Editorials/How High the Bounce?/The Noble Racist
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS HOW HIGH THE BOUNCE? THE NOBLE RACIST Apropos of God knows what, I just heard Mr. Rod MacLeish, a commentator on a Christian Science Monitor radio news program, announce that we are in...
...Truth be known, the evidence is that we are coming out of recession, and may have been out of recession some months ago...
...The Democrats' 1991 Civil Rights Bill attempts to overthrow a 1989 Supreme Court decision, Wards Cove Packing Ca v. Atonio...
...The latest Liberal tactic for passing pet legislation is not to intone soaring rhetoric or to promise a chicken in every pot but to devise legislation so complex, confusing, and tricky that the mere contemplation of it causes, in the normal citizen, headaches and nausea...
...Can Senator Kennedy prove that in advocating the 1991 Civil Rights Bill he is intent on helping black workers rather than buying off civil rights leaders...
...Herd journalists have for a decade spoken of the economy only in morbid terms, but if they want something genuine to rumble about they might lament that nothing much is being done to ensure a healthy period of economic rebound...
...Such companies are vital, however, to a healthy, sustained recovery because they are always the main source of new jobs and products...
...He has us dead to rights...
...Still comfortable, but by now should be uncomfortable in view of numerous Gould sermons and lectures...
...Particularly interesting is his essay on Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, included in the recently published Bully for Brontosaurus...
...In May the index of the National Association of Purchasing Managers rose for the third straight month, suggesting a continued increase in production over the next thirty to sixty days...
...Serves us right, then...
...But America is dominated by neither the rich nor the poor...
...He can foresee no great benefit in buying stock in a somewhat risky but promising enterprise, for if the stock appreciates handsomely the barber gets scalped again...
...The seasonally adjusted data that he cites is on the upsurge, an upsurge not as effervescent as one might wish, but effervescent enough to signal economic recovery...
...Then, like everyone else, he became an evolutionist...
...The whole point of the 1991 Civil Rights Bill is to shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused...
...Many years ago, one of the most trenchant students of democratic society, Professor Sidney Hook of New York University's Department of Philosophy, argued that one of the requirements of a working democracy is that its laws be comprehensible to the average citizen...
...Automobile and truck production bottomed in December...
...They reminded us that we live in a society that is still fundamentally racist, still fundamentally sexist, still unregenerate, still too comfortable by half...
...Can you think of any other area of law in which the accused has to prove what was in his conscience when he made a decision...
...Whatever the case, there is no reason to say that this recession has been anything but short and shallow...
...Wouldn't you know it, Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology at Harvard in the nineteenth century, was a racist and a creationist...
...They want to make it easier to sue the companies that usesuch criteria, and harder for the companies to justify them...
...Mustachioed and a wee bit portly, Gould, who teaches biology at Harvard, had given strict instructions to the Stanford organizers that no photographs were to be taken, no videotape record made...
...He finds it "disturbing" that the textbook used by John Scopes to teach evolution in by Tom Bethell Tennessee, A Civic Biology, contained "racist nonsense," even though it was deferential to Gould's hero, Charles Darwin...
...March-of-progress iconography not only false but racist...
...America's Liberals are not going to fall into that trap...
...Don't we realize we're a mere twig on the copiously branching bush of life...
...This was the opening session of the university's centennial symposium, "Ethnicity, Equity and Environment: Confronting a Global Dilemma...
...assured, and now from all over the world investment in the U.S...
...So while the herd journalists maunder on about recession, depression, and apocalypse now, the real question is How High the Bounce, and for how long...
...and we still believe in human superiority, not realizing we are a mere mammalian after-thought, pitiful latecomers, a gloriously lucky accident...
...Gould showed us a slide of a statue of Agassiz at Stanford, knocked to the ground in the October 1989 earthquake...
...CAPITOL IDEAS GOOD AS GOULD Stanford, California tephen Jay Gould came out from 1,3 behind a curtain and walked briskly to the podium, briefcase in hand...
...We're still unconsciously racist (consciously, in the case of the right-wingers lurking in our midst...
...Cutting capital gains is not of great importance to the rich...
...Moreover, they payvery little attention to the legacy of our Constitution...
