Special Correspondence/Robert Novak

...N one of this would be worth comment were it not for Frum's startling conclusion: "How deeply into kookery can a man who claims to speak for conservatism go before other conservatives are obliged to repudiate him...

...Patrick Buchanan has put millions of words into print...

...What's more, I agree with some points made early in Frum's article about the futility of the neocon funding debate...

...The connection is ludicrous...

...Thus, the only justification for David Frum's character assassination is to join the ongoing campaign to destroy Pat Buchanan as a conservative force in America...

...Robert D. Novak Washington, D.C...

...Buchanan published two columns this spring that attempted to read out of conservatism the "neoconservatives," whom he condemned for their devotion to "Big Government, minority rights and global-ism...

...Abe Rosenthal's infamous New York Times column triggered the campaign suddenly defaming Buchanan as anti-Semitic...

...she commands our admiration in spite of ourselves...

...I certainly did not...

...It is especially painful to read this calumniation in TAS, particularly in view of Bob Tyrrell's view that conservatives must band together and stop shooting their own wounded to avoid the "conservative crack-up...

...That dispute between the second wife of Mr...

...Buchanan is no anti-Semite, as anybody who knows him well will avow...

...When the three pals have triumphed over adversity and brought the herd in all by themselves, they deliberately subvert that Rocky moment by riding in to the tune of "Bonanza...

...Evil here, in the form of a couple of drunken cowboys called Jeff and T. R., is only allowed a moment in which to appear genuinely threatening before it is reduced to the comic and simply disappears...

...Yes, arguments about how much government is tolerable and how interventionist American foreign policy ought to be are vital to defining a convincing post-Reagan conservatism...

...here it is the real thing...

...The depiction last month of Buchanan as a Hell's Angel motorcycling right winger, both in the cover portrait and the cover story ("The Conservative Bully Boy"), marks the first barrage in his attempted demolition that does not come from a writer or publication directly connected with either the left or the Israeli lobby...

...The old woman's hard-edged clarity of purpose in obtaining absolute dominance over those around her by exaggerating her own infirmities never wavers and shows her to advantage against the background of the soppy niceness of her family, who have taken her in...

...His account of adolescent brawling has become the basis of psycho-babbling analysis by one Buchanan-basher after another, and Frum now joins the parade...

...What's more, the author, David Frum, concludes by calling for Buchanan's repudiation by all conservatives...

...As might have been expected when they put Kevin Costner in the title role, this is a New Age Robin Hood who has the right ideas not only about the redistribution of wealth but also about women's rights and racial and religious prejudice...

...Others may have charged Patrick Buchanan with anti-Semitism...

...It's just like the old folks always said it would be...

...The interracial romance between Wesley Snipes and Ana-belle Sciorra is connected with the drug addiction (and consequent lying and thieving) of Snipes's brother (Samuel L. Jackson) only by the fact that their stiff-necked religious parents (Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee) violently disapprove of both...

...A final word on anti-Semitism...

...But there is again, too, the more general problem of accounting for evil in the movies...

...By all means, let's thrash that issue out...

...Second, if we take Buchanan's definitions of conservatism seriously, we have to anathematize not just the Commentary editorial board, but also virtually every contemporary conservative of any note...

...What a laugh the guys all got out of whacking people...

...Not all American judges are mad-caps...

...That raises the question of who is the heretic...

...Spike Lee's Jungle Fever takes a less facile view of the evil of bigotry, but bigotry is here, too, most of what is meant by evil...

...He closes by comparing Buchanan with Gerald L. K. Smith and the John Birchers...

...The right—as well as the left—is split on trade and immigration, so Buchanan is by no means isolated in his views...

...Frum's article will appear in next month's issue—Ed...

...Moldenhauer's ashes, giving an envelope to each party...

...David Frum replies: It is simply bizarre to suggest—as Robert Novak seems to—that it is unfair to judge a writer by his writings...

...RET SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE ROBERT NOVAK ON PAT BUCHANAN C urely, not The American Spectator...

