Public Nuisances
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
I Kidman You Not —WASHINGTON With regard to the last great persecution of the twentieth century, is it possible that we are finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel? The last great...
...Known by friends in his intellectual set as Looney Clooney, he actually does read books and newspapers...
...As the administration's policy planners put it, "America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones?' They also note that "the gravest danger our nation faces lies at the crossroads of [religious] radicalism and technology...
...This colossal record of error makes one wonder...
...He has shown himself to be a cad...
...Remember the claptrap about how we were running out of resources...
...Is., JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 79...
...The Truman administration's policy of "containment," proclaimed in 1947 and meant to contain the Soviet Union and its aggressive puppets, has been replaced by ‘`preemption...
...Producers, directors, writers, drug therapists, and actors abound with ideas and philosophical principles that you can really sink your teeth into...
...Tim Robbins, star of such masterpieces as The Player and Bob Roberts...
...Writers and other members of the intelligentsia have long known the digitalis to the cerebral cortex that is supplied by nicotine...
...Robbins, the controversy was about "my right to express those views...
...Maybe they are just poseurs, though if ever a chain of men's underwear shops is opened for "sadistic creeps:' I think Tim Robbins would make an inviting poster boy...
...And he went on to add that both he and his girlfriend believed the great actor was "just acting" when he threatened Mr...
...Since the presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern in 1972, the Left's influence has suffused much of the Democratic Party...
...Not only are modern sophisticates such as Nicole joining us in the liberation of smokers, but science is also coming to our side...
...After reading a newspaper column by the Washington controversialist Lloyd Grove, Mr...
...No longer is it merely a preserve of slob producers and airhead actors hustling for the philistines' bucks...
...The Left's complaint against America, against its foreign policy, its economy, and culture has expanded steadily for five decades...
...It was this document that got us to where we are today, with Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq disarmed, and other rogue nations feeling the heat...
...An end to this dreadful persecution may be at hand...
...It quickens the wit, strengthens perception, and expands memory...
...The indispensable Paul Krugman spouts this stuff even now in his New York Times column...
...Grove...
...Yet after all these decades of erroneous pronouncements, the American Left remains both intellectually and morally superior to you and me...
...So Nicole, I am with you...
...Professor Galbraith, you are right...
...Now, of course, what passes for the American Left today is carping that American recklessness and self-indulgence have set the terrorists against us...
...Robbins, ever the philosopher, accosted Grove at a post-Academy Awards party with the query, "If you ever write about my family again, I will [bleeping] find you, and I will [bleeping] hurt you...
...Is it not about time that discerning adults be free to light up in a proper setting...
...Said Mr...
...Now that raises an interesting point...
...The Left has been wrong for so long that no knowledgeable observer even expects its pontificators to be right...
...Now is this just an act...
...Clooney will serve as spokesperson...
...Of Mr...
...Robbins's cerebrations on conflict are even more complicated than Looney Clooney's...
...Terrorists everywhere have sobered up a bit...
...The Left has been wrong for so long and about so much...
...Looney Clooneys —WASHINGTON One gratifying development of President George W. Bush's World Crisis is the intellectual transformation of Hollywood, California...
...So smokers and friends of freedom, breathe easier...
...Mr...
...Be careful about allowing Susan Sontag to board an airplane...
...Just when all the world's intelligentsia had given up hope that there would ever again be a Periclean Athens, a Sartrean Paris, or a Greenwich Village, there emerges in a yeasty froth of intellectual vitality, Hollywood...
...Susan Sontag, the literary egotist, adumbrated the complaint immediately after September 11, when in the New Yorker she sermonized: The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality [!] and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing...
...Grove replied...
...Many of the Democrats seeking the presidential nomination at this very hour intone the Left's complaints, even in this hour of vindication...
...Almost immediately she was harassed by Lars Von Trier, the director of her new movie, inelegantly titled, Dogville...
...The most glamorous of these civil libertarians is, it appears, Nicole Kid-man, the Oscar-winning actress, who boldly enjoyed a smoke during a press conference at this year's Cannes Film Festival...
...Clooney's alternative to old-fashioned war would be a class-action lawsuit or possibly a spelling bee...
...In fact many do not even have books, or teeth—at least not their natural teeth...
...Yet, like Aristotle in his Lyceum or Sartre in his cups, they are voluble with interesting observations and syllogisms that challenge the musty dogmas of conventional minds and even discomfit some of the troubled teenagers who turn out for their films...
...I have been told that he has collected every Victoria's Secret catalogue...
...Remember in the 1980s and 1990s the widespread claim about how as an economic power America was kaput...
...The obvious dimming in what Jacques Barzun has called the House of Intellect is doubtless in part a consequence of the persecution of cigarette smoking...
...Smoking was once championed by liberals, and though lighting up just anywhere is insensitive to the rights of nonsmokers, lighting up in properly ventilated places is a right that all freedom-loving Americans should defend...
