Beyond the Boom

...For example, some of the more high-minded among the Vile Body were recently pondering the question: Under what circumstances can you legally spend government funds for the public display of a crucifix...

...Only the Vigilantes, George Sim Johnston, and Lisa Schiffren point beyond the shallow concerns of most of these essays...

...M ost of the essays, however, avoid such economic and political issues in favor of meditations on culture...

...N ow with a big push by Tom Wolfe, who contributed an introduction, the Vile Body has produced a book...

...By this device, as critics of Andres Serrano's famous urinary "sculpture" were to discover, any effective opposition to crucifix subsidies will vanish...

...I feel this is a generous allotment...

...No sunglasses of any kind...

...Bruce Bawer and John Podhoretz offer two penetrating views of the problems of current film...

...How lovely for you...

...I know it's tough, but you can't let the baby run the show...

...at its best it serves the religious sensibility by touching on the divine world, on Gerard Manley Hopkins's "dearest freshness deep down things...

...To avoid being mugged, people will readily accept a standard of living at least fifty percent lower than they could obtain by resorting to the ample cheap housing within high-crime zones...

...That's why so many people cripple their minds in law school...

...Believe it or not, yours is not the first generation to experience the wonders of parenthood, and discussions about new jogger-stroller designs and Baby's funniest expressions of the day should be limited to twenty is also the clear implication that despite all his labors on the slopes of Parnassus, even Tom will not live forever and these kids of the Baby Boom are going to take over one of these days...

...Take this Teachout guy, for example...

...There will issue a heroic commotion of tigerish growls and snarls from the same Ivy League presidential kittens who roll over and play dead whenever a radical gang seizes their offices to extort money, say, for an Arafat annex to the Tawana Brawley Center for the Performing Arts...

...Once the most bloodcurdling scourge of America's cultural intelligentsia, he has abandoned the O'Hare faculty club to scramble up the slopes of Mount Parnassus, jousting for immortality with such as Tolstoy and Balzac, Hugo and Dickens, and leaving us behind to joust for small change with such as Andrea Dworkin, E. L. Doctorow, and the New Yorker's breath poets...

...That Mrs...

...Pritchett commits the unforgivable gaffe of refusing to be guided into his proper place in the ranks of the victim classes, somewhere between the lesbian homeless and the Nicaraguan enrages...

...You would be shocked to know your neighbors' unanswered prayers...

...It takes religion to convey such goals to new generations...

...There BEYOND THE BOOM: NEW VOICES ON AMERICAN LIFE, CULTURE, AND POLITICS Edited by Terry Teachout/Poseidon Press/240 pp...

...Your baby is not some kind of a joke...

...Well . . . many pleasant surprises...

...Nancy Mitford five minutes...

...For your child is your little ambassador to the world, an emblem of your own good manners, or lack thereof...

...Because the intellectual life usually gives no economic cushion, however, many regret this choice, which is fostered by parents who swoon over every poem or drawing offered by their precious children without telling them that the arts are mostly an avocation, not a means of support...

...If you are compelled to bring your little daughter to the matinee of I Vitelloni, keep in mind that answering her incessant questions about what the subtitles say, in baby talk, does not make either of you prized patrons...

...As it turns out, however, we do need the new Vile magazine...

...C ince the vicious Hitler quote was 1...3 infiltrated into his paper, Pritchett's experience has raised an interesting question, akin to the crucifix issue: Under what circumstances will the president of an Ivy League college take space on the New York Times op-ed page to assail one of his students, a young black writer, as a fascist and anti-Semite, after attempting to rouse a campus lynch mob against him with a speech worthy of Lester Maddox...

...If you are rich, be advised that it is in questionable taste to arrive with your uniformed housekeeper in tow, particularly if the child can walk...

...Because the babysitter is now going the way of the dodo, and because working parents are (mistakenly) racked with guilt about not spending that extra hour or two with their child, they routinely bring it along into territories previously uncharted by the young...

...The sad fact is that the new Parnassian Tom Wolfe is far too tame to deal with this kind of thing...

...they should be home having a peanut-butter sandwich...

...Donna Rifkind suggests writing itself as a kind of religious calling...

...Otherwise it turns out you may also use government money for the crucifix if it is employed for simulated masturbation by a "performance artist" in the nude, or if it is made to protrude elegantly from the sinuous rear of a distinguished pornographer...

...Walter Olson mars an otherwise astute piece by making an implicit claim to the contrary: that each generation can recover civilization by the unaided use of reason...

