PUBLIC NUISANCES: A Cautionary Tale/A Frenchman for All Seasons
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES A Cautionary Tale WASHINGTON p ERHAPS THE MOST DUBIOUS clichfi in American history is the one intoned over and again after terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on September...
...Now that the French have had some time to think about it, many chic Parisians even eat their Big Macs with a tomato elegantly slapped aboard...
...I hope he maintained that gusto to the end...
...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 PUBLIC NUISANCES A Frenchman for All Seasons WASHINGTON I HOPE THE GREAT RESTAURANTS of Paris held a moment of silence last month upon hearing of the death of the distinguished French philosopher and journalist, Jean-Francois Revel...
...One afternoon we passed the undergraduate library that then held three million books...
...In his 1970 book, Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution, he notified antiAmerican leftists that the great revolution of the 20th century would come from America where the American notions of democracy and economics would overwhelm the "Socialist revolution...
...They should have...
...I saw heavily armed men train to protect dignitaries from being ambushed...
...For a few hours I watched special ops troops and police train in firearms, close-quarters battle, tactical driving, and other dangerous operations...
...To him the evidence was clear...
...Leslie Groves not to publish his knowledge...
...At the end of the meal, by the time we had exhausted every subject of the day, the great gastronome spied a fellow diner's mousse that had not been touched...
...Frankly I did not find it a happyvisit...
...When I lived in Bloomington, Indiana, alongside the campus of Indiana University in the 1980s, Revel visited with me for a couple of nights...
...If Senator Kerry is not to your liking, there is also Sen...
...Then American solidarity in the war against terror began to fissure, and, by the way, the President's favorable ratings began to sink...
...Ah well, at one point they had the same horror of that stupendously esculent provender served between the magnificent Golden Arches...
...He was certainly the greatest gastronome I have known...
...But, I lamented, the professoriate all think alike...
...On through the fois gras and poulet roti he advanced...
...This was typical...
...In April it was reported that the Bush administration has been laying plans to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities...
...Of course, President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged this discipline with such instruments as the Office of Censorship, authorized under the War Powers Act...
...The place abounded with grim soldiers and retired soldiers training for dangerous missions against gruesome foes...
...Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that "The U.S...
...Given the right-of-way, the philosopher pounced on it...
...Now in the press the war effort is assuming the vague dimensions of monstrosities of yesteryear: Watergate, Iran-Contra, both being cautionary tales from which liberals hope Americans will learn to be better people...
...At one point they considered them poisonous...
...The Post knows this because its reporters laid hands on "internal military documents...
...John Kerry, who might well have become president last time around if it were not for a treacherous cabal of Vietnam veterans who, the Senator believes, lied about his heroic service in Vietnam...
...For the intellectual of the left it was always easier to reject Communism and accept anti-Communism...
...But Jean-Francois reminded him that he was famous for his proAmericanism...
...Yet now our enemies know about our propaganda in Iraq and plans being made for bombing Iran...
...In the late 1970s he was unsure about Ronald Reagan, but seeing the president's resolution against Communism he came to admire him...
...Neither the New York Times nor any of the Washington newspapers reported the mess that had blanketed their cities...
...I read the second story en route to a place called Blackwater USA...
...Three million books," he enthused...
...His French was clear and understandable even to an American with only a couple of years of college French...
...Revel had been a man of the left in his youth, and by the time I knew him he was still unsure about some of thevalues that are nowconsidered conservative, at least here in America...
...No, America has not changed forever...
...I have always wondered why in the West, given all our putative admiration for freedom, reason, and boldness, more intellectuals did not follow the path of Revel in France or of the neoconservatives in America, that is to say the small band of liberal Democrats who broke with liberalism when it slipped into its narcissistic fantasy world in the early 1970s...
...Actually, he was slower to accept Friedman than he was to accept Reagan...
...Soon we had the restaurant's French-born proprietor at our table, delighted to find the great Revel in his humble Midwestern restaurant...
...He was warned by the Manhattan Project's Gen...
