Slouching Towards Gomorrah/Forbidden Knowledge
Shattuck, Roger & Bork, Robert H.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Slouching Towards Gomorrah/Forbidden Knowledge" and "What did you do?" into Polish are particularly egregious), it is an honest, earnest, and sympathetic portrait of a group of Americans who, for the past three decades, have been mocked as racist...
...by the end of the century, often do not regard this country as their own...
...I feel that liberals can't just disparage the conservative movement by saying, 'It's because they're all racists, or they're greedy,— Freedman recently told Publishers Weekly...
...As a distinguished jurist whose nomination to the Supreme Court was effectively opposed by the counterculture, Bork might be expected to have particular insight into the problem...
...Bork names the villain—"modern liberalism, a corrosive agent"—and traces our malaise to Enlightenment notions of DONALD LYONS is theater critic for the Wall Street Journal...
...More recently, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have treated Sade as, respectively, a guide to action and a value-neutral text...
...04 father ran a hardware store the actor always mentioned in interviews...
...pages / $24.95 inson's poetry and Madame de la Fayette's novel, La Princesse de Cleves...
...But neither should we glorify him...
...He doesn't say...
...Voluntary abstinence—setting limits for ourselves—is the other nostrum he vouchsafes...
...Such dicta are particularly unfortunate when directed against those who, like many Hispanics, make natural conservatives in their devotion to family, religion, and work...
...Stewart came from Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his Scottish Presbyterian MATTHEW SCULLY is a writer living in Virginia...
...That accordion, which someone had used as barter to settle a tab at Stewart Hardware, first led Stewart to the stage as a warm-up act for college plays...
...Like Bork, however, Shattuck can come up with nothing better than warning labels, saying "we should label his [Sade's] writings carefully: potential poison, polluting to our moral and intellectual environment...
...It would have been even nicer had liberals like Freedman spoken up a bit sooner, but when you're busily building the Great Society, it's easy to lose sight of ordinary people's troubles...
...In the end the book amounts merely to a cheerless demand for universal cultural resistance —a counsel of despair both excessive and unusable.44 Shattuck's fine book is like Bork's—more convincing in diagnosis than in prescriptive remedy...
...Bork trots out the usual suspects to build his case, from rap lyrics and Calvin Klein ads to affirmative action and euthanasia, postmodernism, unchecked immigration, and the painful absurdities of PC in schools and workplaces...
...In some circumstances the path of abstinence may be fully responsible and life-affirming," he ventures, in accents whose tentativeness suggests he thinks he's going to shock his audience...
...1 In Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, literary critic and historian Roger Shattuck examines the concept of the forbidden, the off-limits, and the taboo in literature and in life...
...the center of the universe...
...But then I realized that what was central to my life was not just the store but the man who presided over it—my father...
...He also pinpoints (rather predictably) the 1960's as the time when this disease took hold...
...Indeed it is not, and it's nice of Freedman to say so...
...By promoting both radical egalitarianism and radical individualism, liberalism created a toxic mix of tyranny and anarchy...
...In this respect, Shat-tuck's fascinating book is like Bork's— more convincing in diagnosis than in prescriptive remedy...
...Today he is adored by Camille Paglia, consecrated as a classic in literary histories, and taught in colleges...
...A few Mexican flags waved in California demonstrations...
...As he readily admits, the courts will not uphold restrictive legislation because they share the values of the cultural elite...
...Not much for books, Stewart nevertheless ended up at 78 December 19 9 6 The American Spectator...
...Burn him...
...The man's writings, stupefyingly repetitious and mechanical, attempt to celebrate not sex but torture...
...Between the intensity of his preparations and that of his performance," Dewey writes, there still yawns the question of the specific contents of Stewart's resourcesNice Guys Finish First in the Hearts of Their Countrymen REVIEWED BY Matthew Scully eading Jimmy Stewart called to mind Edmund Morris, Reagan's iographer, who describes a heroic simplicity running through Reagan's life...
...Somehow the culture must reform and censor itself...
...The war in Vietnam...
...With the failure of these controls, "we are still groping for some kind of commonsense oversight...
...Rejecting the timid objection merely to their public funding, he boldly declares that filth by Mapplethorpe and Serrano "should not be shown in public, whoever pays for them...
...Bork is as well rigorously partisan: When one First Lady goes in for a vaguely sinister "politics of meaning," ;he is nailed by name...
...but, as Shattuck shows, such Sade readers as Ted Bundy and England's Moors murderers have been interested by the narratives—interested to the point of emulation...
...Bork throws about dogmatic thunderbolts...
...I could conceive of no human need that could not be satisfied in this store...
...About concrete remedies he remains evasive, as when he suggests that "lyrics, motion pictures, television, and printed material are candidates" for censoring...
...He worked in the store, sang in the choir, plotted travel adventures, and had a dog named Bounce whom the actor would still be reminiscing about 6o years later...
...Martin's Press /369 pages /$26.95 REVIEWED BY Donald Lyons Is American culture being polluted...
...Then came a series of what Stewart always described as "accidents," which took him first to a Cape Cod acting troupe that included Henry Fonda, then to Broadway, and then, in the summer of 1935, on to Hollywood...
...Religion, he thinks, is a Good Thing, and he laments its watering down by permissive liberalism...
...Shattuck has the noble confidence of an old-fashioned liberal in the power of reason and restraint to negotiate the surrounding darknesses...