...The tyke now needs constant attention until he is toilet-trained...

...The socialism and secularism of that earlier generation which he cherishes paved the way for the current decline...

...David Brooks gives a piquant portrait of one of them, a Washington "policy wonk...

...All else is finally stale and futile...

...Roger Kimball presents a stirring critique of the collapse of intellectual rigor and seriousness in the arts and offers a nostalgic revel from an earlier day when titans such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Lionel Trilling walked the pages of the Hudson Review...

...Not only are all the schools and housing programs run by the most inept and malignant socialist bureaucracies this side of the Gulag, but the streets and subways are beset by criminals and thugs...

...The first issue contains extraordinary essays by William Tucker on Manhattan's housing madness (more than half of all the public housing in the country is in New York) and by John Chubb and Terry Moe on educational madness (according to Albert Shanker, New York City has more educational bureaucrats than the entire continent of Europe...

...Or in the empty train seat across the aisle...

...Children at lunchtime should not be at the Four Seasons having spa cuisine...

...The intact families all necessarily throng to the few communities where their children might be safe...

...We already have The American Spectator, full of Vile writers, and the Dartmouth Review, edited by the precocious Kevin Pritchett, a black student who joined the Vile Body while writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal...

...The magazine ends with a poignant, beautifully written article by Maggie Gallagher on the rise and decline of Park Slope, Brooklyn...

...In all societies, choosing an intellectual career means a real risk of poverty...

...Gallagher, Tucker, and Richard Vigilante, the editor, are all in the Vile Body, as is William Hammett, the publisher, who leads the Manhattan Institute...

...opponents will be denounced as blasphemers in the temple of Art...

...Only a select coterie will relish the opportunity to see the videotape your husband made in the delivery room...

...To the extent that the Vile Body wants secular humanism without social chaos, it is part of the problem rather than the solution...

...Please suppress your famous wry sense of camp when dressing the child...

...But like Allan Bloom's offering of Straussian political theory as a means of redemption, Kimball's notions of critical rigor and "seriousness" provide no source for the cultural revitalization that he seeks...

...He got away with that (I didn't even get any government money), and now there's no stopping him...

...For government-strength high art, you need a Bob Tyrrell or a P. J. O'Rourke...

...Schiffren's contrarian (continued on page 40) 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991...

...Well, the baby has arrived...

...Saratoga and Devon, while interesting options for a new bottled water, are probably less than suitable as choices for your daughter...

...Those little Elvis and Carmen Miranda outfits aren't fooling anyone...

...Susan Vigilante provides a splendid discussion of the twelve-step movement of Alcoholics Anonymous, with its spiritual thrust, and in the process explains "why so many Boomers are jerks...

...Originating at the Brookings Institution, the Chubb-Moe piece demonstrates that there is no connection whatever between educational spending and student performance, rather a clear inverse relationship—adjusted for family income and education—between school performance and number of administrators...

...George Gilder is the author of Wealth and Poverty, Men and Marriage and Microcosm...

...Like many of the writers in this volume, and like Teachout himself, Kimball is pursuing order and tradition-the values of a civilized society-without any recognition that those values cannot be summoned in themselves but must be passed on to new generations of children, chiefly through religious teaching and worship...

...First, as in Evelyn Waugh's original, we get a movie...

...There are a number of superb essays in the book, including Richard Vigilante's trenchant defense of the yuppies and Maggie Gallagher's essay on "house lust...

...So he will be given no quarter...

...There are no rules for manners in the street and in public for very little children," wrote Emily Post in Children Are People (1940), "because they are always in the care of someone who is expected to look after their behavior...

...While an impulse to conceal evidence is well intentioned, stuffing tidy bundles under your host's bed is considered bad form...

...But if the fiasco in American culture has finally reached a point so grotesque that even the author of Radical Chic has had to throw up his hands in feckless despair, what can we expect from his followers in the Vile Body...

...But reason is impotent to inculcate moral values, to induce girls to say no in the heat of sexual excitement, to foster the commitments and sacrifices of child-rearing, and to propagate the disciplines and long-time horizons of a civilized and productive society...

...Stealing other people's family names is beyond the pale...

...18.95 George Gilder THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 37 BOOM BABIES I love children-especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away...

...But I am still far behind him on the slopes and in no position to put up with it...

...So you're going to have a baby...

...And by all means, no screaming babies in church...

...Why Tom encourages this kind of impertinence I have no idea...

...NY is a scholarly and trenchant journal also produced in Lehrman House by Vile editors and writers backed by the Manhattan Institute...

