IN PRAISE OF YOUTHFUL IDEALISM
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Cover Story In Praise of Youthful Idealism R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. I write from a profound sense of mental and physical exhaustion, for I have just read every jot, tittle and splutter uttered by...
...Quite simply Spiro Agnew is an idealistic young politicoe troubled by romantic visions of yesterday's freedom and infused with the spirit of poetry...
...As with the rest of America's dissipated aristocrats the intellectuals charge their minds with great purpose, higher laws and lofty morality...
...The affluent fat cats have threatened his very life and their children harass him in public...
...Some among them--the older ones-realize their days of Brahmin demagoguery are over...
...Agnew is one of those melancholy flops...
...This in itself never bothers intellectuals for they lust for attention even if they attract it only by being the focal point of a nation of guffaws...
...To which Harvard's faculty lounge rumbles something like "Nationalize sin...
...Robust monologues delivered before crackling flashbulbs and whirring television cameras have in the past raised all sorts of indecorous slobs to the level of folk heroes without attracting a sniff of displeasure from the thrones of the mighty...
...Nixon not prejudice the jury, why did they publicize with such gusto his one untidy sentence...
...In the case of Mr...
...They would have "the little people" gutted by velleity and living on the hem of hysteria-all the easier to reign over them, preserving their exalted status...
...AMERICA ARE YOU LISTENING...
...His speeches attracted more partisan sniper fire, more ideological bombardment, than those of any vice president in the sublime history of that high office...
...Dull things like respect for law...
...By citing Mr...
...Obviously adherents to democracy cannot take such misanthropes very seriously...
...And now, having regained consciousness and received the assurance of my family physician that I again have complete command of my faculties, I may cogitate over this arduous but somehow wonderful adventure...
...Thomas Jefferson distinguished monster, Mr...
...Alexis de Tocqueville and Spiro Agnew along with many of America's foremost democratic theorists...
...Nixon was wrong in his statement, but was not the press just a little remiss in acting as wantonly as it did...
...He was speaking routinely to a small group of newsmen after a minor talk with one hundred or so law enforcement agents thousands of miles away from the trial...
...But that was twenty-five years ago...
...Glimpses at the New York Times suggested that the Know-Nothing Party was again a going concern with powerful connections deep within the White House...
...Agnew's criticism to abate...
...After reading articles about him by our competitors, The Saturday Review, The New Republic, The Nation, etc...
...Agnew defends, so he says, dull things, "dull things like patriotism...
...The fall riots will be on schedule...
...Commonality in Tocqueville's words includes "common forms, 'manners and traditions...
...Polarization is another of those perfectly serviceable words bequeathed us by our ancestors and recently summoned by the press for its very special purposes...
...Agnew placed in high taxonomic relief those creatures who extirpate mores, tearing apart commonality and hobbling democratic process...
...Its world is a hallucinogenic dream of great sinners and epic heroes...
...Another of the popular briefs his critics bring against him relies on the educated man's hysteria over the "authoritarian personality...
...So hamstrung by our obscenely partisan Congress that it has as yet not even been able to bestow upon us history's most generous welfare package, just how is the administration going to gag the mighty gossip industry...
...The networks hold a mysterious spell over the FCC and have used it to eliminate the growth of competitive networks, especially pay television...
...This structure of mores we call commonality, if it can endure our ephemeral crises and emergency legislation, will measure social programs and illuminate social goals...
...For having surmounted all the hazardous peaks of Mr...
...I do not mean to imply their guilt...
...How long can we ignore them...
...The package arrived in a plain brown wrapper, and I devoured it in one sitting...
...Yes, I actually labored over everything recently said by the Vice President, only to lumber on to everything the media have said about him --' that is, everything their lawyers would allow, them to print or mutter...
...Nixon dreadfully shallow...
...Recently a large research corporation in Lubbock, Texas, undertook a study of intellectuals and earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris) to discover which possessed longer attention spans...
...Washington Post Syndicate R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Manson's defense by referring to him as a murderer when he was legally only an alleged murderer...
...He is (in his own way) an idealistic young man trying to strike the resonance of fine metal in a plastic world...
...Agnew's speeches and tippytoed round his every volcanic interview, I - in a moment of youthful brashness - ventured on to the Himalayas as it were, to the vast mountains of criticism that have risen about this most controversial statesman...
...Can you hear it...
...And of course that "chauffeur" is an opinionated taxi driver residing in Queens and spouting opinions utterly unheard of over at the Times.Urban crime and human or-neriness can no longer be kept from the editorial aristocrats...
...Agnew's dark celebrity...
...From reading it I believe you will discover why the intellectual performs in the ways that it does, and why it is held in such high esteem by the rest of the decadent aristocrats in the American aquarium...
...Oh, but it is all too, too terrible to bear so the aristocrats at the Times ring up their favorite intellectual for a shot of ideology...
...Agnew cannot even hint that the gossips dislike him lest they go into scenes of simpering and fretting unmatched since Mrs...
...Though the intellectual retained more of what it saw, the researchers report that the earthworm possesses a longer attention span, roughly four-tenths of a second...
...Obsessed with red meat, they ignore major portions of his speeches, portions prepared most meticulously and presented most intelligently...
...For further documentation I have overcome all the scruples of my conscience and refer you to a New York Times article by Art Schlesinger wherein this famed journalist admits the Vice President rarely comments on "conflicts of policy...
...It was only a matter of time before the Bolsheviki of Harvard would be in chains...
...Portentous shadows shrouded the land, precursors to the imminent resurrection of A. Mitchell Palmer, William Jennings Bryan and the fabled Senator Joseph McCarthy, all in one puff...
