Editorials / Drug Dealings / Looking for Loons
Tyrrell, R Emmett Jr.
LOOKING FOR LOONS W here are all the nuts of yesteryear? The other day I happened by Lafayette Park across from the White House. To my astonishment the motley of shabby prophets and loons was...
...To my astonishment the motley of shabby prophets and loons was nowhere to be seen...
...and the insufferable mannerisms of the spoiled child...
...For just over two decades the park has been home for milling mobs of protesters, usually the demented types but occasionally protesters from professional grievance groups such as the National Organization for Women...
...A gorgeous sun shone down on beds of tulips and silver streams of water arching up from the black waters of reflecting pools...
...For me the only reliable location for viewing the glassy-eyed and furious is Georgetown University, which is precisely where I went recently to espy some old-fashioned fruitcakes...
...With Peter Collier, Horowitz has just written a splendid book asserting that the radicals of the 1960s so weakened American authority and values as to assure the pathologies of the 1970s, many of which—for instance, drugs and venereal disease—are still with us...
...Finding the nuts is not going to get easier if Bush and Gorbachev have 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 their way...
...The heroic statuary gleamed but on the lush lawns reposed only the occasional Romeo and Juliet, and on the old benches only bureaucrats and tourists taking a break...
...I saw one ensconced in a cardboard 'raj Mahal graced with the unexceptional message, "Wanted: Wisdom and Honesty...
...continued on page 55) EDITORIALS (continued from page 9) Would they argue that universities are freer, more scholarly, more intellectually alive...
...In Destructive Generation (SummitBooks, $19.95), the authors argue that the main pox of 1960s radicalism, the New Left, hated American liberalism and America generally...
...Somehow America is going to return to 1969, though not all the nuts of that era will be around...
...The other night these questions did not trouble the happy defenders of the New Left...
...Only one was a professor, but both were in uniform: pole-climber boots, blue jeans, book bags (Attache cases...
...They are not summoning us to the brink any longer...
...I was eager to hear their defense...
...Now even the demented types are gone...
...Violence, personal indulgence, intolerance, elitism, and brat-kid narcissism were the major ingredients of the New Left, many of whose members have never acknowledged the destructive consequences of their acts and reign today as middle-aged faculty in the closed society of the university...
...I returned the next day to get the details, but the entire display had vanished...
...In defense of the New Left slouched two museum pieces from 1969...
...And what about the Communist world...
...In America and apparently even in the Soviet Union the citizenry is being urged merely to be productive and law abiding...
...Yes, they had made mistakes...
...and, somewhat surprisingly, they maintained the old manic confidence that the future must be theirs, not George Bush's or Margaret Thatcher's or any of the other figures of the present...
...I suppose I could have fared equally well on most of the other campuses in the country, but at Georgetown's McNeir Hall a couple of middle-aged radicals were defending in debate the student protests of the 1960s against former radicals Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz...
...Bush and Gorbachev make it very difficult for the American of apocalyptic vision and neurotic fervor to gather a crowd...
...And there was another standing above what appeared to be a procession of little yellow egg cartons, lettered, I believe, with such words as "apartheid," "poverty," "processed foods"—topics that did not hang together...
...He felt," a friend reported, "bypassed by history...
...Hours before the debate it was divulged that Abbie Hoffman had committed suicide by downing some 150 pills in his home, a converted turkey coop...
...Is the wisdom of Marx and Lenin and Mao still cherished...
...Were they of the opinion that Southeast Asia is now prosperous and democratic, that libertine sex is wholesome, that drug abuse is fine, that there was no destruction from their protests, no murders committed by Black Panthers...
...For every tragic excess they had an alibi...
...Never...
...Alas, Messrs...
...but thanks to their efforts America is a better place...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
