PUBLIC NUISANCES
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. Sixties to the Finish WASHINGTON DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU THOUGHT when you heard that Senator John Francois Kerry was overheard in a scrum of Chicago...
...My friend sent him packing, but she was deeply troubled and I suspect alarmed...
...The reformers relaxed the rigor of college studies...
...But it is the lesser students who strike me as so empty...
...Those students had some fizz to them...
...She had never seen the young man act that way before...
...Howard Dean...
...Even when they get caught they wriggle out of it, save for the time that Bill got impeached and found in contempt of court and lost his license to practice law...
...The current wisdom swirling around Campaign 2004 is that it is going to be very bitter...
...I suspect this is because so little is demanded of the rank and file...
...Reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere have found that Saddam was paying off world leaders—one being a powerful bureaucrat at the U.N.—with billions of dollars skimmed from the famed oilfor-peace program...
...Yes, "factually inaccurate," but she is a senator today even as Teddy Kennedy is a senator, and Robert Torricelli was a senator...
...My explanation is counseled by the 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004historic record...
...Dean's youthful volunteers brigades were dopes, and untalented dopes...
...Today's profs must have a lot of time on their hands too...
...Republicans believed that the 1960 presidential election was stolen from them and by an equally debonair aspirant...
...war...
...If I were among the bored and the underemployed on campus today, possibly I too would become a binge drinker...
...While protesting youth such as Kerry and the Clintons were smiled upon by the media despite the social pathologies that attended their lifestyle, for instance drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, the young conservatives developed their own distinctive point of view...
...You might recall that the last Independent Counsel to ponder her 1990s appearances under oath deposited in his final report the finding that Hillary's sworn testimony was "factually inaccurate...
...I thought he was referring to the Clintons...
...This, along with mounting evidence that the Europeans were prospering handsomely by supplying arms to Saddam and any other well-heeled tyrant, might explain why "world opinion" was so opposed to our invasion of Iraq...
...Actually the very best students today are probably as good as the best students were in years gone by...
...The friends were slow to leave as the evening dragged on, and so she went to bed, expecting them—all good friends—to depart soon after she disappeared...
...That was a lot of drinking, but apparently students today drink with even more abandon...
...On college there is not much more to do...
...I was struck by the vacuity of today's college students while watching CNN's documentary of the rise and fall of Dr...
...I guess this is what is called "binge drinking," and apparently there is a lot of it on college campuses nowadays...
...In the 1960s and 1970s while we were reading Milton Friedman and the Founding Fathers, many members of today's leadership in the Democratic Party were reading Saul Alinsky, Paul Goodman, and condensations of Marx and Engels...
...They were on opposite sides of the barricades in 1968 and so they are today—though the barricades have been replaced by party lines...
...Howard Dean, and other leading Democrats were Coat and Tie Radicals in 1968, radicals adhering to a leftist agenda while favoring the ambiguity of a coat and tie to preserve what Bill Clinton famously called "political viability...
...MAY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...Hillary Clinton, in what she termed a "major policy" speech at the Mayflower Hotel, unveiled a vision of the Nanny State that was vintage 1968...
...The explanation for this incendiary turn of events is that the Democrats believe our debonair president stole the 2000 election...
...Thus Kerry has brought up Vietnam all over again, glossing over the truly brutal protest he engaged in as a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War...
...John Francois Kerry, the Clintons, Dr...
...Documents in Baghdad amount to a veritable corpus delicti...
...Yet there will always be time to ventilate the misbehavior of the hypocrites at the U.N...
...The two branches of the most political generation of the 20th century, the 1960s generation, are now in the fullness of middle age...
...Why is it that the Democrats cannot get over their hurt feelings about the final tally in the Sunshine State...
...Immediately after the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, during which 1960s themes resonated, the contemporary wisdom held that 1960s youth culture was radical...
...They wanted nothing to do with protests and communes...
...Unless CNN was befooling us, the kids were listless, vacant, and not even very convincingly angry...