...Serious students of the economy who have also had something to do with making it buoyant in the 1980s doubt that there is going to be any bounce at all...
...As one of the nation's preeminent capitalists, he is urging a very sensible measure on Congress and the Bush Administration...
...That is to say employers, if they want to avoid expensive lawsuits, will quietly adopt quotas...
...Bad and incorrigible...
...What is more, he sobbed that unemployment had become catastrophic...
...Advocates of the 1991 Civil Rights Bill do...
...That decision allows employers to use the criterion of competence to decide whether a job applicant is hired...
...Its real importance is for the middle class . . . and for the middle-class entrepreneur who will sustain the economic recovery now taking place...
...If Americans understood the 1991 Civil Rights Bill, most would be against it...
...Well, remember, we are dealing with politicians who have a record for shiftiness...
...That, Senator Kennedy, foreordains quotas...
...I disagree with Gould across the board, but in fairness I should add that he is a very readable essayist...
...and, according to the Commerce Department, April's construction showed the largest increase in fourteen months...
...Can he prove that his heart abounds with virtue rather than base motives...
...A company's best defense against such suits will be to hire a percentage of minorities equal to the percentage of each minority in the area...
...I really meant that about not taking any photographs," he said, his voice weary and a little saddened by the Tem Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...Fearing that blacks, Hispanics, and certain other minorities might not fare as well as whites under such a criterion, the advocates of the 1991 Civil Rights Bill want to make it dangerous for employers to use...
...Whenever he puts pen to paper, Gould valiantly combats our backsliding, our same old retrograde tendency to put on airs as the Lords of Creation and . . . (yes, it's true) superior to the snails...
...prospered from the 1980s economy, understanding its strengths and remonstrating against its weaknesses...
...Gould seems not to realize that evolutionary theory is so unconstrained by facts that it is capable of accommodating any political point of view...
...Oh, he has our number, this Gould, doesn't he...
...In herd journalism one always has to be in step with the herd, regardless of the cost to accuracy or even to lucidity...
...lb report human rights violations on your campus, call o free hotline: 1400-783-6707 AMNESTY IN ACADEMIA PA Box 549 Arlington„ Virginia 22216.0549 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 gory unforeseen a generation ago, when all Liberals and advocates of civil liberties dreamed of a color-blind America...
...The slide showed the great man headfirst in the ground like an unexploded rocket...
...He pointed out that we wouldn't think of photographing a concert artist in the middle of a recital, and I think we all felt chastened...
...One of the fundamental tenets of our law is that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty...
...The Klansman is a racist in a bad cause, black oppression...
...Theodore Forstmann of Forstmann Little & Co...
...The tortured meanings that the Democratic leadership forces upon such by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...They hadn't noticed that, but do you think it had escaped Stephen Jay Gould...
...A full report will appear in a back ssue this fall...
...As the Bush Administration argues, the recession was probably triggered by fears that a protracted Gulf war would send oil prices heavenward...
...The bad news...
...Nonetheless, so strong was the urge to make a permanent record that someone a few rows back hoisted a verboten camera...
...He is demanding such a demonstration from American employers, and their only recourse will be to keep an eye on the racial makeup of their workforce...
...Gould concludes that Shaler used his intellect to construct "an elaborate rationale for contemporary preferences, never challenging the conservative asTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 9...
...ould has this habit of disparaging his own predecessors at Harvard, whenever he discovers that they arrived at conclusions intellectually fashionable in their day but unfashionable now...
...Alan Reynolds, an economist of independent mind with an uncommon record of accurate prophecies, believes that the economy is in a period of expansion and has been for some time...
...He laid down the indispensable flashlight that directs a speck of light to the screen, where he was showing slides...
...They call tax increases "revenue enhancement...
...Under present conditions the barber gets scalped for selling his asset...
...It is a cateAMNESTY IN ACADEMIA American Spectator to chronicle abuses of ion on college campuses...
...The Republicans fear that cutting the tax will play into the Democrats' plans for one more campaign pitting the rich against the poor...
...What separates the Liberal from the Klansman is that the Liberal is a racist in a good cause, black improvement...
...Stretched out before him in the Memorial Auditorium was this huge shining sea of Stanford undergraduates, who had come to imbibe a little user-friendly political science from the hugely popular Gould...