...French restaurants, for instance...

...Edited by Terry Teachout and titled Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life Culture and Politics, it expounds the theory that Tom and I, among other "middle-aged conservatives" . . . "belong to the past...

...Meanwhile, Wolfe is bequeathing his advantage miles to a group of uppity New York journalists and arrivistes who call themselves the Vile Body and who meet monthly in Lewis Lehrman's Manhattan mansion...

...I have been following his career, waiting for him to stumble, ever since, writing in Commentary well before the Serrano breakthrough, he tested the urine treatment on one of my own books...

...While this decision will reveal itself naturally over time, it is customary to share the happy news with family and friends...

...The art scene has gotten much tougher since the palmy days when he provoked an uproar by exposing the incredible scandal of the Painted Word...

...And remember, Lamaze is of interest largely to its participants...

...I mention this solely for the sake of the child, who must be mortified, and would certainly retreat to a private place if he could walk...

...Like many of us, her friends made the fateful choice of avoiding the graduate studies and hard unselfish work that their parents performed in business and the professions...

...But writing is not religion...

...This, I'm afraid, means diapers...

...the problem is that it's in communities dominated by criminals...

...But defenders of the separation of church and state were shocked to learn of a simple new way to breach the wall without even bribing any public officials: you merely submerge the crucifix in urine...

...Remember that Jack Daniel's and apple juice is an excellent pick-me-up for children on those flights from Miami to Lima...

...What the Vile Body calls a housing crisis is actually a crime-and-schooling crisis...

...That's why so much of the work of intellectuals consists of special gripes and class grievances of little interest or worth to the rest of the society...

...It is unreasonable, therefore, to expect that putting your child in the center of the room will provide enough conversational ballast for a group of adults for more than a few minutes...

...Taking your baby into a public place necessitates your exercising vigorous control over his behavior...

...When Gallagher talks about the Boomers living worse than their parents, she is comparing writers and artists with professionals...

...By all means forgo passing the sonogram around the dinner table, please...

...Written, directed, and produced by Vile founder Whit Stillman, mostly filmed in Lehrman House, and peopled by Vile extras galore, Metropolitan was so good, true, funny, and beautiful that it lured paying customers in numbers well beyond even the multitudes in Stillman's close family, who put up some $500,000 to get Whit out of their hair...

...This is most unpleasant for all concerned...

...By all means bring the baby to show everyone at the office...

...I can understand Wolfe's inclination to leave cultural matters behind...

...With Beyond the Boom, he fulfills the incredible dream of getting his name on the cover of a book above Tom Wolfe's...

...Please resist a natural impulse to divulge the minutiae of conception...

...Entirely a story of New York, Metropolitan became a national hit without even attracting the barest notice in the New Yorker, which was occupied in reviewing important artistic works such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Die Hard 2. Then the Vile Body gave us a new magazine, NY Do we really need a newmagazine...

...William Irvine (Mr Irvine is a writer living in New York City...

...Reality has run well beyond his satirical reach...

...It's not the kind of problem that has much occupied Wolfe over the years...

...Post does not even address the subject of manners for the extremely young is no oversight...

...now you've hit the bull's eye so just keep quiet...

...I don't care if you tried ten times a day...

...Although the numbers do not support their claim that this generation as a whole faces an acute economic or housing problem, they offer much evidence of the dire social predicament of middle-class families in New York...

...The answer is clear...

...A name is something you inflict for life on your unsuspecting offspring...

...Some places are not so fabulous for changing your baby...

...If the young black writer generally supports Israel, bravely renounces the racialist and anti-Semitic whining of his black classmates, and runs the best, most influential, and doggedly anti-racist student publication in America, he'll be called "fascist scum...

...For this obvious choice, they are called racists by liberals in City Hall, who chase them down and hound them out of the city by putting homelessness centers and drug clinics in their arduously reclaimed neighborhoods...

...He's off to write a major biography of Mencken, while producing regular editorials in the Daily News and apparently weekly articles for any other Vile publication in reach...

...Tip: there is probably a reason why Lycra bicycle shorts and dinner jackets are so tough to find in infant sizes...

...Instead they can enjoy the mental luxuries and expressive freedoms of the intellectual life...

...There is ample cheap housing in New York...

...When thinking about names, be advised that no one has ever thought children named Robert or Elizabeth were anything less than special...

...But Vigilante and Gallagher are wrong to imply that earlier generations of intellectuals earned as much money or had access to housing remotely as good as today's...