Editorials/The Worst Book of the Year/Fantasists
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS The Worst Book of the Year by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Millions of Americans are well aware of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, and some are even cognizant of less popular literary...
...Unlike dressing up and other kinds of body care that reminded her of her mother-indeed, that made her fear becoming a mother-this one had no sad echoes of the past...
...Emerging from the delusory setting of television, Pat believes he can be President, though he has never held office...
...Now, she is at work on an autobiography that will examine the effects of her family's habit of denial on her own life and, since her father, Ronald Reagan, was President of the United States, the effects of his need to insist "everything is fine" on the nation's political and economic life, too...
...Behold our political leaders...
...These super gals would match (continued on page 18) may be blas6 about my good fortune, too, though I do not really think so...
...Generally, Republicans are deficient politicians...
...Patti Davis's Burden One day, her husband invited her to go with him to a gym, since at thirty-two, she was still reluctant to venture into new places alone...
...or President Ceausescu...
...Nonetheless, she persisted, and by focusing in this way...
...Those who had to leave this crucial core behind can tear down walls, see what the child needed but didn't have, and begin to provide it now...
...As I say, at the end of a century abundant with political causes, we have little political talent left...
...She began to learn the weight-training techniques of body-building, including ways to direct one's mind "into" a specific muscle, so that blood and energy were directed there, too...
...That is the solution...
...Miss Steinem insists that, whether in Hitler's Germany, Saddam Hussein's Middle East, or George Bush's America, it has been the source of much of the world's evil...
...Their goal is public service...
...Nonetheless, her conscious mind still assumed she was destined to be, as she put it at the time, "that least happy of women-a heterosexual feminist who wants to be sexual, but can't speak to a man without a growl...
...Millions of Americans are well aware of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, and some are even cognizant of less popular literary awards...
...Twenty-five years of feeling wretched has not scotched her urge to pontificate, for she has a new solution, beyond power...
...For a dozen years it has acknowledged the year's worst books and raised their authors from the muck of mediocrity and oblivion, making them Coogler laureates whether they like it or not...
...Compare the Republican Bush's performance in his State of the Union Address with the Democrat Foley's suave and thoroughly dishonest "Response...
...she gradually began to feel as if she were inside her body instead of fantasizing her way out...
...Each of us has an inner child of the past living within us," she writes...
...Yet the teenager grows up or goes insane...
...Earnest to Do Good, the President heaved up some tried-and-true policies and went home...
...Twenty-five years ago, Miss Steinem and her feminist liberators arrived on the scene with a message more thunderous and Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by King Features...
...we have a sense of the worst, which is why a valuable service to American literature is provided every year by the J. Gordon Coogler Committee...
...As she later wrote: ". . . In my next life when I am a Lifelong Lesbian, I ny...
...True Confessions By 1975, Marilyn had separated from a second husband...
...Perhaps this generation of males was a bit wimpy...
...Okay, so the "inner child" is actually a "crucial core...
...Possibly Miss Steinem's generation of feminists is truly the greatest...
...For him it is a matter not of public service but of narcissism...
...In the limited time we have had to sample the poetry and song of those now contending for the presidency in both parties, I have come to conclude that all are amuck in a fantasy except for George Bush...
...Suddenly, she began to feel an inexplicable sense of rightness and naturalness, as if she was finally living her own life...
...the American economy, Bush was not saying...
...Armed with feminist tracts of colossal intellectual force and with a stupendous righteousness, this epochal generation of feminists was heaving off the chains...
...Foley re-up in broken homes and amuck in social pathologies, Miss Steinem can present herself as a liberator . . . and a Coogler laureate...
...The policies he referred to were all apparently orphans...
...71 minded his listeners of past Democratic accomplishments and messiahs—he mentioned JFK...
...And we have "walls" where our stomachs should be...
...Why Not the Worst?: A Gloria Steinem Reader 16 The American Spectator April 1992 the guys, Plato for Plato, Caesar for Caesar, Rembrandt for Rembrandt, Beethoven for Beethoven, Einstein for Einstein...
...Its goal is to make women and the occasional androgynous man feel good about themselves and hostile towards everyone else...
...More on this as Campaign '92 sputters along...
...He picks unnecessary fights and breaks up coalitions...
...Each suffers the weakness of his ideological point of origin...
...What's the point...
...As the Coogler Committee notes, Miss Steinem is a very bad writer, and not too lucid a thinker, either...
...She and her feminist colleagues have labored to break up the family, and so to divorcees and to the millions of American children brought One of the ironies of the twentieth century, a century stewed on politics, is that at its end it has so few gifted political leaders left...
...Needless to say, the Hon...
...71 Fantasists 18 The American Spectator April 1992...
...They would take over boardrooms, liberate governments, join all-male clubs, and assert once and for all a woman's right to ride a garbage truck, dig ditches, do anything she damn well wanted to do...
