Editorials/Company Man/Small Minds
Tyrrell, R Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS COMPANY MAN by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. ommunism's East European police states collapsed almost two years ago. So did Americans' fear of awakening on the morrow to nuclear holocaust,...
...At a time when we might be noting the selflessness and occasional heroism of anti-Communists —both liberal and conservative—Lewis doubts America's fidelity to its democratic values and reiterates his recent list of alleged constitutional infractions by conservatives, all of which he exaggerates and most of which took place in pursuit of the Reagan-Bush policy of opposing Communism...
...He keeps a log of his temptations—it's part of the therapy...
...Yet in the 1980s our CIA supplied anti-Communist insurgencies in Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua, giving the Soviets a large dose of self-doubt...
...Calvary accepted me without judgment," Bret says...
...His family went to church for weddings and funerals...
...No religion at all in public school, or the University of Iowa, which Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...At the end of the Cold War our institutionalized left has revised that maxim to read "In victory, paranoia," and so they go on harassing those whom the American people charged with conducting the Cold War...
...Still, rather than celebrate or speculate on the historic possibilities ahead, America's plodding, infantile intellectuals settle for advancing their amazingly parochial prejudices...
...But still, he could not find Gay Nirvana in the Gay Mecca...
...The San Francisco papers report rising rates of HIV infection among younger gays...
...I can't tell you the number of interviews that I've done that have never appeared in print," says Davies...
...and the late labor leader George Meany...
...But when he read the passage from St...
...So did Americans' fear of awakening on the morrow to nuclear holocaust, though the Ban-the-Bomb hysterics still maintain their offices and their delusions as though the Cuban missile crisis were still upon us...
...Why should our youth aspire to it...
...Hoping to delay the technologically superior Americans from entering this field, the Soviets warned that SDI would destabilize the Cold War balance...
...Gates's background was in analysis, particularly Soviet analysis, and under Casey he served brilliantly...
...It extends even to the more sensible sort, such as Meg Greenfield, who in her Newsweek column belittles the American people for not appreciating the humanity of or-dinary Russians, treating them as members of an "undifferentiated, morally improbable blob...
...Then—maybe it was the inner voice of God," he told me...
...Ever since the American Psychiatric Association reversed itself in 1973 and ceased to classify homosexuality as a mental illness, it has been dogma among the major media that homosexTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 9...
...If there's any press coverage of their meetings, it will almost certainly ignore Exodus and describe a disruptive invasion by ACT-UP or some other group...
...So now I can help other people" In San Francisco, he says, he has found a "peace and stability" that he couldn't find in Iowa...
...But I have also chosen not to engage in sex with men...
...Sexual addiction is an area we are hearing more and more about," says Bob Davies, editor of the Exodus Standard and executive director of Exodus International, in San Rafael, California...
...Actually, however, East-West confrontation is over...
...On the very morning when Lewis was disingenuously associating American conservatives with the Soviet coup's Stalinist hardliners and arrogating to his fellow lefties the Soviet reformers' finer values, the independent-minded editorialists at the Wall Street Journal published a testimonial to "Those Who Served," "the enemies of communism [who] have been grinding away at its foundations for nearly a century...
...Left-wing totalitarianisms are cracking up with a precipitance never envisaged even by American anti-Communists, who doughtily resisted Soviet Communism through the 1920s, the 1930s, and through four decades of Cold War and international reproach...
...We're not designed that way...
...It is not that magnanimity from the intelligentsia is impossible...
...Syndicated columnist Anthony Lewis, an omnium gatherum of left-wing pettiness, one week after the failed Soviet coup, devotes an entire column to unfavorably comparing the Reagan and Bush Administrations to the fine public 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 sentiments of Soviet anti-coup leaders, most of whom were active Communists during the long years when Ronald Reagan and George Bush steadfastly opposed Communism...
...Like others in his position, he is given to psychological discourse and analysis of parental sex roles...
...Paul's Epistle to the Romans: For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions...
...Growing up, he had almost no exposure to religion...
...Many homosexual men have developed such an appetite that it's very difficult for them to stop, even though they desperately wish they could, even thoughthey know it can kill them...
...Obscene phone calls are routine...
