Editorials/Worst Books of the Year/Ted and I Agree
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS WORST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. y fellow Americans, it is that time of year for The American Spectator to confer its J. Gordon Coogler Award upon the past...
...and, most astonishingly of all, his ideas are sound—at least for the most part...
...The award, named after the most imbecilic of the country's imbecilic poets, has been won by some of the most celebrated writers of our time, thus answering the oft-repeated question, "Why can't Johnny read...
...Then I did not realize that he is such an ungainly writer...
...He remains proud of that position today, and with ridiculous solemnity attests that he was shaped by the works of J. D. Salinger, James Dean, and Jack Kerouac...
...Lenin born in Omaha would have become a spokesman for nudism or something even sillier but certainly not dangerous...
...This must be very embarrassing for him...
...No Coogler judge has yet been able to make any sense of this monstrosity beyond the words "I believe...
...And what Mr...
...Had the Rev...
...Hence he composes such sentences as "I believe that positive personal and political behavior depends on constructive responses to protest from respected authorities...
...Surely we can all welcome him to the bourgeoisie, but let him make a candid acknowledgement of his violent past...
...I had the good fortune of debating the contents of this book with Mr...
...Hayden suggested that it would be in the best interests of his youthful revolution if someone set New York and Washington afire...
...Unfortunately, he is also bereft of Mr...
...Rushdie be put to death...
...Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day...
...He is one of those writers who are rewarded for promoting as truth the precise opposite of the truth...
...Rushdie's aural sense of the language...
...The offending passage is indeed quite rude, but readers unfamiliar with Islam will find it inscrutable...
...Hayden tried to hornswoggle Black Panthers into shooting down a police helicopter, and at the Newark riots journalist-researcher Eugene Methvin identifies Hayden as a dispenser of Molotov cocktails...
...The New Left hated Liberals and the Robert Kennedy he now claims to have revered...
...I cannot explain this strange occurrence...
...So Tom, it is a Coogler for you...
...This is pure American jimcrack...
...Consider the winners of this year's Cooglers...
...They have chosen as the worst work of fiction Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and I have been asked by them to extend special thanks to the Rev...
...Hayden demonstrates in this windy book, they end up as cranks...
...Few normal people would read such claptrap unless under duress...
...The former radical Peter Collier writes of the time in 1969 when Mr...
...If he is, I hope he will be aware of his frailty as a writer...
...As a leader of the New Left in the early 1960s, he believed in overthrowing the government of the United States because his parents were strict...
...Alas, as usual the Rev went overboard, this time requiring that Mr...
...Thatcher's cops...
...He writes lush prose for the ear, not for the eye...
...Contrary to his present claims he never was a Liberal thwarted by an unresponsive political system...
...Well, no good can come of it...
...He gives these orations 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989...
...A few days before Kennedy's assassination, writer Todd Gitlin cites him as calling Kennedy "a little fascist...
...r. Hayden, too, has no regard for the meaning of words...
...Khomeini merely pointed out that this new book is stupefyingly tiresome, he would have served the reading public well...
...Ever since approximately 1968 he has dedicated himself to ideas that are stupendously inaccurate, while I have been devoted to pursuit of the unvarnished truth...
...The answer is that contemporary writers produce little worth reading...
...Rushdie is one of those contemporary writers who think and write in grotesqueries, his brain being a very inaccurate instrument...
...q TED AND I AGREE very year or so Senator Edward .L.:t M. Kennedy, Keeper of the Liberal Flame, and I agree on something...
...Doubtless at some point he was also edified by Snoopy...
...The Coogler Committee's judges have decided that the worst non-fiction work of 1988 was Tom Hayden's turgid and dissembling memoir, Reunion...
...Ayatollah's eye...
...He seems to be utterly unaware of the contradictions that abound in his book...
...Perhaps in his solitude he is even contemplating more fiction...
...Hayden has believed over the years is as nonsensical as a five-year-old's discourse on the Easter Bunny...
...Essentially, the 541-page tome consists of four or five gobs of prose, including the one that caught the Rev...
...Senator Kennedy cannot be wrong all the time...
...Felicitations...
...And now his life depends on the effectiveness of Mrs...
...Only George McGovern accomplished that feat...
...In a 1966 issue of Partisan Review Mr...
...y fellow Americans, it is that time of year for The American Spectator to confer its J. Gordon Coogler Award upon the past year's worst books of fiction and non-fiction...
...America is cruel to its revolutionaries...
...RushAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features die's earlier writing has been quite good, no member of the Coogler Committee had thought to inspect his new book as a prospective award-winner...
...Rushdie has had to seek police protection from Prime Minister Thatcher, whom he has previously accused of running a police state...
...Ayatollah R. Khomeini for bringing the book to our attention...
...Hayden became a Dukakis supporter...
...The book is selling prodigiously, and Mr...
...Hayden in New York last fall...
...Yet here we are once again in sweet agreement...
...To him, words are pretty things, but without meaning...
...But even a crank should fess up about his brutal past...
...I did note that he considers himself a "born-again middle American...
...What has brought Senator Kennedy and me into this condition of blissful concord is his recent State of Liberalism speech...
...They start out full of fierce revolutionary resolve, and as Mr...
...He believes America is an empire, Britain fascist, the Third World innocent and virtuous...
...Now he knows otherwise...
...As Mr...
...It is possible, of course, that he does not sense the hypocrisy...
Vol. 22 • May 1989 • No. 5
