CONSERVATIVE TASTES: Among the Mad Simpletons

...A starry-eyed young woman at one of his book signings sums up the Jimmy credo: “It seems so simple,” she observes...

...This is perhaps the biggest change during the 40 years of the Spectator’s existence—bigger even than the transition during the Clinton years from the existential threat posed by the forces of progressive communism to the one we now face from retrogressive theocracy...

...war isn’t...

...Actually, there are reasons to think that both men only affect to be simpletons, since they are encouraged by everything in the popular culture to think that by doing so they can gather to themselves a following among the rock ’n’ roll-addicted middle-aged teenagers who still suppose that peace is to be had by wishing and exhorting and congratulating themselves on their own fine feelings, while all the nation’s and, indeed, the world’s problems are owing to the stupidity and/or wickedness of two men, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney...

...Perhaps only Dan Rather has suffered more from this derangement, which leads otherwise sane and healthy people to suppose that by claiming to be “objective” they become magically endowed with a superior vantage point from which to survey—and therefore to resolve or dismiss—the quarrels of lesser mortals, whom they consider to be mere “partisans...

...No more thinking for me...

...His recent book is Honor: A History (Encounter Books...

...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator’s movie and culture critic...

...I can sympathize...

...Or, as the satirical magazine Private Eye paraphrased it, “Peace is good...

...MR...

...All are similarly devoted to and, indeed, incomprehensible apart from, this simple hippie belief in the easy moral solution to all political problems...

...And doesn’t that tell you something...

...They need to be given the right to live in their own country...

...Carter’s simple-minded point...

...We shall find out, no doubt, when we either elect or don’t elect Mrs...

...Only two of the former president’s critics are allowed any screen time: Prof...

...Yet for 40 years the magazine has offered the hospitality of its pages to those who would write the minority report out of the sixties, including even a few would-be Savanarolas who, however belatedly, might still be up for a campaign to stamp out rock ’n’ roll...

...The pleasing outlines of that decade as observed through a haze of marijuana fug, like the distant sounds of angrily protesting youths so beloved of the media, have an undeniable power to bewitch, though I am not among those who believe it so powerful as to make the election’s outcome a foregone conclusion...

...It has also acted as a continuing reinforcement to what I call the “liberationist” outlook on life that has wrought such havoc in our culture and society in the years since the Spectator’s foundation...

...It is that political debate is no longer a matter of left and right or Democrat and Republican nearly so much as it is of the conflict between serious people and Media Mad simpletons like Messrs Carter and Gore...

...Professor Dershowitz is so obviously biased, he says, that there’s no point in continuing...

...Clinton next year...

...To judge from Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains, a hagiographical documentary by Jonathan Demme, he has even adopted that peculiar babyboomer narcissism that supposes the whole world is interested in his feelings—especially his feelings of compassion for the downtrodden and hurt at the names he has been called, presumably by those without such compassion, as a result of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid...

...Yes, it does seem simple, doesn’t it...

...Doesn’t the fact that Jimmyfinds it so simple also tell you something—like why he was turned out of office in a landslide in 1980...

...Peace is good...

...war isn’t...

...The allure is today the same as it was for those protesters of old, and for the various folkish and rock ’n’ roll crooners who flattered them, namely the seductive charm of the easy answer...

...Its emphases on rhythm over melody and adolescent angst over more grown-up emotions, plus the encouragement it has always given to the already strong temptations of youth, including not just sexual incontinence but also moral and emotional posturing of the most offensive kind, have tended to crowd out genuine and unaffected expressions of musical feeling or moral principle—or else to exile them, like poor Robert Goulet, to the Never Never Land of camp...

...To judge by the media—and the numbers of one’s neighbors sporting those silly “01/20/09: Bush’s Last Day” bumper stickers—such people may even be in the majority among our fellow citizens right now...

...All you need is love,” warbled the Beatles, and millions of dope-addled morons slapped their foreheads and said, “Of course...

