Fools' Names, Fools' Faces
Ferguson, Andrew
Books In Review - "Fools' Names, Fools' Faces" than proved. Two decades ago the developed parts of Asia (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea) all took overpopulation very seriously and some resorted to brutal measures to suppress it. So what do they...
...The graying of Asia...
...Etc...
...Box 549 Arlington, VA 22216-0549 P9610 The American Spectator • October 199 6 69 about himself...
...Bennett's literary tonics, The Book 4 He does not spareconservatives if theydisplay what he regardsas an unforgivable sin:unseemliness...
...On the contrary, he trashes Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, and Bill Bennett (not Bob Dole, however...
...The biggest fools are those who do the most talking, closely followed by those who lack the brains to realize that the talkers aren't saying anything...
...70 Though we talked mainly about baseball, Williams was also interested in the federal budget debate...
...the button-down squares whose hackles should have been raised, had been doing precisely the same thing for years...
...Ferguson the Un-Alchemist returns them to their original states of dross and paste, beginning with Bill Moyers, "an Elmer Gantry for the New Age...
...No state-of-the-art this or that, no devils in the details, no rocketscientist analogies, no Yogi Berra-isnms, no calls for "more education," and no interminable quotations from punditry's favorite pony, Alexis de'Ibcqueville...
...Now Ferguson's analysis takes on an eerie prescience: "Moyers has left behind a seamy past to take to the airwaves, where he tells tall tales to the gullible, appropriating their confusions, only to administer a salve of undemanding reassurance...
...Polar Politics and the Sensible Center Richard Darman Simon & Schuster /384 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Fred Barnes...
...to justify the tax hike he favored but that destroyed Bush's re-election prospects...
...To Democrats he is a Henry Wallace for the 199o's...
...Soon Phil Gramm calls and, Darman writes, even he "knew that with Democratic control of Congress there might have to be a concession on taxes down the road...
...Campfires have loomed large in Moyers's life since he took up spiritualism and pop psychology in his six part omnium tedium, "The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers...
...In this way we learn about the cheap office buildings of Tehran, the leaky toilets of Karachi, the Intourist Hotel in Bukhara, all somehow freighted with significance and all taken as dark omens of an even darker future...
...taxes to get the deficit down...
...The anachronistic word suits the Lord Chesterfield streak underlying Ferguson's easygoing, puckish nature-a duality as interesting as it is rare, and the likely source of the psychological tension that makes his style so rigorous...
...He envisions yet more budget deals to wipe out the deficit and allow "creative" government policymaking to resume...
...Unlike syndicated columnists, he does not write three times a week...
...SIZES: X-Large, Large or Medium --------------Please send the following: Medium t-shirt $ Large t-shirt $ X-Large t-shirt $ Shipping $ Total enclosed $ • Check enclosed 0 Please charge my: El VISA U MasterCard Lt American Express Card #: Expiration Date: Signature: (Please print) Name: Address: City: State: Zip: *Residents of VA, please add applicable sales tax...
...Fools' Names, Fools' Faces is that kind of book...
...The surest clue is an excess of praise...
...But that is of small comfort to Australians, who have seen their standard of Iiving decline from number one in the world at the turn of the century to tenth place in 1970 to eighteenth and still dropping today...
...So Darman, a bit obsessively, broaches the subject of taxes...
...1~ o f Virtues and The Devaluing o f America, have a truth-in-labeling problem that is obvious to anyone who knows how to spot a ghost job: One of the few pleasures of reading such books comes from the acknowledgments, in which, shoved up among the encomiums to wife, kids, typists, and high-school track coaches, the name of the book's true author is slyly revealed...
...Darman seems to think Williams was right, too...
...He does not spare conservatives if they display what he regards as an unforgivable sin: unseemliness...
...Indeed, everyone Darman talks to knows this: Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, then-House Republican leader Bob Michel, Drew Lewis and Bob Strauss of the National Economic Commission...
...I outlined the budget dilemma to him, and asked for his reaction...
...He's a centrist who's comfortable with the Washington establishment, what he calls "the system...
...At this writing, that five-year total-half a trillion 1990 dollars -is still the largest [deficit savings program] ever...
...the bland Nineties are "a zeit with no geist...
...Martin's...
...And so on...
...Darman accepts some but by no means all of the blame for Bush's defeat in 1992...
...In fact, if Bush had taken it and boldly declared taxes had to go up, he might have fared better politically than he actually did by acceding a year later to the Democratic demands for a tax increase as part of any budget deal...
