Editorials: A Mumbly Creep/Season's Jeerings
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. A Mumbly Creep Bob Dylan came to Washington in early December. He snuffled his way through the Kennedy Center Honors, wiped his nose on his...
...Age is a matter of grim consternation to Dylan and his peers...
...Speaker Newt Gingrich won the competition with his "The idea of even meeting Lauren Bacall is unbelievable...
...As for Dylan's pish-posh about sex, drugs, and authenticity, all his so-called free spirits have shown themselves to be dreadful frauds, the drugs have led to insanity or enslavement, and the sex to Anita Hill...
...A medal was placed on Dylan's bony shoulders, and the august confines of the State Department dining room resounded with a raucous three-minute standing ovation...
...He snuffled his way through the Kennedy Center Honors, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and went home wherever that might be...
...Improbable war whoops punctuated the din as paunchy suburbians emoted with nostalgia, delusions of their rock-abilly days, and enough self-love to embarrass Narcissus...
...He was here as an honoree, along with several older American performers...
...The harrowing experience left me with a much more sanguine conception of women in combat...
...In place of the holiday decorations he has erected two billboards...
...Just listening to the preposterous praise he evokes from his fellows would make a normal man uneasy...
...Having become enchanted by a very nice young woman on the president's staff who hails from his home state, I bought her an elegant fragrance...
...Mayor Schundler's audacity should remind us that those who see a division of church and state issue in nativity scenes and menorahs are historical illiterates, as well as neurotics, malcontents, and simple morons...
...That is not to say that Dylan does not suffer occasional side-effects from his feigned bohemianism...
...Ofi 25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator For all his bitterness, Tyrmand has done something very worth noticing...
...Kenneth P Shorey 'The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative" FEBRUARY 1973 16 February 1998 • The American Spectator Season's Jeerings A nd so the carnage of Christmas continues...
...Suffice to say that he is one of the earliest members of what we call the baby boomer generation...
...And then: "The sheer magic, for I think everyone in my generation, is to finally have our nation recognize Bob Dylan...
...Once there was a time when the celebrated rebel refused these awards...
...He has somehow managed to write a witty tract about life under communism—a tract that asks us to laugh at the indignities and insanities of life in a Marxist society while forgetting about the horrors...
...Well, Newt, as a member of your generation I should like to be left out of the revels...
...The idea of having met God's associate [this being a threadbare joke about the career of Charlton HesAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...They were recognized as being an insult to the whole idea of the independent artist...
...All he has ever written are jingles freighted with ominous blah...
...Given the mediocrity of his generation, the thing is possible...
...There are more palatable terms that would be perfectly acceptable to the country's more sensitive Muslims, Hindus, and Unitarians...
...04 The American Spectator • February 1998 17...
...In recent years the ACLU has taken action not only against hurtful nativity scenes and menorahs, but also against Frosty the Snowman and Santa Claus whose corpulence should warrant hisacquisition of a disabled sticker for his sleigh and, I would have thought, might protect him from the ACLU's attentions...
...It is, of course, all an act, another edition of the down-and-out-in-Paris claptrap of the humbug intellectual...
...He failed to join in singing the national anthem—"He has absolutely no political problem singing the national anthem," insisted his publicist Eliot Mintz...
...Nor do I know their medication, but in this cultural campaign they appear to have the momentum...
...In enlightened Hillsborough, New Jersey, the members of the school board have banned these last two titles and replaced them with "Fall Festival Celebration" and "Special Person Day...
...Now he is out to thwart even the ACLU...
...Yet when Gregory Peck comparedhim to Walt Whitman and Mark Twain things were clearly out of hand...
...In terms of political achievement, neither you nor the Boy President are showing student government of the 196o's and 1970's to be a match for a Hollywood studio back at mid-century...
...Apparently, nativity scenes and menorahs did not distress them as much as monarchists and tax collectors...
...Can it be long before the ACLU's enlightened expurgate "Christmas" from the public discourse...
...I have heard it all before...
...He still looks sick...
...That is the suggestion of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, though the suggestion could be insincere...
...The buying spree is over, but at this very moment millions of frenzied Americans are convening on shopping malls to exchange yesterday's bounty and to avail themselves of the sales...
...Schundler, however, is unscotchable...