...Words are putty in their hands—it would be undignified to say mouths...
...Such fears stampeded retailers into cutting inventories and producers into cutting capital investment...
...Us bad, then...
...need to interrupt one lecture for the sake of another...
...But the smiling advocates of the Democratic bill insist their bill will not mandate quotas...
...Gould's slides illustrated the wrongheadedness of unfashionable biology...
...With the end of the One Hundred Hours' War, investors were reAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...They want it to be harder for an employer to prove that, in his heart of hearts, when hepassed over a certain job applicant, he harbored no consideration other than competence...
...Our revealing iconography...
...The economy's problem right now, according to Forstmann, is a credit crunch for mid-range companies and for new businesses...
...As we would expect, he deferred to "comfortable convention" and for a while he accepted the creationism of his superior, Agassiz...
...Rod MacLeish, a commentator on a Christian Science Monitor radio news program, announce that we are in the midst of a long and deep recession (or did he say wide and deep...
...The burden of proof was again with the accuser...
...As for our unemployment rate, though unemployment is always about as welcome as the flu, in this recession it has been relatively mild...
...This is Gould's own favorite among the thirty-five essays reprinted from his Natural History series "This View of Life...
...The Liberal is the Noble Racist...
...The Democrats are quite forthright in wanting the burden of proof to be placed on the accused...
...In the Wards Cove decision, the Supreme Court returned civil rights law to the enlightened American legal tradition from which it had strayed...
...Most Americans do not want a society that bases its judgments on a person's race, color, creed, etc...
...O000h, go the students...
...Forstmann urges the elimination of the capital gains tax, certainly on assets held for more than three years...
...Ha ha ha ha...
...Within the context of the "genteel racism of patrician Boston," Gould tells us, Shaler "reserved his lowest opinion for black Americans," supported the Immigration Restriction League, and so on...
...Liberal Democrats have decided that the less a potential opponent knows about these inscrutable terms the better it is for the so-called civil rights agenda...
...On brink of total annihilation at any moment...
...is expanding...
...Obviously, Mr...
...He believed that the human races "are separate species, properly and necessarily kept apart both on public conveyances and in bedrooms...
...MacLeish is one of the Republic's many practitioners of herd journalism...
...terms as "quotas," "affirmative action," "racial goals," "race-norming," and other arcana are concocted to dissuade ordinary Americans from any further consideration of these dread topics...
...His classes overflowed, and his students poured forth praise . . ." At the Harvard tercentenary, in 1936, he was named twelfth out of fifty people most important to the history of the university...
...Just in time, Gould spotted the rascal and stopped in mid-sentence...
...Fearful of federal regulators' scrutiny, the banks are being extremely stingy about extending loans tosuch companies...
...Evidence of recovery can be seen in the stock and bond markets...
...Although unknown today, Shaler was Harvard's most popular professor by far...
...It is a middle-class country, and the middle class recognizes that capital gains taxes If discussions of the 1991 Civil Rights Bill elicit from you symptoms more normally associated with the flu or a hangover, Senator Kennedy has you where he wants you...
...Take this March of Progress, for example, illustrated by the well-known single-file series, ape to man walking to the right, becoming more upright and (the moving speck of flashlight telling us where to look) becoming progressively lighter skinned...
...American Liberalism has joined with the racists and other bigots in putting race, ethnicity, gender, and even financial worth above considerations of individual merit...
...They call welfare checks entitlements...
...No-000h...
...Most of us don't even know it ourselves, of course, but our "familiar iconographies of evolution" give the game away, because they are directed toward reinforcing a comfortable view of human inevitability and cultural superiority...
...prevent the barber from selling his shop, investing in the stocks of a midrange business, and retiring to Florida...
...They can sit on their assets for a generation...
...He had already taken off his jacket, loosened his banker's tie, and rolled up his sleeves—the better to get down to the business of telling us what's right and what's wrong in evolutionary biology...
...Good for Gould...
...The capital gains tax has a negative effect on the liquidity of capital assets and on capital formation...
...Housing bottomed in January, Reynolds observes...
...He goes through old drawers, compares letters excerpted in memoirs with their unexpurgated versions and takes pleasure in displaying the dirty linen...
Vol. 24 • August 1991 • No. 8
