SALUTE TO PLAYBOY'S FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY
Nathan, George
A S A L U T E T O P L A Y B O Y ' S FIFTEENTH A N N I V E R S A R Y BY George Nathan Considering as evidence that Playboy receives widest audience from college pupils, what moron would...
...It is all a parodistic evocation of Jean Paul Sartre, Monsignor Eugene McCarthy or some other pop philosopher, nothing more...
...Playboy panders to things like Paul Newman, bishop pike and Richard Speck...
...Spouting the kind of rot which incites readers to seek careers with I B M , the Peace Corps and in higher education...
...In the extensive research requisite to this essay I read through fifteen years of Playboy...
...For clutched in the bony claw of Calvinism, hefner (like his N e w England predecessors) fancies sex as life's focal point...
...A S A L U T E T O P L A Y B O Y ' S FIFTEENTH A N N I V E R S A R Y BY George Nathan Considering as evidence that Playboy receives widest audience from college pupils, what moron would dare to adjudge American education a failure...
...Call him the Dorian Gray of American scribblers, cheers...
...In pursuing dr...
...Under roasting television lights the grease spilled from his hair, the putty peeled from his ulcerated jowls as he charged yoimg America, old America, all America to do-it at Carnegie Hall, do-it for the Nobel Prize, do-it by the Berlin Wall, do-it, do-it, do-it...
...Intending quite the opposite, the F P C has increased the price of natural gas by regulating the field price...
...hefner m y staff has, with a rare assiduity, collected a formidable mass of data including what appear as unpublished love letters to Brookfield's Zoo's oldest boa constrictor and an ingeniously gathered set of fingernail clippings...
...and I doubt more than a few have ever tried . . for in fact only the most witless primate could countenance such trash...
...Washington Star Syndicate, Inc...
...Call him a paisley hermaphrodite, affirmed and bravo...
...Sandwiched between Wagnerian advertisements, the rest of the magazine dragged on about the latest fashions for transvestites and featured an exciting interview with a remarkable fellow whose name eludes me...
...a >ie*uuMa4*e...
...W h o cares about Lord Fauntleroy's four dimensional bed...
...And his message is "share the guilt...
...In truth, any lunatic trusted with a pen will scribble more tolerable prose and loftier thoughts, although his editor, like Mr...
...Exercising a jargon almost sacerdotal in its pious pomp, he insists that we all swim in his moral cesspool...
...Recently the government passed harsher restrictions on transportation which inhibited industry from moving into rural areas bringing profitable activity to those empty hands...
...It all reminds me of m y colleague Nathan's thesis on the "Conspiracy of Stupidity...
...Agricultural price supports raise the price of food, making it costlier to fill those empty stomachs...
...I found her utterances difficult to believe and still feel someone spilled a bowl of cliches across the page...
...Rarely do they fail to bestir Page 8 one's humor...
...Anyone laboring under the heresy that sex and selfishness are private affairs would suffer the calaboose...
...That so many people read Playboy merely indicates that America's sub-humans reside beyond Monkey Island at the zoo and the city limits of new york...
...On and on Brozen goes, citing examples of the befuddled Feds' contribution to American poverty...
...And at the poor's behest would you not think they would close those valves...
...W h o creates poverty...
...Call him a deviate, affirmed...
...Yet to the knowledge of m y research staff no one has ever categorized him with precision...
...In the same issue William Slug Coffin might intone, "God's groovy, just like Ravi Shankar...
...Consider the bathos...
...I shall refrain from further elaboration on Playboy's trivia and errant obscenity, remembering The Alternative is a family magazine...
...hefner's fanaticism for things naughty issues from a sense of guilt more crushing than this N e w England nourishment to those empty stomachs and a sense of achievement to heal that despair...
...Playboy is not without praiseworthy ingredients — for instance, its jokes...
...Recently hefner's monthly playmutt was pictured running along a seashore dodging utility poles, leaping over rusted oil cans and debris while a frothing hound bounded after her...
...J. K. Galbraith will elucidate the most superficial twaddle on Vietnam, cardigan sweaters or some other area of especial expertise...
...hugh hefner...
...The twist is that 18th century Puritans draconically suppressed their interest in a prettily turned ankle, while this 20th century puritan ecclesiastically urges licentiousness, with the relentless callousness of a fanatic...
...These same restrictions increase travel costs, hindering the poor's immigration to regions with better paying jobs...
...His exhortations ring with the most brittle piety...
...It appeals to those who identify themselves with Casanova hefner but whose doctors will not allow them off the farm on weekends...
...It took m e three hours and forty-two minutes (excluding runs on m y medicine cabinet), and, though a terrifying experience, I must admit I laughed a thousand laughs and found the most humorous knee-slapper of all, the "Playboy Philosophy...
...U o m e , locki...
...What scurrility strikes too low...
...According to University of Chicago economist, Yale Brozen, you're getting warm...
...In his best of all possible worlds Americans would pass alien and sedition laws interdicting all those abstaining from perversion...
...N o w monopolistic unions callously exclude Negroes and other minority groups...
...Playboy's whole concept is ridiculous...