...He has been a stalwart in the long struggle against Communism and performed signal service in alerting the world to the follies and excesses of global financial institutions...

...military intervention in the Persian Gulf and noted that emphatic backing for the use of American military force came from friends of Israel...

...Too little in this case...

...There even seems to be a sort of protocol now to the representation of such characters, since Ron, like Hannibal Lecter, requires a young investigator to divulge deeply held private feelings in return for his helping to solve a crime...

...Since nothing Frum has written justifies such an "obligation," he packs into his fmal paragraph the throwaway line that Buchanan's "real message is inseparable from his sly Jew-baiting...

...Yes, it is all too true...

...My article was an intervention in a quarrel Buchanan started...

...But the very unacceptability of the offense mandates that any accusation must be founded in fact, not in surmise or fancy...

...Nor do I remember hearing him complain about the Bush Administration's "war on drugs" and its curbs on financial privacy...

...But here it is not so easily wished away...

...Something similar is at work in our film of the month, Etienne Chatiliez's Tatie Danielle, which is one of those movies (and what a lot of them there are) that only the French could have made...

...Yet there is good news, too...

...And in pictures these days, anything between the psychopathology of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and something as convenient as the liquor or vitamin deficiency theories seems not to play very well...

...That is a disservice not only to its target but to those who published it...

...That he is...

...In my opinion, it is unlikely this attack would have been launched had not TAS been listed by Buchanan in a column as the recipient of financial aid from neoconservatives, which he assails...

...Unfortunately, Rickman's performance is the only good thing about the film...

...if the essence of the man is to be found anywhere it is there, and not in his friends' polite comments about what an affable chap he is...

...Like Milton's Satan, she dominates our disapproval as well...

...I also share Frum's disagreement with Buchanan's nationalistic stands on trade and immigration, which are bad politics and bad policy...

...Does this vary from what the Wall Street Journal and The American Spectator espouse...

...and an odd sort of respect accrues to Davis, the religious nutbar who shoots his own son, because he is the person in the midst of a moral chaos whose sure sense of the opposition between good and evil allows him to be uncompromising...

...That would be acceptable were Frum not launching an assault on not merely the views but the character of a man he does not know...

...Regrettably, he did not bother to interview Buchanan or anybody who knows him well, but has relied exclusively on his written word...

...T he latest scion of the psychopathic I stock is Ron, the retired pyromaniac played by Donald Sutherland in Ron Howard's Backdraft, which is worth see-ing for the special effects but whose plot is incomprehensible and whose characters are one-dimensional...

...At least since Coleridge wrote of the "motiveless malignity" of Iago, novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters have had to work very hard to make evil believable—or at least dramatically acceptable...

...Frum apparently does not understand the tenet of the conservative movement that the priority for U.S...

...Jeff and T. R. may be a little Neanderthal in some of their sexual attitudes, but it is really only the liquor that turns them nasty...

...The two targets most vocally unhappy about Buchanan's neocon column—Tyrrell and Bill Bennett—are, like Buchanan, Roman Catholics (Tyrrell a fellow parishioner of Buchanan, Bennett a fellow alumnus of Washington's Gonzaga High School...

...And this one is more enjoyable than most...

...They had gone to court to secure his ashes but in Florida's Dade County Circuit Court the solomonic Judge Robert Newman simply split Mr...

...So it is appropriate that the medieval costume drama of Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, should make a comic caricature like Jack Nicholson's Joker in Batman of Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham...

...This is a wicked caricature that bears no resemblance to the Pat Buchanan I have known for over twenty years as a news source, a colleague, and a friend...

...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) judging me by mine...

...It doesn't do to be too disapproving of Hollywood's sentimentalism and easy moral uplift...

...Many of the "neoconservatives" I suspect Buchanan has in mind—with his habitual prudence when dealing with powerful people, he does not name names—are indeed excessively partial to Big Government...