...Whipped up by the Christmas hysteria they are a murderous bunch, particularly in those departments at Bloomingdale's where fragrances and lingerie are sold...
...The ACLU responded with a lawsuit, and now all these seasonal phenomena have been packed up and returned to the attic of the city's Department of Public Works...
...All over the country ACLU klaverns have had success in such proceedings, but Jersey City is governed by a uniquely treacherous mayor, the conservative Bret Schundler...
...The first explains that the city's decorations are in storage owing to an ACLU lawsuit now being fought by the city...
...His administration has been a huge political success...
...Actually he is just another boomer success story...
...Sinclair Lewis, for instance, aided and abetted by Mencken and Nathan, rejected his Pulitzer...
...The ACLU has made considerable headway against such hurtful terms as Easter, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and St...
...Sometime ago he became deathly ill from a contagion borne in bird feces...
...In 1994 the ACLU managed to persuade local courts to banish the town's Christmas nativity scene and menorah from the lawns of City Hall...
...After reviewing Supreme Court decisions and those of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Schundler redeployed his nativity scene and menorah by the city's Christmas tree, palliated by the presence of Frosty and Santa and without the disturbing presence at the manger of the Virgin Mary...
...He was drunk...
...The second reads inpart: "As the Constitution of the State of New Jersey reads, let us remain 'grateful to almighty God for the civil C, and religious liberty which He C hath so long permitted us to -- enjoy,' and let us continue `looking to Him for a blessing upon our endeavors to secure and transmit the same unimpaired to succeeding generations.'" These words are from the preamble of the New Jersey Constitution...
...Nor did he snicker as the country's first boomer president and first boomer Speaker of the House spent the weekend in desperate competition to proclaim their love for him...
...In artistic and intellectual terms our wildly overpraised generation is a gigantic bust...
...Like his president he walks on both sides of the street and talks out of both sides of his mouth...
...Doubtless, Dylan was not disposed to see through their exploitation of his mediocre self...
...How about "Sparkle Season...
...How many years the members of the board have been in therapy I do not know...
...There are wry smiles on almost every page...
...Put the aging Ronald Reagan of 198o, who only became a politician in middle age, next to either of these career politicians—the Hot Springs goody-goody or Newt, whining here about some imagined national rebuff of Dylan—and you have a first-class statesman towering over student government machiavels at play...
...Mencken and Nathan could not get past his drunken wife...
...In fact, the Journal reports a fierce struggle taking place this season in Jersey City, New Jersey...
...Moreover the blah about war and peace was all wrong...
...The term must cause great bitterness with the country's enlightened minority...
...ton] is almost inconceivable...
...The battle against controversial aspects of American heritage is not without its setbacks...
...After all, he has worked conservative magic to bring together one of the most culturally and politically diverse urban populations in America...
...I was in the fragrance department, furthering my new campaign to befriend the Clinton administration...
...She really needed it...
...There he was in Washington the other month accepting another award as a celebrated rebel...
...The Journal's editorialists insist on being out of synch with enlightened opinion...
...They called him the "poet of his generation...
...Presently, of course, the term Christmas will be no more...
...Dylan, the impudent egotist who ransacked the lovely old repertoire of folk music, sneered at the bourgeoisie, and then took up the bourgeoisie's electric guitar to exploit its every mawkish emotion, was up to his old tricks while in Washington...
...Frankly if Dylan is a prophet, the world he prophetized is all pratfalls and misery...
...It is only a matter of time before the stalwarts of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) break from their campaigns on behalf of Nazis, Klansmen, and flashers to advance the cause of civil liberties by banning the public utterance of the word "Christmas...
...It was adopted in 1776, by all kinds of free thinkers who were about to shed their blood for these freedoms...
...Or should I say mumbles...
...Accordingly, he, as the hacks wrote it up, "upstaged" the older honorees, Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Jessye Norman, and Edward Villella...
...When Lewis was awarded his Nobel prize he accepted it...
...Valentine's Day...
...Upstaged," indeed—here was another cloying spectacle of the boomers celebrating themselves...
...He looked scroungy, smelled bad, and variously affected timidity and rage...
...The Pentagon and the State Department won the Cold War, not some teen-aged waif with a flower stuck between her teeth...
...I myself spent a few pre-Christmas hours in the Women's Department at a Manhattan Blooming-dale's...
Vol. 31 • February 1998 • No. 2
