Editorials: Bookists/A State of Mind
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Bookists The Modern Library's editorial board has just announced the loo best Englishlanguage novels of the century, as esteemed by its board...
...Lynn says that today it is "in history and biography that you find people and narrative...
...No, this is not going to be another column on the Boy President and his cadre of slippery extenuators...
...Alas, I promised no further allusions to Boy Clinton in this column...
...It does grow tedious...
...Besides, I just completed a LexisNexis search of how frequently over the past six months journalists linked Bill Clinton's name with that of Warren Gamaliel Harding, hitherto recognized as America's most corrupt president...
...In Mr...
...Try the op-ed page of the New York Times, whose columnists have grown condignly critical of the White House cabal with each new allegation of felony, misdemeanor, or encroachment on civil liberties...
...And wasn't there C something about an Indonesian gardener donating thousands, and a Thai woman with a German name...
...8, on page 26, has to be a gag...
...His aides, to a man, were innocent of any culpability in this squalid Monicagate matter when it broke...
...And then there are the jokes about the president's forked tongue, slob con-you find neither...
...It leaves James Carville vile...
...And President Harding had the good fortune to die in bed before a friendly electorate got wind of his scandals and before the historians began their rants...
...The ad states that Dr...
...You Clinton-haters out there are going to have to repair to some other fountainhead of malign commentary...
...Scott and his fraudulent designs...
...There were goo FBI files found on a fat guy's desk in the White House...
...isit T1S Online :11 x‘%^^%.spect,itoroorg A State of Mind The American Spectator • September 1998 17...
...It reminds us that there are varying degrees of literary talent...
...I found 390 listings...
...Astounding though it may be, the board considered only literary merit...
...His retirement is going to be gruesome...
...The novelist Cynthia Ozick was not shocked...
...More interesting still, though most Americans believe their president to be even more of a moral basket case than they thought four years ago, they are increasingly impatient with the criminal or even merely critical pursuit of him...
...I do not believe that a magazine as sophisticated as The Alternative could possibly believe in Dr...
...For them the critical issue is education, then Social Security, then taxes...
...The disconnect between what people know about Clinton and what they feel will end...
...How shocking to assess a work of art solely on its artistic merits...
...Nixon's aides brought him down...
...But for now take a look at the Modern Library's list...
...Clinton is bringing his own people down...
...25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator To the Editor: The advertisement your magazine published in the May 1973 issue Vol...
...No one knows how they got there, or for that matter, how the fat guy got there...
...In fact that is one of the merits of this list...
...The fact that a grateful Clinton administration may have rewarded campaign supporters with deals that make Peking a nuclear threat to Washington and other nations is alarming to the press...
...Jay Leno continues to mine the extravaganza at i600 Pennsylvania Avenue for humor, and he reigns unchallenged as the king of the nocturnal chat shows...
...Accept my apology...
...Dreiser's American Tragedy is rated sixteenth...
...The country's leading cartoonists regularly serve up caricatures of a dumpy, dopey, smirking commander-in-chief with a bra hanging out of his pants pocket or some other specimen of women's lingerie near his person...
...Yet the American novel is about to get a jolt of life...
...Donors to the 1996 campaignincluded Buddhist nuns, Chinese generals, and a billionaire who began his career running a Jakarta bicy- Ci cle shop...
...Respectfully, —G...
...Samartino: Fie...
...Scott's electric girdle for men...
...A4 duct, evasions, and arrested adolescence...
...Their minds tell them he is a rogue, but they feel no revulsion...
...Orthopaedic Surgery) Dear Dr...
...One explanation might be that, though this big lovable lug of a president is a joke figure, all the laughs have been exhausted...
...Incidentally, the girdle itself worked fine, but the cord was so short I could never leave the office...
...Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is probably merely "a period piece," as historian Kenneth Lynn asserts, worthy of a place on a longer list but not in the century's top loc...
...They wrote in American...
...Just as Americans were breaking for their summer vacations they gave us loo books to bring along...
...Many of the novelists mentioned are not actually English-language novelists...
...Finally there are those taped conversations of the intern...
...This slippery couple has been playing the press for suckers too blatantly and for too long...
...Rather, they write history or biography...
...Even when his Webb Hubbells and McDougals were first exposed, the American people were protective of Warren...
...The list is attracting spitballs...
...There was the outbreak of amnesia among White House aides when called before Congress...
...Most are true, but the ordinary human brain can fasten upon only so much before freezing up...
...The campaign finance violations of the last election were too multitudinous...
...on Dr...
...Whereas in a lot of the fashionable fiction of our time A Washington Post-ABC News poll has just published some intriguing data about the American people's present state of mind...