...Grace notes like these usually don't come to...
...It comes from former Presidents Ford and Carter...
...Over the years, I have come to respect and rely on him in many ways, but this was never more so than when I embarked full-time on this enterprise...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...The soft-spoken PBS producer-host-ego of Bill Moyers'America has gone from being LBJ's henchman to being "concerned," the preferred condition of the furrowedbrow set he now commands, who nod solemnly over his runny pieties about "an ethic of cooperation," "a renewal of community," and "the conversation of democracy" around "the national campfire...
...But that was five years ago, before Bill Clinton became a Bill Clinton for all time...
...Like most Harvard intellectuals, Darman is in awe of Williams, the Splendid Splinter of the Boston Red Sox...
...T-shirts are white, 100 percentcotton, with maroon TAS logoand the famous TAS turkeyon the sleeve...
...It proves Ferguson's point that Beltway ethicists were offended when Hillary Rodham Clinton did not even bother to sneak the name of her own ghost into the acknowledgments of It Takes a Village, thereby giving dishonesty a bad name...
...A strong conservative, Williams had no favorable inclination toward either big government or taxes...
...Thirty minutes after his appointment as President Bush's budget director, Richard Darman hears the first plea for Bush to jettison his no-new-taxes pledge...
...He wishes Colin Powell had run for president...
...Ditto for resources, which Bob takes to be scarce...
...That the most conservative members of society, the business community, are themselves seasoned veterans of soulsearching workshops, explains why Clinton has gotten away with his emotionwracked, hysteria-prone presidency...
...And that is the point of Darman's tendentious though riveting book-to make the case that he was right at the time about raising taxes, and still is...
...T]he white-male power structure of late-twentieth-century America [is] the first to pay people to dismantle itself...
...After reflecting a bit, he volunteered, "People would understand if the President just stepped forward, right out on the front porch, and said he'd have to raise October 19 9 6 • The American Spectator...
...Darman doesn't argue that the 1990 budget agreement was creative, only that it worked...
...Williams, now 71, turns out to be an avid follower of the debate in Washington on politics and policy...
...In spring 1989, Darman attends a Baltimore Orioles baseball game with Bush, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and baseball great Ted Williams...
...Bill Bennett is unseemly because the virtue-oil salesman "has become a brand name...
...No, I laughed at the lengths Darman is willing to go in Who's in Control...
...Just using that phrase suggests he wouldn't know a resource if it jumped up and bit him...
...MAIL PAYMENT AND COUPON TO: At11eI1C8~pC&*T PO...
...On page 15 of Devaluing we read: "A very special debt of gratitude is owed to Peter Wehner...
...His account of his talk-show appearance with Gennifer Flowers initially makes the reader expect some sort of ultimate pronouncement on the character of Bill Clinton, but instead lie suddenly makes us privy to an off-air exchange between Flowers and himself: "I'll tell you," she hissed, "whoever said the truth will set you free was full of s...
...The sweat pours from you, and your shirt sticks to your body...
...This is where I had to mop up coffee, REVIEWED B Y A Florence King...
...Indeed, Japan is graying faster than Europe did, and China is hot on its heels...
...Andrew Ferguson His attention to craftsmanship also proIntroduction by P .J...
...The pressure gets worse, far worse, incomparably worse, by-another-order-ofmagnitude worse...
...at another point he blithely declares that crop yields have already reached their "attainable limit...
...Early in his book, in Danane in the Ivory Coast, Bob explains his methodology, which is to forsake the air-conditioned comfort of a car for a stroll around town...
...The one he attended was packed with corporate types listening to windy speeches about "Unleashing the Power of Your Workforce by Managing Diversity," and obediently chanting after their facilitators, "I accept the `onion theory' that I will continue to peel away layers of my own racism for the rest of my life...
...The spectacle of latter-day Babbitts on expense-account guilt trips activated Ferguson's "what's wrong with this picture...
...His attitude seemed to be if you've really got to do it, just explain yourself directly, and do it...
...I talk on the phone, therefore I am," is the raison d'etre of "yuppies with portable phones attached to their ears, stopping traffic, tripping over hydrants, bumping into lampposts...
...FRED BARNES is executive editor of the Weekly Standard...
...What this means is that the future will see fewer workers on the bottom supporting more elderly at the top, with awesome implications for growth and taxes...
...Celebrity interviews tell us little about the celebrity because the interviewer talks This election year...SHOW WHOSESIDE YOU'RE ONwith a TAS t-shirt...