...Personally, he is a man of unfailing good manners and discretion who does not faintly resemble Frum's ruffian...

...If acted upon, it would bring into being a conservatism that could not govern and would not deserve to...

...But merely to level this charge, however unsupported it is, is to inflict serious damage on him...

...Not a bit...

...Bad guys who are not psychos tend to be ciphers, mere fodder for the portable cannons of Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger...

...Just as Only the Lonely uses it to give manipulative behavior a whiff of brimstone, so Jungle Fever attaches it to a story of drug-inspired evil and invites us to decide which is worse...

...He is also, as Novak acknowledges, an eloquent and effective spokesman for wrongheaded conservative causes, like protectionism...

...Here, as in Only the Lonely, the evil presence is that of a viciously manipulative old lady, beautifully portrayed by Tsila Chelton...

...That indeed seems to be its purpose...

...One of the film's most memorable moments comes when the nice, respectable family sit in conference assembled and it suddenly dawns on them, with a mixture of shame and incredulity, that elle est mkhante—she is nasty...

...Only the redoubtable Sandrine (Isabelle Nanty), whom they hire to look after her when they go on vacation, refuses to be manipulated and so excites not only respect but something like love in a lonely old woman's granite-hard heart...

...Nor does the body of his writing support the indictment...

...You cannot watch that and not know both that evil exists and that it lives very intimately among us...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 35...

...He then indicts Buchanan for inconsistency, belittling his concern with Communist oppression in Nicaragua, Angola, and Lithuania...

...This lively and valued voice of the right has joined the New York Times, the New Republic, and Commentary in the assault on Patrick J. Buchanan...

...It is particularly reprehensible that an article that starts by questioning Buchanan's criticism of neoconservative funding ends with a gratuitous accusation of "Jew-baiting...

...Frum is a member of the renowned editorial-page staff of the Wall Street Journal, whose virtues include a willingness to venture out of the office for shoe-leather reporting...

...I do not deign to tell Pat Buchanan what to write, but I believe he would be better off trashing liberals than sniping at William J. Bennett (who defended him when A. M. Rosenthal launched the smear campaign against him...

...It is clever, has a lot of good jokes, and is relatively unpretentious...

...No more than Maureen O'Hara are they nineties people, but here it is the older generation that has the last word...

...That attests to the feistiness of this publication and its editor-in-chief, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., whose refusal to suffer slurs silently is a quality I applaud...

...The very word, which is often used of children or animals, suggests a cringing, mealymouthed way of characterizing unspeakable behavior and reinforces our sense of the pathetic limitation of the family's moral vision...

...In fact, Buchanan's position as a major conservative spokesman—perhaps even a presidential candidate—was undisputed until he opposed U.S...

...Even they know that they are still only playing at being cowboys...

...I just wish they could have got through their adventure without the help of a cute baby calf called Norman, rescued by Crystal from his condign destiny as veal steak...

...Only casually does Novak address the critique of Buchanan that this magazine in fact printed: Buchanan, Novak insists, is "an eloquent and effective spokesman for mainstream conservative causes...

...Unfortunately, it is another central premise of the film that this more genuine world can be trolled for its catch of wisdom during a two-week vacation, after which yuppie heaven will be just the same, only better...

...What motives lie behind this practice I cannot, and did not, say...

...In the course of a 3,000-word article I made one passing reference to Buchanan's practice of baiting Jewish sensibilities...

...To see one from the inside, as we see Iago and Edmund and Macbeth, is something that we are almost never allowed...

...Novak's unwillingness to judge writers by their writing prevents him from (continued on page 35) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 7 idea of "nineties behavior" looks rather silly...

...It can safely be predicted, as J. Danforth Quayle can confirm, that anybody—conservative or not—who fires on TAS will get as much or better in return...

...As it turns out, the two halves of the film do not fit together well at all...

...Additional letters on Mr...

...Evil is comic here too, but not by way of self-conscious caricature, as in Robin Hood and Batman, or the exoticism of the mob ethos, as in GoodFellas...