...The titles mentioned by such masters of the literary art as Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, and Waugh are too limited...
...Yet not one of the books listed is unworthy of our attention...
...For one thing, though polite opinion in our nation's capital has been in a fever over campaign finance reform and tobacco prohibition, most Americans consider these issues comparatively minor...
...There should bebooks for the sake of books...
...The list is, as all such lists are, open to debate...
...It is Mr...
...So much for speculation on Bill Clinton's legacy...
...This is particularly true if one tries to keep up with all the scandals...
...That should make the patriotic juices flow in all of us, save for one lamentable detail: Most of the American novelists are dead or pretty much in retirement—more evidence, that, of the unhealthy condition of the American novel...
...Actually these bookists at the Modern Library did a very good thing...
...Each author is to one degree or another a great literary talent...
...Worse, the press is opposed to campaign finance violations...
...Boredom could also explain some Americans' mental and emotional disconnect regarding the Clintons' misbehavior...
...He was trying to protect his people...
...Buchanan, a former Nixon aide, made the useful and original point that "Richard Nixon's involvement in Watergate came of misplaced loyalty...
...How many jokes can be confected about his tailor who apparently also lives in Sofia, Bulgaria, and specializes in alterations for the creme de la creme of Bulgaria, Albania, and Belarus...
...Unfortunately, I suspect that the press is about to become judgmental about the Clintons...
...So back to the Modern Library's Top Forty Plus Forty Add Twenty...
...Clinton who is dragging everyone in and everyone down...
...I Read RI.IT's cn NN cek...
...The affirmative action charlatans are at work...
...How do we explain this curious condition...
...Tom Wolfe will come out with his first novel in a decade this fall...
...Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is rated thirty-sixth...
...In fact only one board member was a woman...
...When they are heard, everyone's attention is going to be aroused...
...Or look back to a Pat Buchanan column from mid-July...
...Instead you find some novelist's neurosis and narcissism...
...Bill Clinton is lucky but not that lucky...
...It is a fact that the American people always liked Warren Gamaliel Harding...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...They are Americans...
...How many jokes can be made about administrative incompetence that for years has left appointments unappointed, policies exploding in the Clintons' laps, the president there when his schedule says that he is here...
...The remark smacks of bookism...
...And Buchanan went on to point out that in August of 1974, after Nixon administration officials such as himself discovered that their boss was lying, they called on him to resign...
...Wilder and weirder revelations have been made...
...Women keep coming forward claiming the President violated them, whereupon they become about the only members of the Clinton drama to suffer moral opprobrium...
...I take this as evidence that so long as the American press does not perceive grim menace in a president (as it did in President Richard Nixon), most Americans will avoid being judgmental, as the phrase has it...
...6, No...
...Bookists The Modern Library's editorial board has just announced the loo best Englishlanguage novels of the century, as esteemed by its board members...
...She remarked, "I don't believe there should be women for the sake of women...
...Obviously there is a spirited segment of the populace devoted to the Clinton high jinks even as there is a spirited segment of the populace that relishes Beethoven, Tom Wolfe, and high-calorie desserts...
...There were Hillary's billing records found in her bedroom and cattle futures never found anywhere...
...THOMAS SAMARTINO, M.D...
...Please tell me that the ad was a gag or I will think The Alternative has gone ape...
...The Modern Library's editorial board did not factor in race, color, creed, gender, and—who knows—maybe disability...
...Unfortunately, when it comes to writing novels it does not seem that today's best literary talents write them...
...All this, Hillary blamed on a Pittsburgh philanthropist, Richard Mellon Scaife, but then it was revealed that she had invited him to the White House...
...On the other hand Rush Limbaugh and his millions still cackle through the afternoon...
...White House interns complain that the president did not violate them...
...After a point the laughing glands cease to secrete their invaluable substances...
...I am turning my mind over to the Modern Library's assessment of the twentieth century novel...
...He has duped us and he is now on his way to New Jersey with the two hundred dollars Baron Von Kannon paid him for a Midwest franchise...
...RET Correspondence JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1973 16 September 1998 • The American Spectator Every author on the list introduces us to interesting people caught in interesting situations...
...Yet today, "Clinton's defenders assure us that even if he committed perjury...it is of no consequence because it was, after all, 'only about sex...
...Well, let us allude no further to the hate-Clinton commentary...
...Clinton's case, the reverse is true...
...Called A Man In Full, it has an abundance of people and the narrative that Lynn longs for...
...Hammond of New York was the late Surgeon General of the U.S., and I do not really remember that either...
...I expect his next stop will be at HEW...
...Even before he receives his day in court or in an impeachment hearing, his image in history has taken shape...
Vol. 31 • September 1998 • No. 9