...mong the noteworthy qualities of Andrew Ferguson's writing is its AR freedom from cliches, bromides, and lazy phrasing...
...Of course, there's no way for budget wonks to know what "otherwise" might have been, absent the Darman-negotiated budget deal...
...test of conservative values...
...By that definition Australia would be the wealthiest country in the world (as indeed the World Bank found, using that measure...
...Barbra Streisand's signature song is "People Who Read People...
...The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the deficit was "almost $50o billion less than it otherwise would have been," according to Darman...
...Imagine the pressure...
...This is because Ferguson is a writer who makes haste slowly...
...He followed this with "A Gathering of Men," in which he went hunting for his lost manhood with the founder of the male mythopoetic movement, Robert Bly, "a plump poet from Minnesota who serenades men's seminars with an untuned lyre...
...This collection of thirty-two previously published columns and essays is rich with those distinctive freshets of prose that I have come to think of as "Andyisms": former NOW president Molly Yard is "the Mammy Yokurn of the choice people...
...Then former President Nixon faxes a note arguing that if Bush's "flexible freeze" is a nonstarter, the only other option is a tax hike...
...America is hooked on talking cures, Ferguson believes, because our Protestant heritage deprived us of the sacrament of Confession...
...This is how you learn...
...I laughed out loud when I read this, but not because Williams's advice was absurd...
...Add $1.00 S&H for each additional shirt...
...I think that was Jesus," he replied...
...But, like most Americans, he wanted a balanced budget...
...Darman is honest about his own views...
...With Clinton thinking aloud, Newt Gingrich explaining what the Tof ers meant, and everyone trying to define "self-esteem," merry cynics like Ferguson are tempted to conclude that the examined life is not worth living...
...Getting away with this, and thinking nothing of it, is part of what it means to be a brand name...
...most of the time he doesn't even write once a week...
...Ferguson's America is bent double with a massive attack of logorrhea...
...FLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...A refusal to suffer fools has been the defining trait of satirists since Juvenal, but pre-millennium America has added a new wrinkle: our biggest fools are the people called "national treasures...
...In short, Bob thinks resources are purely physical, like gold or copper or fertile soil...
...Who's In Control...
...Be forewarned: reading Ferguson at the table can he fatal, or at least messy...
...Price: $15.95* + $3.50 shipping & handling...
...The reason is that in today's economy, in which even the simplest of products has a complicated process behind it (offshore production, multinational components, increasingly sophisticated design), the value comes less and less from the physical inputs than from the overall process (design, production, shipping, marketing) and how these factors are put together...
...He writes when he writes, i.e., when he has something to say and is ready to say it, for opinion journals such as TAS, the New Republic, National Review (where he was my roommate, so to speak, on the back page we alternated), Forbes MediaCritic, and, most recently, the Weekly Standard, where he is a senior editor...
...So what do they worry about today...
...What...
...68 October 19 9 6 • The American Spectator clear my windpipe of donut crumbs, and change my T-shirt...
...Darman doesn't try...
...He didn't want the President to have to break his pledge...
...Now, the truly Darmanesque tack would have been to get on the good side of the more conservative Republicans who took over Congress in 1994 and dominate the party...
...i The Un-Alchemist: Suffering Fools Deliciously a writer the first time around, but emerge Fools' Names, Fools' Faces in the fine-tuning of a second or third draft...
...In that case the diversity workshop is our counter-reformation...
...Not always, Bob, not always...
...What of the hope, long cherished by the usual suspects, that Moyers will run for president...
...Indeed, there is something Clintonesque about Bob's whole project, which involves not so much testing theory against reality as providing the color to one of Professor Homer-Dixon's many theses...
...His answer is bleak: "The revolution proceeds without a shot being fired, with scarcely a peep of protest...
...Doubtful, said Ferguson in this 1991 profile...
...Frankly, I expect Richard Dannan's Bi e f romDararman an st ed s slightly yo ,who w as deputy chief of staff in the Reagan White House and Hit Strikes Out deputy treasury secretary in Reagan's sec ond term before heading the Office of Management and Budget under Bush...
...O'Rourke duces zany anecdotes of such invisible Atlantic Monthly Press 1213 pages 1$22 construction and perfect timing that we aren't always prepared for the punchline...
...And on page 16 of Virtues we read: "As to John Cribb, I cannot thank him enough for his efforts to make this book a reality...
Vol. 29 • October 1996 • No. 10