...Itaccurately reported that Moscow had an SDI program of its own ten times the size of that proposed by Ronald Reagan...
...CAPITOL IDEAS EXODUS by Tom Bethell ret Lutz was getting ready to go I.EN jogging in the lènderloin, south of Market Street in San Francisco...
...The fact is that America's schools—and universities—are not very pleasant places, and they are as intellectually stimulating as a bout with the flu...
...He was "kind of seduced" at the age of 12 by a family friend when camping, and since then has had homosexual encounters with literally hundreds of men...
...Now there is something for inquisitive senators to ask Gates about when they grill him before their Senate Intelligence Committee on September 16...
...Or tell an audience accustomed to the arias of Pavarotti that any bellower will do...
...It struck me, men and men aren't supposed to have sex together...
...I believe it is not inaccurate to say that, almost two years after the collapse of Eastern Europe's Communist police states, there is more interest among American liberals in investigating the Central Intelligence Agency than there is among recently liberated East Europeans in investigating their moribund secret services...
...The CIA was right...
...Owing to the exigencies of the Cold War, "we have greatly underappreciated the fact that [the Soviet Union] was—is—a place of people, not just bombs...
...So once again he got in touch with Christian groups—ministries loosely affiliated with Exodus, which seeks to "communicate the message of liberation from homosexuality through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord," to quote from the masthead of its publication, Exodus Standard...
...One of the many delusions these pests live under is the notion that there is always an abundance of gifted personnel to fill any post...
...There is probably more boldness of thought displayed by Russian Communists today than in the grim purlieus of the American intelligentsia...
...Now he has been married for six years...
...Bret grew up in Davenport, Iowa...
...The members of the institutionalized left, who dominate our culture and Capitol Hill, have renewed their ardor to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency, one of the West's premier instruments in winning the Cold War peacefully...
...He calls it an emotional disorder that finds "unnatural" expression...
...Even the quality of mind displayed by America's intellectual classes is low—at least that displayed by America's non-scientific intellectual classes...
...Exodus and affiliates have received bomb threats and had their tires slashed...
...There was a lot of drinking and drugs, as well as sex...
...But Lewis's pettiness is more typical of the American intelligentsia...
...That is how the typical American intellectual appraises the Americans who sacrificed for Soviet Jewry, welcomed such dissidents as Solzhenitsyn, and for decades paid the bills to resist Soviet totalitarianism...
...He arrived in San Francisco in 1987, when he was 24...
...is curious that a nation with a tradition of rugged individualism should have almost no individuality manifest among its eggheads—unless one confuses their conformity to a childish, petulant leftwingery with individuality...
...Of course, I have in mind Robert Gates, the President's deputy assistant for national security affairs...
...550 people participated in their latest conference, in Toronto...
...And here in our nation's capital, how are the locals observing this hitherto unanticipated state of affairs...
...And he is making an experimental movie about the "gay and Christian communities," and traits they have in common...
...I well remember the 1983 furor from the institutionalized left when the headlines roared with leaked reports that Herbert Meyer, vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, had gathered the intelligence that, if pushed by an American buildup, the fragile Soviet economy would buckle...
...Nonetheless, he became a Christian in 1981...
...Davies says that homosexuality was something he had to deal with in his own life...
...Yet show me the left-wing egghead who braves personal privation for his left-wing views, or show me one who mixes left-wing views with sparkles of conservative nonconformity...
...All right, but how about noting the impostors in our educational establishments who drag in their bogus studies of ethnic bibble-babble, their obsessions with "sexuality," gender indoctrination, and all the other preposterous considerations that they have heaved onto education's agenda to the exclusion of learning...
...Also rising is the antagonism of gay activists to the suggestion that homosexuality can be reversed...
...During the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency provided the American government with the right intelligence and insight to pursue a winning foreign policy...
...all he knew about Jesus was what he saw on television...
...Read the lead stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times...
...The dismal results of this year's SATs are being explained by youth's immersion in, a proliferating array of low-brow entertainments, from TV to videos...
...Then democracy movements and ethnic movements made the Soviet leadership return home What I would like to know is how so much information about capitalism and democracy penetrated the Soviets' totalitarian state in the 1980s...
...Safe-sex slogans and condom promotion add their own encouragement, of course...
