Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye
King, Florence
T 'm not sure that women can be cur1 mudgeons, technically, but if they can, then Miss Florence King of Stafford County, Virginia, is a 14-carat, top-of-the-chop, fully developed,...
...Worse, to attend to the needs of "the little wafflings," a new professional class has arisen: that of the "Helpists...
...The latter consisted of frustrated suburban housewives roused by the melancholy seal barks of Betty Friedan...
...And, discussing Phyllis Schlafly in the introduction to Reflections, she writes: "Like all members of the God 'n' Country club, Schlafly thinks that only leftwing teeth are set on edge by America...
...it's less ambitious, too...
...At last year's political conventions, she notes, "there were children all over the place, making speeches about Daddy, nominating Daddy, hugging Daddy, while the television cameras panned over the smoke-free room picking out motherdelegates with babes in arms...
...q REFLECTIONS IN A JAUNDICED EYE Florence King/St...
...The essay on "Helpism" (titled "Does Your Child Taste Salty...
...Better yet, reflect on Gen...
...But it is women, she says, who will be the final losers in the creation of the New Age Man...
...America is not a democracy," she writes, "it's an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid...
...And lurking behind the Helpist enterprise...
...For men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion...
...Miss King has much more to say in this book—about the corrosive effects of egalitarianism, the sham of democratic snobbery, the blight of compulsive nicknaming—and she invariably says it with wit and nerve...
...I soon found out...
...I wish Shere Hite or some other feminist would explain to me what is so wonderful about "vulnerable" men...
...I daresay they do it for love—love of money...
...She is also one of the most exhilarating essayists alive: occasionally raunchy but always full of high humor, casually erudite, animated by an original and constantly surprising turn of mind given shape in a prose style as clean and fresh as mountain air...
...Helpism, she says, was first popularized by Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People`the opening wedge in the promotion of personality over character...
...That's my description...
...George S. Patton's maxim, "Men who won't fight won't f—k...
...That's by her own description...
...Martin's Press/198 pp...
...The culmination of the sensitive guy is the Family Man...
...What else, after all, could "women's liberation" mean...
...Confessions was a memoir, an alternately hilarious and affecting account of her youth in the District of Columbia during the 1940s and '50s...
...sional do-gooders, the obsession with self-esteem, the decline of intellectual standards, feminism, and lots, lots more...
...She quotes with approval her fellow misanthrope Ambrose Bierce, who, when asked by a woman for advice on raising children, replied: "Study Herod, madame, study Herod...
...She's wrong...
...Show.' " But on closer examination, the aspects of American life that she specifically despises turn out to be the fairly recent accretions deposited by the dominant culture of dimestore liberalism: the cult of the kid, the ascendancy of profesAndrew Ferguson is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...T 'm not sure that women can be cur1 mudgeons, technically, but if they can, then Miss Florence King of Stafford County, Virginia, is a 14-carat, top-of-the-chop, fully developed, saltedinthe-shell curmudgeon...
...Honor, duty, and steadfastness are now called diet, exercise, and nonsmoking...
...I'm slightly to the right of Baby Doc, but life in America has the same effect on me as 'The Morton Downey, Jr...
...magazine...
...In no time, the movement split along two pseudo-feminist fault lines, the Lunatic Fringe and the Lunatic Warp and Woof...
...At the end . . . the candidate rounds up every relative he can lay hands on and drags them up on the platform to play with balloons...
...But you get the idea that it's not children themselves who get on Miss King's permanently frayed nerves so much as the institutional fawning and doting that have elevated the brat to the status of cultural exemplar...
...In telethons that go on for twenty hours we get tributes to kids, songs about kids, stories about kids, and of course, kids—in person...
...The effect of these debased forms of feminism has been to confuse traditional sex roles to the point where "American men have very few masculine stances left...
...Too rich a diet of male vulnerability does things to women, and if you don't believe it, look at Rosalynn Carter's mean mouth...
...I say that Miss King claims to hate America: "I'd die for the South but I wouldn't die for America," she recently told Charlotte Hays of the Washington Times...
...Today's Helpists have gone much further...
...The school crisis team," Miss King writes, "with its counseling tables set up in the hall like a morbid version of Career Day, encourages kids to make a career out of falling apart...
...Today's burgeoning supply of ostensibly compassionate counselors of drug addicts, unmarried mothers, battered wives, and abused children . . . would be out of work if the supply of drug addicts, unmarried mothers, battered wives, and abused children were to dry up...
...When feminism awoke from its long sleep in the sixties, I assumed it would be a movement for careerist spinsters who chose to renounce marriage and motherhood for a life of the mind lived with spartan simplicity and dedicated to professional achievement...
...Inviting adolescents to emote is bound to be crowned with success...
...The former consisted of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Lesbian separatists, and guerrilla theaters like WITCH and SCUM...
...She is, moreover, a right-wing bisexual, an Americahating Confederate flag-waver, and a spinsterish enemy of modern feminism...
...15.95 Andrew Ferguson 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989...
...As her comments on the conventions show, Miss King's attitude toward children is unambiguous...
...No wonder, then, that adults do their best to be like children...
...She even dares to note the salubrious effects of censorship: "The popularity of old black-and-white movies may be due less to the chi-chi interest in 'film history' than to the reason that dare not speak its name: the relief in knowing that the movie we are about to see was strictly censored...
...A confirmed spinster—it's a term, along with "old maid," that she uses with pride—Miss King considers herself a feminist, even though she admits (not unhappily) that "my name is mud at Ms...
...This is hardly a complaint, however, for as a satirist and polemicist Florence King has few equals...
...The newer book features Miss King as satirist and polemicist, and the tone is less varying...
...Peopled with bizarre and indelible characters, touching on grander themes like family and loyalty and love and the life of the mind, it allowed Miss King's literary gifts full play...
...Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye is a more loosely constructed book than Miss King's Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, published in 1985...
...after a question asked in a Cystic Fibrosis advertisement) may be the best in the book, for it displays in concentrated form many of Miss King's great strengths as a cultural critic—which is, of course, the true identity of a successful satirist...
...A high school student's sudden death is instantly transformed, nowadays, into the occasion for commando raids by "school crisis teams," bands of busy-body social workers, counselors, and psychologists who flog the deceased's classmates until they "show their emotions" in a satisfyingly lugubrious manner...
...The feminization is by now almost complete...
...These days, I suppose, such an observation is rightly considered "anti-American," but it is an anti-Americanism of a distinctly American kind...
...Television weather reporters affect guess-what tones and breathless gasps while pointing at cartoons of sad-faced clouds...
...By their insidious pandering to hypochondria and the fear of death, they have destroyed the old virtues and replaced them with mere good habits...
...They are expected, instead, to be vulnerable, sensitive, weepy even...
...Liberals take up mess-making politics while conservatives trade McGuffey's readers like baseball cards...
...After all, any country that can produce a critic like Florence King can't be half bad...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
