Editorials / The Worst Book of the Year / You Can't Look It Up
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
A las, the citizenry of this great Republic has arrived at that cloying season when its eminences in the arts and communications display the full hugeness of their self-love. It is "awards time";...
...hold your stomach...
...The Grammy awards are equally meretricious, and the awards for the arts and journalism are the worst...
...She is Madonna...
...All this and more must be assembled, and still sexual climax is not assured before one tosses one's cookies...
...These are the sentiments of a stupid man and a polluted source...
...Think of President Clinton's insistence that pork-barrel is "investment...
...I despise Ronald Reagan...
...At the Oscar orgies, Hollywood insiders rave over the heroism, artistry, and simple humanity of other Hollywood insiders, who happen to be rogues, mediocrities, and people one would not trust to walk the dog...
...In the Kultursmog, the left often denies it is left and categorizes the word a cruel slur...
...This he has yet to do...
...And Pulitzers have been given to journalists who have made preposterous claims, for instance, Janet Cooke in Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Imaginative as our publishers and authors are, none has ever figured out how to exploit a Coogler, though this year's winner may...
...nor indeed has anyone else...
...The problem with these awards is that they are all so useful...
...Jimmy Carter is credited with six sonorities, George Bush with four, and there are twenty-eight attributed to both FDR and JFK, though President Kennedy died in his first term...
...For instance, even to call the left "left" is tricky...
...In our culture, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is the most popular reference book for preserving a public figure's oratory...
...They are a source of riches and influence...
...1981...
...Groups of unattractive people have to be invited over...
...Gorbachev, open this gate...
...He left it to me to look at the pictures...
...The explanation resides in the unhappy fact that America's political culture is thoroughly polluted with the partisan ideas and bugaboos of America's infantile left...
...Pulitzers have been given to books that were ghostwritten, for instance John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage...
...From all I can tell from them and from the paragraph or two of infantile prose that I could bear to read, sex, as postulated by Madonna, is not very pleasant stuff...
...She is a lady who has made much from little...
...Alliances are entered...
...That is precisely how the Kultursmog is preserving him for partisan reasons...
...There is no economic theory to support this plan...
...Moreover, that which is true of journalism's so-called "ethical standards" is true of the so-called "standards of excellence" in the arts and communications—there are none...
...Goering's memory, but sex with Madonna is not fun...
...Actually, as even the Democrats and the Republicans now recognize, the economy was then growing at 4.8 percent, its friskiest rate since the fourth quarter of 1987...
...In reviewing it, the indefatigable Professor Kenneth Lynn discovered that Wills's present praise for Lincoln is "at odds with the preface to Wills's controversial study of the Declaration of Independence, Inventing America (1978), into which he packed an explosive 10-page assault on the author of the Gettysburg Address...
...Reciprocal award arrangements are quietly agreed upon...
...Usually, in the past, the Coogler Prize Committee (composed of such distinguished litterateurs as the Washington Times's Wes Pruden and Commentary's Norman Podhoretz) has given Cooglers in two categories, fiction and non-fiction, but this book is so ambitious in scope—at once a sex manual, at once a series of prurient tales—and so bad that it wins in both categories...
...There are the politicians themselves, some of whom are very creative in polluting our discourse...
...It is Kultursmog, in which even words are tainted with false connotations and rendered unreliable vehicles of meaning...
...The J. Gordon Coogler Award is conferred upon the year's worst books...
...In fact, no Coogler laureate has ever even attended the charming and highly dignified ceremony, now held here in our nation's capital...
...Hence, vast lobbying efforts go into acquiring them...
...Perhaps now Mr...
...InStead readers will find in the polluted pages of Bartlett's Ronald Reagan sounding like Harding or Coolidge...
...Gorbachev, tear down this wall...
...Consider this: Last fall the Democrats and their noble presidential aspirant were telling us the American economy was in recession...
...Adam Meyerson, the distinguished editor of Policy Review, has recently demonstrated how the Kultursmog is manufactured and spread...
...Wills is a writer whose work is riddled with sophistry and contradiction...
...It is a view of sex once propounded by the now deceased Nazi air marshal Hermann Goering...
