Euhemerism: The Chicken, the Egg, and the Eagle
Nathan, George
EUHEMERISM: THE CHICKEN, THE EGG AND THE EAGLE by George Nathan The new left's "meaningful dialogue" must delight the most dour of civilized men. Only an intellectual tortoise would be slow to...
...When sds' (students for a demagogic society) country club expatriots decided at the highest level to incinerate "the Establishment" it was, for Americans, the grandest day since the removal of eleanor roosevelt's braces (or franklin's for that matter)- For over thirty years denatured theocrats disguised as liberals, under the rubric of new deal, fair deal, no deal, new frontier, and grate society, have evangelized banality, federally endowed condescension, and even now preach the most preposterous cures for laziness...
...Followed by the resounding chuckles of all civilized men...
...Our Stone Age antagonists from Siberia shanghai a military transport plane and when they benignly return it the nation erupts in giddy jubilation...
...When Eliot declared: This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper he was metaphorically imprecise...
...Albeit, Morocco has ever since borne America the most menacing enmity...
...Unfortunately, whereas La Blavatsky's religious dipsomaniacs possessed an eerie allure, America's theocrats have wrought the most baneful effects...
...Washington Star Syndicate, Inc...
...Kirk's ankle-deep carpet and, at Andrew Carnegie's west coast kindergarten, (here Dr...
...For while Perdicaris amiably chomped figs with his hill ape captor, Roosevelt, eschewing ransom, sent to Tangier the coyly worded message "We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead...
...One need not be an ornithologist to perceive ineluctable differences between the soaring eagle and a strutting, clucking chicken, but then one also encounters distressingly unavoidable differences between the presidential activity of a Teddy Roosevelt, an Andy Jackson, a Millie Fillmore, and that of Lynnie Johnson, our lame chicken president...
...Only an intellectual tortoise would be slow to apprehend the adventitious merriment of those cretins who, to the solecistic refrain of "Burn, baby, burn" and "Up against the wall, Oedipus," urinated in Dr...
...And now comes the denouncement, for in theological seminaries like Columbia, their hokum besotted pupils are exposing the theocrat's absurdity by joining sds' thalidomide intellectuals in celebration of a black mass...
...The State Department cannot even establish diplomatic relations with an all night hamburger stand within the shadow of the White House...
...they have reincarnated the prophets of old, who, after decompressing in the Ivy League, roam the halls of government awaiting opportunities to attend a movie with Jacqueline Kennedy...
...Connoisseurs of sophisticated quackery refer to America's fourth-rate religious fanatics as Establishment Liberals, and the world has not countenanced such frauds since Helena Petrovana Blavatsky (1831-1891) founded the Theosophical Society...
...Washington's religious fanatics have entreated the archangels to abandon their empyreal shelters to take employment in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...All this chaos exists, we hear, because thirty years of nonsense was not enough nonsense, we need thirty more — "To extinguish this fire we shall need another bucket of oil...
...In 1904, when a tattered chieftain, Raisuli from the emerging oasis of Morocco, kidnapped a senescent lecher and only occasional American, Perdicaris, Teddy Roosevelt acted with a directness that, if practiced by a contemporary president would drive the editors of the New York Times to an unfamiliar scramble to their prayer cellars...
...The American uniform serves as a defenseless bullseye for National Liberation Fronts from Hanoi to New York...
...For spiritual warrant they rely on non-producers and for sustenance they enforce collections from wealthy heretics, unorthodox enough to create something other than needs...
...In America, as divinity has seeped out of religion it has oozed into politics...
...Astonishingly, in spite of slow communications, tricky diplomatic protocol, a hazardous cultural gulf, and neuralgic international tension, the crafty Raisuli released Perdicaris immediately...
...In luminaries like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...
...For alas, they have achieved power and changed the American eagle to a chicken whose eggs bear a ghastly creature possessing brains and beauty comparable to the pterodactyl of the Mesozoic Era — to wit, the egg hatcheth concerned pupils, aware pupils, sophisticated pupils, sensitive pupils, gooey pupils, non-pupils, or, the most impudent lame brains since Leopold and Loeb...
...Nathan subtley refers to Stanford University) incarnated "Black Board Jungle...
...Such a response would appear alarmingly out of cadence with contemporary diplomacy when a primitive, bifurcated, hermit kingdom arrogantly pirates our boat and we negotiate- Pajama-clad teenagers defy and humiliate our handicapped armies and we negotiate to negotiate...
...Our world shall end with a cluck . . . and many disarranged feathers...
...And meanwhile on the hem of riots, behind cyclone fences and amongst a thicket of Secret Service men, the embattled parties nominate fourth-rate candidates little more capable of governing a nation than the decadent mortician presiding over Britain...
...Their divinely inspired electorate has chosen President no less than five manifestations of the Holy Gost...
Vol. 2 • September 1968 • No. 1