...That's it...

...Popular entertainment, in fact, has a long history of coping with its anxieties and taboos in this way...

...One of the funniest scenes I have seen at the movies in a long time is when 'Fade Danielle and Sandrine abandon the family's beloved 14-year-old cocker spaniel in a Parisian park...

...He is firm for limited government, traditional cultural values, and a strong national defense...

...Instead, Frum from the opening paragraph launches an ad hominem attack portraying Buchanan as an embarrassment to genteel conservatives, among whom he apparently lists himself...

...Martin Scorsese in GoodFellas came close, but he was really working a different tradition: that of evil as comic...

...Why...

...The problem never worried earlier writers much, though Shakespeare took more trouble than most to account psychologically for the evil that his audience seems to have been ready to accept as a given...

...Novak's lengthy refutation of a nonexistent allegation of anti-Semitism risks leaving in readers' minds the impression that he believes the true animus behind any criticism of Buchanan, whatever its actual content, must be Jewish paranoia...

...The reason for this is that, paradoxically, it allows us to see wicked people as people: once you discount their mental abnormalities, which live within them like the devils they were once thought to be, you can give them a little character on top...

...Three friends from New York (Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby), all suffering from some sort of mid-life crisis, go on a cattle drive from New Mexico to Colorado and, with even more ease than Maureen O'Hara is cured of her prejudices, find themselves...

...It might be argued that Buchanan began the exchange with anill-advised attack on the neocons, but his errant sniping has been answered with a nuclear counterattack...

...Chatiliez manages to make it both real-looking and familiar, not safe and comfortable for us by an accompaniment of cacklings from an obvious stage villain like the Sheriff of Nottingham, who at one point orders that Christmas be cancelled...

...The devil in the medieval mystery plays was always a comic figure...

...It aspires to be a Spielbergian action picture, but the accumulated implausibilities of both the incredible escapes and feats of derring-do and a gang of medieval hippies defeating a merely clownish evil by grooving on peace and love are too much for it...

...Love does not conquer all, and the crackhead comes to a bad end...

...Clearly there is not enough here to sustain a full-length article attacking Buchanan on the merits of his writings...

...Ideologically, Buchanan is no kook but an eloquent and effective spokesman for mainstream conservative causes, and he certainly meets Frum's test of "what should be done tomorrow morning...

...But Buchanan's distinction between true conservatives, who must be isolationist and protectionist "America Firsters," and bad globalist neoconservatives is not just intellectually incoherent...

...The trade and foreign investment controls that Buchanan favors are the deadliest form of statism...

...His principal foundation for depicting Buchanan as a barroom tough is Right from the Beginning, Buchanan's charming and self-deprecatory memoir of a middle-class Catholic boyhood in Washington, D.C...

...It collapses under the weight of its own lack of verisimilitude...

...Frum brands Buchanan's opposition to intervention (which ended promptly once American troops were in combat) with the label of "isolationism...

...Peter Moldenhauer (deceased) and his two daughters from a previous marriage has been settled...

...But the neocon dispute hardly justifies writing Buchanan out of the conservative movement...

...If you are you will never enjoy going to the movies...

...In the wake of Hitler's Holocaust, it is unpardonable and impermissible...

...Professionally, his self-discipline en-abled him to perform with strict restraint in two hitches as a White House aide and with unvarying fairness as a moderator on CNN's "Capital Gang...

...Any more than that and the audience might not be quite so ready to believe that being closely in touch with the state of nature is a wholly beneficient and healing experience...

...In reply, I pointed out two things: First, Buchanan himself is very far from being a consistent advocate of Small Government...

...And the nastiest of them all, deliciously played by Jack Palance, naturally turns out to have a heart of gold...

...power, since we cannot serve as policeman for the world, has been to stop the spread of Communist poison...

...The pet cemetery's owners also face charges for dumping dead animals in four wooded areas near the cemetery, where they have become a health hazard for all save the gigantic rats that feed on them...