...Toll it to Lincoln, whose armies were defeated for three years before the President found his general...
...As I say, intellect is not much admired here, even by intellectuals...
...for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural...
...They even want to prevent one of the Republic's best-educated, most far-sighted career intelligence officers from returning to head the Central Intelligence Agency, where he was deputy director during the 1980s, when our government put the final touches on a prudent and fruitful foreign policy strategy that for four decades successfully avoided World War III...
...Homosexuals are made, not born, he is convinced...
...First he opened his Bible and read a passage from St...
...Yet now Washington's pecksniffs want to tar him with a scandal they have not been able to tar him with for years, Iran-contra, and deny the Republic the benefit of his acuity, as though the Republic abounds with men of Gates's talent...
...Now this is quite odd...
...Intellect is not admired in America...
...They were shocked by what he told them—they were afraid of being "contaminated," he says, and they asked him to leave the group...
...This has been difficult, because he had become "massively addicted...
...The typical American intellectual is a plodder, a conformist, and frequently an ignoramus...
...Paul, what crossed his mind was not so much the "penalty" as the "error": the thought that God does allow us to act freely, does respect our free will, but that often we make incorrect choices...
...Interest in Exodus and related Christian ministries is rising...
...Ask Boris Yeltsin...
...In 1988 he found out that he was HIV-positive—the big crisis in his life...
...He receives several hundred inquiries a month...
...You could see the Bay Bridge from his window...
...he attended for three years...
...H omosexuality is a "maladaptive coping mechanism," Bret says...
...He found a job working as a secretary for a law firm and he circulated within the gay community...
...And it doesn't fulfill my desire to be more masculine or to be loved or accepted...
...Maybe God had meant him to be gay...
...Anyway, now he is "recovering" and "learning" heterosexuality—like learning a new language...
...How far would reform have gotten in the Soviet Union had American capitalism and anti-Communism failed...
...So he resigned himself to the lifestyle...
...Communist ideology counseled Moscow's faithful that anti-Communist insurgency was an impossibility...
...But homosexuality itself is also increasing, he believes, since it is correlated with (increasing) family breakdown...
...The whole world is changing...
...We don't believe it's inborn or genetic," he says...
...At that point he became very rebellious and angry at the Christian community and soon after moved to San Francisco...
...Churchill's maxim at the end of World War II was "In victory, magnanimity...
...He felt he had no choice—it was a sanctuary and everyone accepted him...
...But the CIA SMALL MINDS o repeat, as repeat we must every I time the nation's students set a new low on their Scholastic Aptitude Tests, if intellect is not cultivated by American adults, why should we expect it to be cultivated by American youth...
...The 1980s proved to be too arduous for the jerry-built Soviet Union...
...It seems like you're born with it because it can start so young...
...Not only that—there is something distinctly infantile about the typical intellectual's habit of mind...
...I'm leaving the gay lifestyle but not rejecting my many friends who are gay...
...It's just an empty act...
...And the editorial is scrupulous to commend not only fellow conservative anti-Communists but also liberal anti-Communists such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...A few years later, he told a Bible study group in Iowa about his struggles with homosexuality...
...and in the same way the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts, and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error...
...Or tell it to Yankee manager Stump Merrill, who is in grievous need of that one Whitey Ford...
...When the Reagan Administration proceeded with its Strategic Defense Initiative, the Soviets recognized it was the beginning of the end...
...Time interviewed him at length, but nothing appeared in the magazine...
...Then there were the five anti-Communist insurgencies that bled Soviet strength and wobbled Soviet confidence...
...In 1988, a friend referred Bret to Calvary Chapel in San Francisco, where they helped Christians who "wanted to leave the gay lifestyle" There was group counseling, therapy to examine the roots ofhomosexuality, prayer, worship, references to Biblical authority, and so on...
...The President has designated him to return to Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Feature head the CIA, where in the 1980s he served as Bill Casey's deputy director after Casey reviewed the performance of thousands of intelligence agents and snatched Gates up...
...Then let them applaud him and his colleagues at the CIA for a job well done...
...Homosexuality is one thing and sexual addiction another, he says, "but in combination they can be very powerful...
Vol. 24 • October 1991 • No. 10
