Among the Intellectualoids
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Worst Book of the Year T his cold slab of a book is a disappointment. Professor Hill, you have let me down! The liberals' dispendious...
...In the afterglow of their acclaim you shimmered in my mind's eye as a Clare Boothe Luce for the 1990's, suitable adjustments having been made for the fact that where Clare had a libido you apparently have a second gall bladder...
...You grouse about the separation of women from men in the rural black churches of your unhappy youth "most likely out of denigration of women's roles...
...Of course, far from being apolitical, Miss Hill is one of those ritualistic liberals who meet any hint of disagreement with indignation and occasional paranoia...
...neurotic Ivy League clerks assisted him...
...The only imaginable complaint you left out could have been about your ghost writer, a plodding dud...
...Prior FBI checks during his thirteen years of public service had turned up no hint of ribaldry nor did earlier Senate inquiry...
...Yet as I have suggested, the women's language seems to be justified...
...And then there is this petty complaint: "Some of my classmates have been more than insensitive to my situation...
...For whatever reason, she is evasive about 44 Possibly a place can be found for you at that sex clinic awaiting Our President...
...52 June 1998 • The American Spectator Skimming this tiresome digest of complaints, readers will note that you are offended by gynecologists who are never "responsive to my condition" (being somewhat of a hypochondriac myself, I read no further...
...Your fans have been untruthful...
...That this dreadful book would be published by a reputable publishing house suggests you have plenty of power and no useful purpose to which to put it...
...All your Marxian whim-wham about the distribution of power in society is a bore...
...Bravo, bravo, Miss Hill...
...None of the disclosures was incongruent with what the other blushing ladies had to reveal...
...Then I read your book...
...You have had years to develop some perspective on your charges and on the enormous 1991 hullabaloo surrounding them...
...Finally, I particularly like this alarum provoked by the fierce image of President George Bush: "I would have been afraid to live in the country if George Bush had been reelected...
...As for your smutty disclosures, they were solitary and unsubstantiated...
...No feminist has had to dial 911...
...Quite understandably, it sold less than 16,000 copies...
...they are responding to the advances of a sexual predator...
...Cute secretaries trundled along the halls of the Supreme Court Building...
...According to the transcript of your Senate testimony, you said of Judge Thomas in October 1991: "One of the oddest episodes I remember was an occasion in which Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from the table, at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, 'Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?'" And you add that "[o]n other occasions he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasure he had given to women with oral sex...
...She is the first dirty talker of the Naughty Nineties, and now she is the winner of the J. Gordon Coogler Award for 1998...
...Well, calm down, Miss Hill...
...her liberalism...
...You were "intelligent, composed, unflappable, religious and attractive...
...The moral exemplars around Our President all point to the prurient reports of the women pursuing their Great Leader and urge that we have done with this unwholesome spectacle of dirty-talking women...
...Rather than admit her political leanings she hides them behind a mask, in her case the mask of the victimized woman, the black victimized woman...
...Perhaps she first donned the mask during the Thomas hearings—she in her megalomania refers to them as the Hill-Thomas hearings—though the evidence is that she has been on the left since puberty...
...is editor-in-chief ofThe American Spectator...
...As you never demonstrate any interest in learning, it is not surprising that you arrive at Yale Law School ungrateful for the opportunity to study there and unimpressed by its reputation for learning...
...With all your academic degrees and touted intellect why is this book so pinched in perspective, destitute of ideas, and—let us face the music — bitchy...
...On you proceed with the semiMarxian analysis that chokes the prose of your book (your ghost-writer was from East Germany...
...Anita Hill undistinguishes herself again...
...The foulmouthed Monica Lewinsky taped by Linda Tripp is almost virginal compared with you simpering before those God-fearing senators on national television...
...When it does we see her as another very angry feminist liberal, walking a tightrope of hysteria and screaming about how she and all womanhood are a victimized class...
...One in particular, a man with whom I was close in law school and since, has not returned several phone calls...
...0i4• The American Spectator June 1998 53...
...Possibly a place can be found for you at that sex clinic awaiting Our President...
...Many Coogler Laureates have been from this mold...
...Mein Got...
...ut allow me to return to the matter of your dirty mind, for it is your dirty mind that made you famous...
...You have written 1997's worst book, and as always the competition was keen...
...It is impossible to square the liberals' encomiums with the impudent stupidity of Speaking Truth to Power...
...No other living soul had suffered your scintillating experiences with the Judge...
...Each came forward, some with dates and corroborating witnesses, to divulge a steamy encounter with Bill Clinton...
...His marital vows remain intact...
...some have been hostile...
...Consider what Glamour magazine wrote...
...Of your theatrics against Judge Clarence Thomas, Quindlen enthused that you "had the radiance of a person who has done the right thing...
...Consider the irony...
...But hold...
...The only blot on his record is the product of your dirty mind...
...Your Senate testimony is even dirtier than the sworn depositions of Paula Corbin Jones or Kathleen Willey, or even those Arkansas state troopers whose testimony after four years of studious reflection has so offended the fragile sensibilities of David Brock...
...It was then that I realized that what had been proposed as objective was in fact fraught with perspective —the perspective of those who made up the analysis—one that I did not often share...
...I have now read the book and reviewed your amazing Senate tesR. EmmErr TYRRELL, JR...
...However, the women testifying to the ithyphallic social ways of President Clinton brought fact and collateral details with them...
...Once again we see the asinine comedy of liberals coming to a moral boil over a vexed condition that they themselves created...
...timony against Judge Thomas...
...Sometime in the 1930's George Jean Nathan, one of the original American Spectator's editors, wrote that women have dirtier minds than men...
...Ultimately their revelations contributed to a composite profile of a sexmaniac, our forty-second president, a deviant in need of therapy...
...Fundamentally your problem is that you have a very dirty mind, unrelieved by artistic afflatus or by corroborative sources...
...The liberals' dispendious praise of you over the years had given me the impression that you abound with intelligence, character, and grace...
...Miss Hill, your smut stories were unprovoked and they were very dirty...
...One of your complaints about the place does, however, put the lie to your oft-repeated and oft-contradicted claim of political disinterestedness...
...Miss Hill, you and the aforementioned women prove his mordant point...
...Thus when The American Spectator's prestigious J. Gordon Coogler Committee recommended you as the 1998 Coogler Laureate, for authoring the worst book of 1997, I scoffed...
...I would have thought your book would have come up with supportive facts behind its thesis and apparently your raison d'être: namely, the propagation of the idea that men cannot keep their hands off you, particularly when no one is looking...
...Having declared you one of "1991's bright spots" (there were ten, all female), the magazine's editors described you and the others as "beacons of integrity, humor, guts and grace in an often cold-blooded world...
...I heard no liberal in late 1991 or 1992 repine over the dirty talk issuing from Anita Hill...
...At any rate, Hill's mask slips throughout this book...
...Finally, throughout the six years that you were presumably preparing this Coogler-award-winning book, Judge Thomas served peacefully on the Supreme Court...
...It is at its best a compendium of your personal complaints, some cosmic, some petty...
...Novelist Anna Quindlen sang in the same bold C major key...
...My bravos are replaced by a tsk and a tsk...
...You write that "[l]egal training, with its focus on 'objective analysis,' created a dissonance in me that I did not resolve until I started teaching law myself...
...You now have powerful contacts, wise counselors, and a lush cash flow owing to your jihad against Thomas...
...Moreover, she is a practitioner of masked politics...
Vol. 31 • June 1998 • No. 6