...I could not endure such a rhetorical laxative...
...College devotees of belles-lettres need not journey to new york, Chicago or Lafayette County, Mississippi to satisfy their belletristic hungers...
...Disabled people...
...Behind an armor of government legislation they deny higher paying jobs to the poor, for fear this might deflate their inflated wages...
...The caption read (honest, cross m y heart) "I a m a sucker for the seashore...
...It services no higher form of life...
...Lazy people...
...A conscious, thinking person, rather than read Playboy essays or short stories, would choose a cozy stretch on the rack...
...The Federal government causes poverty A ) partly by taxes to support confused and ineffective poverty programs and, B ) partly by bungling interventions into the free market...
...The result approximates Time magazine's foolish affectations to catholicity — journalistically Playboy is nothing more than a dilettante's delicatessen...
...Page 9...
...a mere profanation of Cassius Clay written by the P. T. Barnum of sexual deviation, dr...
...His sermons are as authoritarian and all-encompassing as any remark Jonathan Edwards ever made...
...What a remarkable creature, an editor who cannot edit, a philosopher with philosophical dropsy, a playboy who is no fun...
...Yet the most intriguing of all Brozen's examples of government-created poverty was the government's regulation of gas fields...
...ancestors', for the ankle most engrossing to hefner generally belongs to the male of the species...
...W h o cares about the bright young yalie who made a fortune inventing an electric nose picker...
...In a recent appearance on Laugh-In, Huntley and Bunkley (or some such comedy), he uttered the most sanctimonious nonsense regarding public coition ever recorded...
...In the past he has concealed his puritanical mania by publishing half-learned, trivial articles on all ilk of nonsense varying from interviews with the absurd arthur schlesinger to tedious doodles by the late jules feiffer...
...Tossone's, must obviously suffer the importunity of editing from the original manuscript on men's room walls at the Greyhound terminal...
...The m a n has sought turpitude like flies after a garbage truck...
...It is banal solecistic junk like this that has driven Abe Fortas to pornography...
...Call him a crackpot, affirmed...
...Throughout the article she droned on about the joy of not having to work nights for the yellow cab company, and the mysteries of indoor plumbing...
...N o mere human can wholly assimilate such prose...
...Yet it serves no dignified end to criticize blithely a publication, wholly ignoring for the subject's merits...
...It was all exciting reading for a South Dakota gas station attendant or yale professor but hardly the kind of thing a sophisticated grape picker might pursue...
...Renowned for brilliant essays and short stories...
...In fact, one so dissipated, ignorant, and obscene that drew pearson could not libel him — he is just too polymorphously corrupt...
...His televised pontifications attest to the exactitude of our allegation...
...For years the government has insured unfettered union growth...
...Distinguished scribes like Gerald Greene, Joseph Brackman and Willie Feinberg often embellish its pages with biting literary vignettes whose insights into the human conditions have not been transcended since Marjorie Benton Cook, in 1914, published her English classic, Bambi...
...The evidence irrefutably demonstrates playboy hefner is nothing more than the last wheezing relict of black frocked Puritanism — the last Higgethbottom, the final W h o C a u s e s P o v e r t y ? BY R. Dennis Tyrrell W h o causes poverty...
...Playboy has assembled the most magnificent fashioners of English prose to edify its urbane audience...
...His guilt is inexorable and overpowering, so he attempts to diffuse it by demanding that w e all share his zeal for women's underwear, hip sodomy and so forth...
...in vilifying him how could one fib...
...Serious yoimg minds reach for it, monthly, and greedily prowl its pages...
...Why, Washington's regulators of natural gas...
...Brozen offers some startling examples of government interference leading to increased poverty...
...ma*t i4uUoUeA U u Plcufituf,, n444Jte4...
...This increased price touches the poor most intimately, for, especially in rural areas, they rely on gas heavily for cooking and heating...
...In a recent issue the eminent G. L. Tossone began, "It was a sleazy fire trap of a hotel, but in one of its grubby cubicles lay the miraculous opportunity to remake a life — or lose a wife, (sic)" H o w this magnum opus concludes, God (relying heavily on His omnipotence) knows...
...And those restive hands have little to do but hang loose when the Federal government restricts cultivation, further decreasing job opportunities...
...Calm paws monitored by dull intellects reach for Harper's, the new yorker or The Alternative, but a renaissance m a n snatches his Playboy, rushes home, locks his door and devours its mellifluous prose, inspired photography and profoimd philosophy...
...Juxtaposed to a flashy female taxicab driver suitably injected with silicones, an oaf like Rev...
...The military-industrial complex...
...Do-it and you will be saved, and hefner will be canonized and his circulation will soar...
...They may satiate all this and more, by an across-the-counter purchase at their campus book stores...
...Not since Joshua, has one exhibited such virtuosity with the jawbone of an ass...
...doo/i roaring Jonathan Edwards, the leering prospopopia of Cotton Mather...
...The Federal government's minimum wage eliminates marginal jobs leaving unskilled workers with empty stomachs, time on their hands, and despair...
...What a boon...
Vol. 2 • December 1968 • No. 3