...On Palm Sunday of 1942 a blizzard dumped more than two feet of snow on the East Coast...
...Again, Revel was an empiricist...
...In 1942, when all Americans recognized that we were at war, the press was more disciplined...
...There were mockups for training for urban warfare and for recapturing pirated ships and hijacked airplanes...
...Nonetheless, somehow he was admitted in 1997 into the Acad~mie Fran~aise, where he was numbered among the 40 "immortals" who maintain the standards of the French language...
...I met him in the mid-1970s and knew him for his journalism...
...To reject socialism was more difficult...
...After visiting the library I took my friend to a nearby French restaurant, where my thick-set rubicund companion immediately ordered a vin rouge and fois gras...
...Well, forever lasted about two years, maybe three...
...In one of his many learned disquisitions on food and the history of food, Revel noted that for centuries the French would not eat tomatoes...
...They are as much conformists as members of Rotary--notwithstanding all their boasts to independence and high intellect...
...You would not want the Nazis to know...
...He was enormously erudite, gruff, and sardonic...
...It is a facility in North Carolina where a private company trains security personnel for the world we were all made aware of on 9/11...
...He was astounded by the wealth of the university but put off by the smug conformity of the faculty...
...Certainly American liberals have not changed...
...Some of the self-censorship appears preposterous today...
...His three-volume history of Western thought was beyond me, but his journalism, appearing in the French magazine L'Express and also in English publications, was learned and lively...
...To my surprise at some point in the 1980s Revel found himself persuaded by Friedman...
...When I asked him why, he responded that the free-market economy had provided the "evidence" of its superiority...
...There is not much romance in this war on terror...
...It is the same in Paris," he responded, shaking his head...
...I suppose the answer is that intellectuals are no more independent-minded or courageous than members of any other social group...
...Revel inquired...
...Truth be known, the world has changed forever even if the American press has not...
...Codes of reportage were established, and news organizations submitted thousands of stories to the censors...
...That was the clich6 that claimed that now "America has changed forever...
...Are you finished with it...
...In America there was hope...
...Both news stories are out there for our enemies to make use of...
...JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71...
...Blackwater is a vast and impressive privately owned facility that is profitable only because there are hundreds of thousands of brutes around the globe who want to kill civilized people...
...Legend has it that Groves told Laurence he knew too much already and "I shall have to hire you or kill you" With the agreement of Times editors Laurence disappeared into the Manhattan Project, reappearing on the bomber that leveled Nagasaki...
...Behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains was tyranny and economic futility...
...The time has come, theytell us, to hand this war over to the experts, for instance, Sen...
...During World War II the Times science writer, William Laurence, got word of our progress on developing an atomic bomb...
...Revel was living proof that an intellectual could break with the herd...
...After that he wrote a series of articles on the development of the bomb for his newspaper and won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize...
...He was also that rare French intellectual who admires America, and something more: he did not flinch from the evidence in any intellectual debate, whether it be a debate over Communism, terrorism, or the tomato...
...In America Norman Podhoretz showed the same reluctance...
...So now those documents and the controversy within the military surrounding them are known to the public, the world public...
...Read the liberal press...
...During the Cold War when his fellow Europeans in large numbers idolized Castro and Mao, Revel mocked them all...
...Increasinglyit reads like the press of what during the Cold War was called a "nonaligned nation...
...Revel was ahead of his time...
...military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al- Qaeda in Iraq...
...He was also, contrary to what some of the obituarists are saying, unsure about Milton Friedman and Fl'iedman's brand of free-market economics...
...PUBLIC NUISANCES A Cautionary Tale WASHINGTON p ERHAPS THE MOST DUBIOUS clichfi in American history is the one intoned over and again after terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001...
...America is at war, and it is not just the Republicans' war...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose service during the Vietnam War was very much like Senator Kerry's once he returned from Vietnam...
...Then came the salade verte and the mousse au chocolat...
...Increasingly it appears that the American press "is not taking sides" in this war, this Republican war...
Vol. 39 • June 2006 • No. 5