...On the one hand the state tries to enforce equality of outcome in the public sphere...
...Once forbidden and virtually inaccessible, they have been championed by two generations of French intellectuals...
...It was a three-story structure full to the rafters with everything needed to build a house, hunt a deer, plant a garden and harvest it, repair a car, or make a scrapbook...
...And as a big fan of Douglas MacArthur, he is irked by the tendency of WWII GI's to make the general "the butt of countless jokes...
...Almost all the literary and philosophical discussions of Sade ...sponge away the depravity and the bloodiness of his narratives by considering only his ideas...
...He mentions John Paul II (twice) and the Christian Coalition (once) as signs that "religion is gaining strength...
...For this irreverent "egalitarianism" — which is really nothing less than the populist, demotic texture of American life itself—Bork feels an invincible distaste...
...No one has persuasively explained why the war was morally reprehensible or unjust in its brutality...
...Here in the States, Grove Press published Sade in the permissive 1960's as "one of our civilization's treasures...
...Conservatives will find his proposal self-evident and sensible — as far as it goes...
...Before long he's on to the right to bear arms: "Gun control proposals are nothing more than a modern liberal suggestion that government, which is unable to protect its citizens, make sure those citizens cannot defend themselves...
...But largely he remains content to hop from theme to theme — listing sermon topics like an old-fashioned treatise on homiletics—rather than engaging any issue deeply or with originality...
...But an incisive legal mind does not necessarily make for incisive cultural criticism, and Slouching Towards Gomorrah never gets beyond being a catalogue of symptoms, most of them already well documented elsewhere...
...By whom...
...What legal meaning should that "should" have...
...From there on out, Stewart's life was so normal and wholesome that Dewey strains to find the source of the actor's talent...
...And that's about all he has to say on the matter...
...He seems to assume that such emotional range could only have come from some inner turmoil...
...Such a claim—with its dismissive "nothing more than" — is doubtless as enjoyable to believers as it is repellent to the unconvinced...
...No, opines Shattuck, "for we should not deliberately destroy any human life or accomplishment...
...Stewart's life was much the same, a kind of anti-Hollywood fable: gifts not squandered, a career not wrecked by self-indulgence, wealth and fame not abused, a wife and children not abandoned...
...Some of what he has to say is well stated: "American culture is Eurocentric, and it must remain Eurocentric or collapse into meaninglessness...
...into Polish are particularly egregious), it is an honest, earnest, and sympathetic portrait of a group of Americans who, for the past three decades, have been mocked as racist know-nothings by their liberal "betters...
...The evidence for this extremely generalizing "often...
...What then to do...
...Donald Dewey avoids the cheap sentimentality that often attaches to Stewart, but he doesn't quite have what it takes to lift the 88year-old actor's story above the level of Boy's Life fare...
...Even after I grew up and moved away and saw larger sights, the store remained with me...
...Freedman continues to count himself a liberal, but he recognizes that working-and lower-middle-class Americans have had to bear a disproportionately large share of the costs of liberalism's often disastrous experiments in social engineerSlouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline Robert H. Bork Regan Books / 382 pages / $25 Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography Roger Shattuck St...
...With an eye on Canada and Bosnia, he claims that "no multiethnic society [such as we have become] has ever been peaceful Out of Self-Control: How Far We've Fallen 76 December 1996 • The American Spectator z 0 I except when constrained by external force...
...liberty and equality...
...He examines such writings as the Book of Genesis, Paradise Lost, the Odyssey, Faust, and Frankenstein, and such experimentations as sterilizations in the United States, Nazi labs, genetic research, and abortion (though this last is skirted around...
...He is sensitive to the injustices suffered by white males under current quotas, yet also writes this: "Hispanics, who will outnumber blacks in the U.S...
...That the virus of separatism will strike here is clear from the case of Louis Farrakhan, whose nationalism is unmentioned here...
...If he is silent about the mechanisms of censorship, he is apocalyptic about the racial and ethnic future...
...He was good-natured, cheerful, unassuming, and in most ways quite normal except for one mysterious thing inside that seemed to carry him along, with not much real planning, from boyhood on...
...Judge Robert Bork thinks so, and in the clumsily titled Slouching Towards Gomorrah, he looks at how we got from there—some earlier epoch of cultural health—to here...
...We rely," he writes, "on several interlocking institutions— familial, educational, civic, moral, and intellectual—to exercise some control over inexpungiThe American Spectator • December 1996 77 ble human selfishness and malevolence...
...It seemed, Stewart recalls, Princeton, his father's alma mater, in the early thirties— a time when a guy could become a hit at college parties by bringing along his accordion...
...What does Bork envisage as our external, stronger force...
...in the private, meanwhile, unchecked hedonism reigns supreme...
...And Shattuck, a scrupulous liberal gingerly eager to rehabilitate the idea of self-control, finds validation for abstinence in, surprisingly, Emily DickJames Stewart: A Biography Donald Dewey Turner /5n...
...But the author, best known for his brilliant studies of French avant-garde writers like Proust, Apollinaire, and Jarry, is at his best here on the strange case of the Marquis de Sade...
...In 1951 Camus denounced Sade, and Simone de Beauvoir undertook his defense, using Sade as a "symbol or analogue of [the] Stalinism [she was] not yet ready to renounce or reject...
...when another consults astrologers, the fact is mentioned but she is left nameless...
...That's not intellectually satisfying or historically accurate...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
