Editorials / Senator Deadwood/Mascot Studies
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Senator Deadwood by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. S enator Bob Packwood, the Wall Street Journal tells us, leads "a double life." He is one of the most powerful senators in this great city. His influence...
...Other disturbers are viewed less favorably...
...71 objected—because it was too white, or too male, or too violent or scared little children...
...Spirituality...
...The chief business of a university is supposed to embrace study and, among select professors, research...
...They were really indignant, as these colossi usually are...
...Senator Packwood has, of course, apologized for his past...
...Today the country is at the mercy of these disturbed people, and actually raises many to lifelong prominence...
...On the historic night that President Bill Clinton delivered his health-care speech to Congress, Senator Packwood was a focus of awe, owing to his powerful position on the Senate Finance Committee...
...Think of Jesse Jackson or Ralph Nader...
...After all, in their lives words T he American university is not a happy place...
...Both profs and students live in fear of the thought patrols...
...The activists believe that Senator Packwood will be revealed as a cad and—who knows—perhaps worse...
...Soon salacious language was the mark of an enlightened mind...
...His problem is that he took his liberal cohorts at their word...
...Learning is subordinated to reform...
...If by accident the malcontent had come upon a legitimate grievance, fine—the Republic initiated a reform and passed on...
...In art—or what passes for art—the notion of obscenity was hooted at...
...It was Therapy...
...Women's issues have been a specialty with him, but also the whole Good Government agenda...
...Is there any legitimate reform associated with Jackson's name that Martin Luther King did not set in motion years before...
...In the case of sex, the liberals applauded its spread...
...There is today on campus—and for that matter throughout much of American life—an innocent assumption that any protester must have a point...
...Soon we should hear whether his colleagues intend to hold public hearings...
...I do, too, but for a different reason...
...American public figures are very good at public apologies...
...Well, if we have seen it once we have seen it twice, and once was enough: the revolution devours its children...
...And Very Embarrassing...
...Actually many of the young people are quite grim...
...That one value is disturbing their neighbors...
...More than two dozen women from the senator's past have complained that they were the recipients of unwanted attention from him...
...We have quite forgotten that familiar figure of the past, the malcontent...
...Consider this...
...Nader may have done slightly better for the commonweal, but surely a review of his decades of gripes reveals little that has been constructive...
...For one thing it tells us that protest and demonstration have become major themes of American life...
...And theirs was not a joyous bon voyage...
...He has spent two days testifying in private before the Senate ethics committee where, doubtless, more words were wasted...
...The liberal activists have placed other matters on their agenda and one is Senator Packwood's head...
...Well, Senator Packwood, consistency has not been a liberal value for a long time...
...Self-Awareness...
...There is no more government-sanctioned segregation, though some minority members wish to segregate themselves...
...They were admirers of the free-speech movement...
...University officials had spent two years and $20,000 to develop it, but according to the university's sports information director, "he (the Norseman) was—I hate to use the word—too Aryan—some peoplemean so little...
...That is what "liberal activists" want...
...The right-of-center American Conservative Union accords him a lowly rating of 33...
...Then we have the controversy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst...
...I believe the activists will be revealed as public nuisances and a threat to the very liberal tradition they claim to espouse...
...And the entire institution is at the mercy of malcontents and quacks...
...There are hundreds ofsimilar controversies rumbling through American universities today, and all are taken with the utmost seriousness...
...America's liberal tradition was of value when it was under the stewardship of liberals...
...They might also object that the mascot is treasonous, anti-monarch, and anti-British, for the shocking mascot is the Minuteman, the colonial militiaman standing ready to resist the Redcoats at a minute's notice...
...Senator Packwood in his long career has been a paragon of liberal Republicanism...
...They would all be better off guzzling beer and cheering the local mud wrestlers...
...And the progressive Americans for Democratic Action smiles on him with a 60...
...Sex for many liberals was until recently the highest form of recreation—even higher than chess...
...Worse, these grumblers have inspired thousands of common malcontents to take up a noble cause...
...At our universities, neither professors nor administrators apparently possess the discernment to distinguish between a harmless mascot and, say, a flaming cross on a hill...
...Senator Packwood was among the many celebrants, but times have changed...
...There are no controversial wars...
...Past generations recognized these odious cranks when they commenced to bawl and took them cum gran salis...
...Now it is Brutality...
...That it is being led by "liberal activists" over at the Stewart Mott House should surprise no one...
...Up until a few years ago a majortheme of the forward-lookers was sexual liberation, or at least a relaxation of America's squeamishness toward sex...
...and so now many vicarious Martin Luther Kings and Eleanor Roosevelts lust for their moment in history...
...It is the essence of art and maturity—so long as the disturber is a liberal...
...Mascot Studies...
...Today the revolution is over, at least for heterosexuals, and the reaction has set in...
...Yet back home in progressive Oregon he travels by night to avoid the forces of moral and political uplift...
...social issues, and he was a champion of legalized abortion back in the days when abortion was thought to be the work of Lucifer...
...His influence on health care and the North American free-trade pact is vast...
...There the Politically Correct have insisted that the school's mascot is "racist, sexist, and promoted violence...
...Vexed debate over the campus mascot is but one of the unhappy consequences...
...But the role model of the protester and reformer have gained eminence in American legend...
...Well, at some point in the 1970s we got all three, and many Americans celebrated the sexual revolution with gusto...
...That is for the good...
...He has been ardent on all the Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the Politically Correct succeeded in banishing that school's mascot, too...
...Yet a few blocks away, over at the Stewart Mott House, which is owned by "the wealthy liberal activist," other liberal activists gathered wearing "Goodbye Bob" buttons...
...The complaints of some of these women come from many years ago...
...They have filled their campuses with intellectually lazy people who are bored by books and always ready for some soul-searching debate or gaudy march...
...Even in Washington he is scorned by those moral and intellectual colossi...
...To disturb is to educate...
...What does it tell us...
...In this century there is no noble cause or liberal value that liberals have not gladly reversed themselves on, except for one...
...Now the senator's progressive past is screaming at him and flaunting those sour buttons...
...It is supposed to be an incubator of higher learning, abundant with frisky young people and cultured profs...
...Nowadays, these pursuits are frequently disrupted by the ongoing campaigns of so-called feminists and other axe-grinders...
...He should have recognized that Americans are not Europeans, or at least he should have had the good sense to have been a homosexual...
...Senator Packwood shared their hopes for, say, the Swedish approach to sexuality or maybe the Italian or perhaps the French...
...but their indignation was directed at the kindly and progressive Bob...
...We have been through our sexual revolution, personal liberations, and the drug experience, most of which came out unhappily...
...He was for many years a Great Hope against Goldwaterism, Nixonism, and Reaganism...
...At Auburn University, the Politically Correct have waged a campaign to replace the school's "Senator" mascot, because it struck the moron element as racist and sexist and resembled to them—a "white plantation owner...
...In the days of the sexual revolution they would have been ignored or snickered at...
...Truth be known, most of the old injustices are defunct...
...Ignominy...
...It was a distinctly comic Norseman, but again the morons triumphed, objecting that the Norseman was "too masculine to represent female students...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