...I do not believe many members of the Left expect to be right...
...It is the intellectual jewel of the Western World...
...Robbins was frightened because the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame canceled an invitation to him, owing to his hysterical views on our Three-Week War...
...Bush's war he has said in contravention of the received wisdom, "You can't beat your enemy anymore through wars...
...And the light that I hope we are seeing is an elegant Marlboro, poised on the lips of a sophisticated sybarite...
...Perhaps whenVictoria's Secret opens its Middle Eastern chain of see-through burka boutiques, Mr...
...Robbins was a recent lecturer at the National Press Club, occasioning me to telephone Mr...
...Happily now there are indications that smokers have a growing vanguard of freedom fighters...
...The authorities have their eyes on you...
...And "I am extremely grateful that there are those of you out there still with a fierce belief in constitutionally guaranteed rights?' Then he called columnist Grove a "sadistic creep...
...Tobacco has been the sine qua non of every civilized salon...
...In such a world, "we cannot let our enemies strike first?' "Containment" was opposed for decades by much of the American Left, and a whole school of egghead thought rose up complaining that it was the Truman administration that had made Soviet Communism hostile to America, not Stalin or Communist ideology...
...I think he's a terrific actor," Mr...
...After studying the health records of 100,000 people over four decades, the paper reports, ". . . environmental tobacco smoke was not associated with coronary heart disease or lung cancer mortality at any level of exposure' I knew it all along...
...Of course the Hollywoodian of the hour is the very intellectual Mr...
...Where is the acknowledgment that this [the suicide attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon] was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world;' but an attack on the world's selfproclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions...
...In world history I can think of only one other parallel, the rise of the mullahs of Islamic fundamentalism...
...And where was this civil liberties advocate when Hollywood's hero president, Bill Clinton, was hounding journalists with grand jury investigations, threats to their bosses, and IRS investigations of his former victims, Paula Corbin Jones and Kathleen Willey...
...The last great persecution of this most repressive of all centuries is, of course, the hysterical persecution of tobacco...
...The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public...
...At the National Press Club the man whom Mr...
...Robbins PUBLIC BY R. EMME'l 78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 1,15LAMES out in Hollywood...
...Perhaps she feared an American expeditionary force would bring with it the anti-smoking patrols that now haunt such once-free American cities as New York, governed by the Suicide Mayor Michael Bloomberg...
...A massively researched paper in the British Medical Journal reports that all the hysteria over "secondhand" smoke is without scientific support...
...The actor's "constitutionally guaranteed right" places no obligation on the Baseball Hall of Fame to endure him...
...When are these renowned Hollywood minds not acting...
...Let us sit down in a smart café, light up, and talk things over...
...She is showing herself to be a lady of taste and independence...
...Never Right —WASHINGTON I n September of 2002 the Bush administration released a thirty-one-page strategy statement that took cognizance of the new type of international conflict facing the civilized powers...
...Speaking directly to the president and in defiance of any Republican "knock in the night," he speculated, "I believe he [Bush] thinks this is a war that can be won...
...The ugly name was, I assume, his idea...
...The American Left is the only intellectual force in Western history to gain moral superiority by being wrong...
...Yet Mr...
...Since Miss Sontag's bull, the chorus from the Left has grown against "preemption" and led to many very stupid statements about the futility of opposing terrorism and rogue states with military force...
...I hope the monitors of Homeland Security keep this in mind...
...He, too, has postulated ideas on peace and war's quaintness...
...A memorable example came from Professor James Galbraith in the American Prospect just a few days into our forces' dance through Iraq, in which he pronounced the war practically lost and suggested that we salvage our "disastrous position" and "accept a ceasefire, which would lead to the withdrawal of coalition forces under safe conduct?' Safe conduct from whom—the Iraqi army then on the run...
...To him the United States Marine Corps had best be replaced by the Rockettes...
...Grove and ask him about his tete-a-tete with the intellectual Mr...
...I salute her, notwithstanding her opposition to the recent war in Iraq...
...Bush's World Crisis...
...Iraqis are famous cigarette smokers, so I suppose it is possible that her opposition to the war was merely solidarity with the Iraqis in their right to enjoy tobacco...
...Of all the Hollywood philosophes probably the greatest are the actors, who speak so eloquently to Mr...
...In the land of the free and the home of the brave, I view cigarette smoking as a First Amendment right...
...Yes, maybe these Hollywoodians are not as intellectual as I had thought...
...Grove calls a "terrific actor" raised a finger dramatically skyward and exhorted his audience to "defy the intimidation that is visited Upon us daily in the name of national security?' Apparently Mr...
...there is no such thing anymore:' Mr...
...OK, so they do not write books...
...George Clooney comes to mind...
...Raise those taxes a bit higher, Mike, and even nonsmokers will call for your neck...
...Do not be surprised if Paul Krugman is arrested for wearing a suicide vest...
Vol. 36 • June 2003 • No. 3