...Today's youth culture lacks esprit...
...She is a student finishing a college degree on a major American college campus, and her recent experience reminds me of a matter that has fetched my attention frequently of late, to wit, many college students do not have much to them...
...No, it was not a young man in tears but a young woman, and so you will understand why I packed away the stories of corruption in the United Nations...
...Rendering oneself comatose is the most interesting pursuit available...
...and in foreign capitals...
...They sang folk music and they sang well...
...Perhaps they could steal a chapter from 1920s collegians and become goldfish swallowers—assuming the animal rights indignados would not object...
...The mentors of their radical youth are allpasse, but there is no evidence that the Clintons and Kerrys have learned that in their youth they were wrong and we were right...
...Hillary has been even more artful in breaking the law, though she too has suffered blemishes on her otherwise exemplary record of crookedness and lying...
...When she awoke the next morning she found one of the young men had drunk his way through the night in her living room, watching DVDs and emptying her refrigerator...
...In 1968, George W. Bush and many of his cabinet members were Penny-Loafer Conservatives...
...They are a pale rendition of generations past...
...Actually Bill has never really practiced law...
...The songs they sang were infantile...
...By 9:00 am...
...Yet it seems like an awful waste of time and for that matter of good booze...
...he was stupefied and mildly abusive but otherwise preparing to drink his way through the day...
...Maybe they too binge drink, but more discreetly...
...Binge College WASHINGTON THE OTHER DAY, while happily contemplating the corruption that is turning up at the United Nations, my plans to contemplate what it all means were disrupted by a telephone call from a college student in tears...
...The profs demand much less reading and writing today than in the 1960s when campus reformers began to gut the curriculum...
...Actually it was split...
...They have their cars and high-tech entertainments, ample funds and time on their hands...
...My friend had been visiting with some male and female friends in her off-campus apartment...
...He even has the chutzpah to remonstrate against the FBI's surveillance of him in those days, ignoring his group's many acts of civil disobedience (occasionally criminal disobedience) in time of R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...There has to be more to it than that...
...The battle lines of the 1960s are still in place...
...In a word, many are vacuous...
...Support for the Vietnam War endured almost to the end...
...Sixties to the Finish WASHINGTON DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU THOUGHT when you heard that Senator John Francois Kerry was overheard in a scrum of Chicago blue-collar workers referring to unnamed politicians as "crooked" and "lying...
...Certainly the college curriculum on most campuses is neither interesting nor demanding—which is the crux of the matter...
...They were the contemporary version of the 1960s collegians who campaigned for Senator Eugene McCarthy's insurgent presidential bid against President Lyndon Johnson by getting "Clean for Gene...
...I disagreed with them, but they were for the most part learned, highly principled, political activists...
...The Clintons have, indeed, been very artful in all their transgressions...
...When I was a student in the 1960s I knew of students who drank their way through the weekendand would sozzle themselves on an occasional weeknight...
...Both sides, the pundits tell us, are going to indulge in "negative" ads and eye-gouging...
...He taught law briefly, but mostly he breaks the law...
...For now I have my troubled young friend to contend with...
...Anyone who has had an opportunity to compare the workload of a generation ago with the workload carried by college students today knows why college students have a lot of time on their hands...
...So what really explains the rancor arising in this election year...
...Today's enthusiasm for free markets, globalism, strong defense, and some semblance of traditional values is championed by those of us who opposed the radicals of the 1960s...
...What is more, I thought he was being complimentary...
...They composed slogans and they were literate...
...Their performance upon graduation suggests that...
...The 1964 election did not turn out to be a particularly "bitter" election—though I am sure surviving Goldwaterites are still hurt that Lyndon Johnson accused his opponent, Barry Goldwater, of plotting to get us into war in Southeast Asia...
...Much of his support came from college students...
...When I encounter them they seem almost always to be very amiable but also ignorant, aimless, and bland...
...In 1972 the youth vote went against the radical George McGovern and for President Nixon...
Vol. 37 • May 2004 • No. 4