...Perhaps it was too gentlemanly...
...They can, indeed, do anything they damn well want to do, or at least they can threaten to do anything they damn well want to do...
...Political operators and world-savers have entered every nook and cranny of American life, summoning us to world wars, cold wars, and wars on poverty, pollution, sexual harassment, and the throw-away bottle...
...and, come to think about it, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society also "led to" this recession...
...After four thousand years of domination by a male conspiracy, finally, this super species of feminist announced that it was putting an end to the Male Tyran Tyrants All Think of such current examples as Saddam Hussein, a boy beaten and tortured daily by his stepfather, who grew up to enjoy the close-up torture of others...
...It is an indigestible stew of truth and falsehood, spiced with the usual feminist jargon, psychobabble, whines, and incoherence...
...According to Revolution From Within, she is carrying a child...
...Foley spit on his hands, rolled up his sleeves, and delivered a virtuoso tirade: reminding Americans of their every fear, assuring them that his fellow Democrats would fulfill their every hope, massaging every interest group no matter the attendant contradictions, and uttering this whopper: "The supply-side, trickle-down decade of the 1980s finally led to an economy in decline...
...We still have the balmy and the venal, but at the end of this century of politics we have political leaders in astoundingly large numbers who are wholly lost in fantasy...
...Miss Steinem has merely gone to a shrink and discovered that she suffers a malady common to the middleaged battle-axe: "low self-esteem...
...He is just another Republican amuck in politics...
...Clinton is more of a late-twentieth-century type, the type described by Alan Ehrenhalt in his insightful book The United States of Ambition...
...He is speaking of American history's longest period of peacetime growth...
...The Republican Bush mentioned no one other than FDR...
...Our noble causes get weirder all the time...
...Precisely how their triumph over four thousand years of Male Tyranny came about I cannot say...
...And they have to be torn down so we can "provide" something or other for the "inner child" who is actually a "crucial core...
...Miss Steinem has been at war with normal life for more than two decades, much as a brat teenager is at war with normal life for, perhaps, half a decade...
...But do not expect her to quiet down...
...Yet we really cannot appreciate the best unless...
...And at the end of the day, with monuments to the feminist revolution being raised all around her, Miss Steinem makes the surprising confession that she has had an image problem...
...As Joe Klein has written in a revealing piece in New York magazine, "Clinton tends to describe rather than to take stands...
...Clinton is from the slick left, and open to everything...
...Think also of Ronald Reagan, who seems to have learned endless cheerful denial as the child of an alcoholic father: or George Bush, whose biographers describe a well-to-do childhood with an aristocratic, religious father who used a belt for discipline, controlled every aspect of family life, and insisted his sons compete, win, and become leaders, whether they wanted to or not...
...They live in a political fantasy...
...Then, to her surprise, she fell irresistibly headover-heels in love with another woman...
...beyond equal pay for equal work...
...American politics has hosted the glassy-eyed before—think of William Jennings Bryan—but never in such numbers and never so close to the throne...
...She was beginning to understand the soul-killing depth of male dominance and could no longer imagine living with a man...
...The feminists have, as they are wont to say, "had it all...
...Rather, we have all these creatures of fantasy, many wanting to be President...
...Feminists and their lawyers have brought their message into practically every area of American life...
...Frankly, such' a banal diagnosis from one who has been so full of brag and bounce and pontification for so long is something of a disappointment...
...Though she had been warned that this process could release old toxins stored in the muscles, she had such strong responses of nausea and light-headedness that she wondered if all her childhood pain might be stored there...
...Narcissism emboldens the fantasies of a lot of these political lightweights, but why is narcissism so plentiful at the end of this century...
...But she has contributed mightily to a great revolution, the main target of which has been the family...
...beyond a seat on the garbage truck...
...Emerging from the equally delusory world of 1960s campus activism, Clinton too believes he can be President, though his reckless lifestyle has always made this project doubtful...
...Americans pursue excellence, and these awards solemnize the best...
...For full text, see the "Gloria Steinem Reader" excerpted onpage 16...
...Clinton has been obsessed with being a political leader since his youth...
...If there were ever any notable Republicans who figured in past Republican revivals of...
...Death Wish If you learn a tenth as much from this book as I have, I'll be a happy writer...
...At any rate, here we are...
...This year, Gloria Steinem's Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Little Brown, $22.95) has captured both Coogler Awards-for fiction and nonfiction...
...Pat practices a politics of exclusion...
...And today they can...
...Republican politicians never remind the electorate of past Republican services...
...This is what Pat Buchanan and Bill Clinton have in common...
...whose police state normalized his own earliest years of living in one room with nine siblings and an alcoholic, sadist father...
...Of these two fantasists, Pat is unique in that he has only recently gotten the presidential bug...
...apocalyptic than any ever uttered by Marx or Jesus or Leo Buscaglia...
Vol. 25 • April 1992 • No. 4