...The sources contributing to the Kultursmog's vast clouds of stupidityare various...
...Nor will Bartlett's preserve Reagan's ability to summon his wit even with a bullet in his chest...
...In this instance the Pulitzer Committee did yank the award when the story was exposed, but it then gave it to another story that also turned out to be faked...
...Apparatuses not readily available in the home, the back seat of the car, or in a lovely outdoor setting have to be requisitioned...
...Many Republicans seemed ruefully to agree...
...But more important than the politicians are the other sources of culture: books, university faculties, the media...
...The intellectual and political atmosphere in which we speak is beset with a thick smog of left politics...
...Researchers will have to look elsewhere for his 1981 prediction of Communism's demise as a "bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written...
...Ordinary Americans might never encounter Reagan's later predictions of Communism's collapse, his brave justification of force on Normandy Beach in 1984, or his 1987 plea in Berlin: "Mr...
...Wills is older and wiser, but in a world of serious "standards," he would have acknowledged and explained this contradiction...
...In fact, it comes off as nothing so much as hard work...
...I mean no offense to Mr...
...Honey, I forgot to duck...
...Ronald Reagan was an extremely effective orator...
...Yet, readers searching for memorable quotations from Ronald Reagan's three decades of public life and eight years in the presidency will find in the new edition of Bartlett's just three, the same number as for Zachary Taylor and Gerald Ford...
...Or, consider this: President Clinton is now telling us that this growth will be enhanced by an increase in government spending and that tax increases—he vows—will add to economic growth (though never in history have they...
...CI H ow does one explain the gloomy grey clouds of stupidity that hang over Washington...
...They are badly done, garish, hampered by faulty composition, and frequently not up to the standards of Hustler...
...A" pats "B" on the back, and "B" pats "A...
...And economic history suggests President Clinton will return America to the miseries of low economic growth and high inflation that wrecked the economy in the 1970s...
...As my colleague on the Coogler Prize Committee, John O'Sullivan, editor of National Review, summed up: "I have not read this book...
...For instance, Iran-contra—an arms-for-hostages stratagem not wholly dissimilar to one attempted in 1980 by President Carter—is held to be shocking and President Ronald Reagan, the most successful president since Franklin Roosevelt, is passed off as a dope...
...Forgotten, too, will be his many eloquent renderings of America's role in history and government's role in America...
...CI...
...I know it is a bad book on the same principle that I know Australia exists: responsible and intelligent people tell me so...
...No one lobbies for it or shows up at the awards ceremony to blubber and brag...
...Her book, Sex, was only modestly successful at the bookstores, but do not be surprised if she takes her Coogler and turns it into an avenue to literary influence and still greater wealth...
...Just four years ago America was flush, experiencing its longest period of peacetime growth as a consequence of slowed government expansion and lower marginal tax rates...
...Pulitzer Prizes have been given to authors who are proven plagiarists and humbugs, for instance, Alex Haley, whose 1977 Pulitzer for Roots was never withdrawn, even after Haley was forced in 1978 to make a $650,000 out-of-court settlement on charges he had lifted some eighty passages from Harold Courlander's slave novel, The African, and after later evidence revealed that he simply fabricated much of his family's genealogy...
...Today the only literary award of genuine worth and integrity is the J. Gordon Coogler Award...
...Moreover, all three are fatuous...
...But I have not even looked at the pictures...
...Equally symptomatic of the polluting effect of the Kultursmog by the left is the aura it confers on historic figures and events...
...Why is it that so much of what our politicians and public figures declaim as true is so frequently false and so quickly forgiven...
...As the editor of Bartlett's baldly declared to the Philadelphia Inquirer, "I am a Democrat...
...With Bartlett's preserving the oratory of Ronald Reagan, all his lines describing the momentous clash between Communism and the West will be forgotten...
...The Committee stuck by the second fake...
...Again, how do we explainsuch stupidity...
...Candidate Bill Clinton even spoke of "Depression...
...What intelligent reader actually believes that Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America is sucha meritorious essay into "criticism" as the National Book Critics Circle claimed the other day...
...From the sidelines conscientious economists said pishposh, but the campaigning politicos persisted...
Vol. 26 • May 1993 • No. 5