...HENEWYORKTIMESOBITUARYof Robert Goulet reminded us that “in 1961, The New York Daily News Magazine called him ‘just the man to help stamp out rock ’n’ roll.’” Alas, as the obituarist for the Times added—could it be just a touch wistfully?—“it was an impossible assignment...

...At one point, we see Larry King reading out some rather caustic comments on the Carterite view from the first of these two professors until Jimmy stops him...

...Just look at former President Jimmy Carter...

...It’s a wonderful example of what in a forthcoming book I call “Media Madness,” an affliction of which the 39th president at some point must have contracted one of the earliest, most virulent, and longestlasting cases...

...Demme’s cameras intercut shots of the aftermath of suicide bombings in Israel with shots of Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinian homes as the film’s contribution to making Mr...

...A similarly simplistic outlook upon the world’s conflicts and complexities lies behind almost every political documentary you see these days, from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to Ted Braun’s Darfur Now...

...If we do elect her, then doubtless it will once again be The American Spectator that leads the thinking minority through the wilderness...

...By 1967, when The American Spectator first saw the light of day in Bloomington, Indiana, most people of the generation of the Spectator’s editors—and your correspondent—would probably have forgotten that in that dim and distant past of six years previous anyone had even wanted to stamp out rock ’n’ roll...

...People have a homeland...

...Even the Bright Young Things of the 1920s Jazz Age, in so many ways the prototypes for the libertines of the 1960s, would have laughed at such simplicity...

...The film also finds the problem of conflict in the Middle East a simple one—so simple that it must have been solved years ago if there were not bad men preventing Jimmy’s solution from being put into effect...

...J A M E S B O W M A N DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 9 Man From Plains...

...DEMME’SFILMFOLLOWSthe former president on a cross-country publicity-tour he made last year on behalf of this book, and if it were all you knew about Jimmy Carter, you would have to believe that he was the sort of American folk hero C O N S E R V A T I V E T A S T E S Among the Mad Simpletons 7 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 T by James Bowman whom ordinary people name their children after, the subject of popular ballads like Paul Bunyan or John Henry or Jesse James, and that he is a man who is universally adored wherever he goes...

...Although I have at various times enjoyed a number of popular songs in the style of what that ultimate square, Principal Seymour Skinner of The Simpsons, once called “rock and/or roll,” I think that over the last half-century it has on balance been more of a force for ill than for good in our common cultural life...

...They don’t get much time...

...But it was the contribution —if that is the right word for it—of the youth culture of the 1960s to America’s storied political history to realize that by remaining perpetually adolescent you could not only learn to take the easy answers seriously throughout your adult life, you could even cling to them until you were safely delivered by time into your second childhood...

...Bythat time, the parents who had complained about the suggestiveness of Elvis Presley’s stage performances had much bigger problems to worry about...

...After more than eight decades of knocking around in the world and nearly three since his bitter political comeuppance, he still appears to believe that calling for an end to violence is a policy...

...Our esteemed founder and editor of the Spectator through all of its 40 years, R. Emmett Tyrrell, has pointed out that presidential elections in which there is someone named Clinton at the top of the Democratic ticket—of which, at the time of writing, it looks as if the next will be one—are also referenda on the 1960s...

...Alan Dershowitz, whom he declined to debate in person, and Prof...

...You might even believe that he is a symbol throughout the land of the Golden Age of the late 1970s when the simplistic nonsense he spouts from one end of this movie to the other was issuing from the Oval Office, to the unspeakable illumination and gratification of the foreign potentates of the day, whom he was wont to lecture, as well as admiring throngs—young and old, rich and poor, hippie and square—back at home...

...At 83 he is not himself of the generation of peace and love, but he seems in some ways to have been hit harder by its stunning insights even than the Clintons themselves...

...Kenneth Stein, who resigned from the Carter Center over the book...

...Likewise, whenever someone is reported to have criticized the great man for being anti-Israel, or even anti-Semitic, he looks pained and delivers what he apparently sees as a definitive refutation, namely that he has called for an end to violence on bothsides...