of the 408 members up for re-election faced a serious challenge, and one out of six members faced no major party opponent...
...He will have to put an end to the gerrymandering of House districts and to the government-funded $1.2 million office budgets available to members but not to their challengers...
...God help me if it is only the beginning of a trend, but the vital, valuable members of this society lost to retirement communities, motorhoming, and consumerism at its crassest are a great loss indeed...
...At any rate, there is a growing awareness that lifetime tenure is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind for the House or for any other elective office in the land...
...At the time liberal intellectuals were seen as championing more enlightened views...
...Alarmed by this situation, House Republican Leader Robert Michel has just spoken out against the political action committees whose vast floods of cash aid the Hon...
...Toxicological studies with dogs have allowed pharmaceutical companies to put thousands of useful drugs into production...
...They are a threat to their neighbors...
...Studies of viral diseases in monkeys have allowed headway against AIDS and the virtual elimination of such diseases as polio...
...For one thing, conservatives were generally blamed for the 1930s Depression, which they had apparently visited on the American people out of greed and spite...
...One came in fairly frequent contact with these conservatives: they could be identified by the reactionary views they casually expressed regarding race, class, and religious orientation...
...I was born in 1932," wrote George Waldman of Reading, Massachusetts, "so I lie right in the middle of the generation in question...
...So much money is available to incumbents that some use it to buy the support of colleagues in their drive for leadership positions or to elect friends to political positions back home or to pay legal bills, as House Speaker Wright is doing...
...Why is this...
...in the 100th Congress, 16 percent of the members have been seated for at least twenty years...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...The Solomons on the bench can decide that...
...As the Wall Street Journal has noted, "The turnover rate among members is now lower than that of the Soviet Communist Party's central committee...
...By and large they just weren't directly touched or troubled, personally, by any of the great sociopolitical calamities of this century...
...Where we were born into cynicism and have grown into conservatism (largely), the missing generation was born into ascendancy" and became cynical...
...Tom Holt of Arlington, Virginia, noted that many people had heard stories "about how government had stepped in to help with WPA and other make-work," as he indeed had heard from his "officially elderly parents, Tom Bethel...
...Their re-election is almost a foregone conclusion...
...I remember growing up believing that there really was something sinister about conservatives—yet my family was not at all political...
...Julia Child could be next or perhaps the chef at your favorite McDonald's, at least as accessories after the fact...
...The problem is that corporate America does not think very boldly about politics and simply dumps its largesse into the coffers of House incumbents...
...There are briefing papers to read, media appearances, appearances on the floor of the House, and journeys on corporate jets to faraway places for public addresses, conferences, junkets...
...Ishould think that historian Adams would be more inclined to lump them with the bigots of colonial time who for the highest religious reasons persecuted Baptists and Quakers in Massachusetts, with the Pilgrims who banned play on Christmas and the Maypole on May Day, and with this century's Prohibitionists...
...Members need work hardly at all at campaigning for re-election...
...The case was reinforced by two events: the advent of the racist Nazi regime in Germany, which was understood at the time to be a right-wing phenomenon...
...They will leave "the children of the revelers to pay the bill...
...And he is "wary of what's coming: the sons and daughters of the baby boomers...
...As Fred Barnes reported in these pages last month, the six members who lost last fall had all been accused of misconduct...
...There is, however, even in this great capital, an ever so slight apprehension arising from the fact that, though they are hard working, the Hon...
...Now to lose office a member has to be hounded by scandal and running in a pretty conservative district...
...Nor are gourmet Scout leaders the only targets of animal rights zealots...
...In my experience," wrote Dan Hawkins of Helena, Montana, "they should be called the entitlement generation...
...Surgical Corporation, a manufacturer of high-speed surgical staples whose program for But if Republican Leader Michel wants to reintroduce the democratic process into House elections, he will have to do more than reform PAC rules...
...I think that is why there is a 'missing conservative generation' in American life, which may even have been a good thing in its time, considering the alternatives...
...This latter point is somewhat surprising, for it is not easy to maintain personal beauty while engaged in the arduous work of the Hon...
...These bully-boy pietists manifested the animal rights activists' same disregard for the rights of others and a similar narrow-mindedness and fanaticism...
...It's conceivable that such inby Tom Bethell nocence was unprepared to be jilted by a succession of progressively un-won wars: Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, and Central America...
...Congressman Jamie Whitten has been in his seat for forty-seven years...
...He notes that "something similar can be said about the students I've been getting in college [Santa Clara University] over the last several years—those born between about 1960 and 1970...
...They may very well be the most pampered, unruffled birth class in our history...
...John R. Dunlap of Santa Clara, California (and a frequent contributor to TAS), wrote: "I seem to find the very lowest voltage (or at most the sense that politics is just a game, something of low stakes and minor importance) among people born roughly between 1933 and 1943—the last decade of this `generation' we're talking about...
...They had returned from the war and held "a huge party...
...Others oppose medical experimentation on animals...
...In her rented pickup police found a remote-controlled detonator and charged her with possession of explosives, manufacturing a bomb, and attempted murder...
...Price continued: "But thirty years is only half a man'slife...
...The extinction of those five chickens just made the animal rights activists all the madder, and according to the last reports I received they were demanding that misdemeanor charges be brought against these Scout leaders for allegedly committing cruelty to animals...
...Additionally, they felt the good had won, so they were complacent...
...Yet today's animal rights advocates are not merely public nuisances...
...How the Boy Scouts conduct their wilderness programs may be a matter for police action...
...CAPITOL IDEAS THE MISSING GENERATION M any thanks for the enthusiastic response to my query last October about the "missing generation" of conservatives in America...
...Then "during the war against Hitler, we got used to the idea that any means were justified to right a wrong as great as racism...
...How about full citizenship and access to all federal entitlement programs...
...Although this belief now seems irrational, it was not uncommon at the time...
...So secure is incumbency today that after an Hon...
...Organ transplanting would have been impossible without animal experiments...
...There are some who would arrest every butcher in the Republic and others who, would shut down all pet shops...
...Many years ago the historian James Truslow Adams astutely noted that there have been two broad categories of reform in America, the first constructive and generous, the second "characterized by fanaticism, the overriding of minority rights, and narrow-mindedness on the part of reformers who have been willing to sacrifice all else to attain their one end...
...Today they are a "fat and happy generation who have grown older, who still want more cake for their old age, when they are the ones needing it least...
...Within a certain age group (perhaps 45 to 70), it has been suggested to me, there seem to be very few conservatives...
...Miriam Cody, Amherst, Massachusetts...
...Our Washington press corps seems not to have noticed...
...Members from the trouble of facing a strong opponent (and the tendency of other elective bodies across the country to do the same is growing...
...What we have here is a typical American reform movement in all its glowing idealism and smoldering malice...
...What would it be—a minimum standard of living for pets, barnyard animals, and laboratory animals...
...Such reformers view themselves as but the very latest edition in the great American tradition of reform, placing themselves grandly in line with the abolitionists and the suffragettes...
...There is another factor," Bruce Price added...
...The House, however, seems to have rigged the electoral process so as to free the Hon...
...training surgeons in the proper use of these staples has aroused an animal rights furor...
...Quite possibly there are activists opposed to all of the above and to God knows what else...
...both of whom grew up in the Depression...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