...Whereas apple pie and mama have suffered on the cynic's anvil, the free press has continued to shine, burnished by idealists and skeptics alike...
...Rather they want Mr...
...Inasmuch as the networks are the beneficiaries of a monopoly inhibiting competition and treading on the First Amendment, these licenses should be rescinded...
...It was not Mr...
...You can review all the dictionaries on this one and they will never quite impart the flavor this word is supposed to discharge...
...If it once alleviated human travail it does so no more, and as it was always laced with antidemocratic strains it has left the aristocrats forlornly atop its superannuated structures-Ice Age bureaucracies, rococco towers of vested in-terests-or holed up in the bunkers of its defeated ideology-multiversities, stuffy editorial offices-hopelessly removed from the citizenry...
...The professors' achievement has been even more ignominious...
...No, modern journalists have tried through exaggeration, deceit and arrant neglect to frighten the nation into viewing Mr...
...The war whoops are resounding you see not because of the way Mr...
...This is an old wives' tale, popularized by Ritualistic Liberals, which marks anyone who criticizes them ipso facto an Austrian house painter...
...Like the rest of the members of my glorious generation I was under immense stress...
...For (before being called to service by his party during the election season) his speeches grew less partisan and were always ideologically vague...
...Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was photographed drinking bottled beer with her gardener...
...But it was weak tea compared to the pronun-ciamentoes of his critics after whose reading I spent hours in my prayer chamber...
...This is true throughout the civilized world, and even in parts of Latin America, where the Bishops have brought the mystery of television...
...Katharine Graham and her little gazette Not even the New York Times was beyond his vengeance...
...Freedom and equality have been the raw material for every political exhibitionist since Tom Paine...
...The American intellectual (Homo ignoramus) like the editorialist and commentator is an odd fish...
...That is, they have corrupted the churches, deemphasized the family and reoriented the matrices of education so that today they inculcate chaotic lifestyles ignorant of western civilization and devoid of American mores or commonality...
...They want to censor him, and if he acknowledges their criticism with any but the most abject reply he is imperiling their poor freedoms...
...Agnew says things but because of what he says...
...Let us never forget that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable...
...Like "law and order," "extremism," "escalation" and the other asphyxiating terms of the sixties, it reeks with deadly connotation...
...If anything intelligent ever sneaks into the six o'clock news, it is generally because its author has the instincts of a P. T. Barnum or Cecil B. DeMille...
...Most importantly commonality defines the language of discourse, and establishes the rules of democratic process, soothing the abrasions of political conflict with the unguents of understanding...
...I mean to proclaim it in C major...
...Agnew's character...
...Of course the gossips are just pulling our legs...
...Admittedly it was pretty strong medicine...
...Polarization is the one form of dissent our liberal friends frown upon...
...they "are not at the bottom of the social ladder-indeed, many of them were born on the social ladder and have very great say about who is to climb on which rung....They can be found in every segment of society that helps to form the opinions of society at large: in the universities, in the media, in government, in the great professions...For the first time in history a great nation is threatened not by those who have nothing but by those who have almost everything "-that is to say by the decadent aristocrats who, driven by the only ardor their desiccated dogma has left them, charge their liegemen to denature the mores of the plain folk...
...In desperation they recently turned to a speech by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Dean Burch, on which they had to work a little palmistry...
...Chet Huntley characterizes their aspirations...
...Exactly how a solitary vice president is going to bring down the ax on ABC-CBS-NBC, their hundreds of affiliates and the great newspapers of the land, unhindered by either the nation's occasional or career libertarians (ACLU) and despite almost two centuries of American constitutional process, evades me...
...What really bothers them is their malignant realization that regardless how majestically they strut and posture they are not themselves superior to anything save strep throat...
...But who speaks for commonality...
...Nixon was not delivering his State of the Union Address, nor was he giving a charge to the jury or addressing anyone closely connected with the trial...
...Agnew's daintier critics (for instance John Osborne of The New Republic) tell us that it is because of his rhetorical muscularity - his proclivity for, in his words, "throwing them a little red meat...
...Any enduring democracy embraces three social requisites: freedom, equality and commonality...
...Great American Series Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper...
...Ah, how wrong I was...
...Given to megalomania, they would like to favor Plato's government by the superior man but know in their heart of hearts that such government would not even accord them the distinction they presently enjoy under democracy--where there is always a peripheral respect shown to clownishness...
...The Alternative urges all Americans to lower their voices, enter into dialogue (rap heavily) and try to understand listen to what this young man is trying to tell us or it may be too late...
...Sensing that our era is characterized by "a vague uneasiness that our values are corny-that there is something wrong with being patriotic, honest, moral, or hardworking," he fears "the last decade saw the most precipitous decline in respect for law of any decade in our history...
...Their ideal statesman is a charming, foppish promoter of circuses and sham...
...He might still have one ethnic but lately they have been getting "uppity...
...Truly this is a grand irony, for the government should not have granted these licenses in the first place...
...Now they have changed their theme from "Agnew the Simp" to "Agnew the Menace," and we are all supposed to pack our bags every time he approaches a dais...
...If the press was so anxious that Mr...
...And so they continue to rave over the Agnew Menace...
...Shame overcomes me as I recollect how I was duped by the media...
...And Mr...
...While encouraging diversity of expression among networks this would prevent the government from favoring one network over another and thereby pressing the media's jugular...
...For a certitude the Klan was about...
...Mercilessly he would strike the most defenseless of American institutions, uncoiling a venomous tongue and hatefully lashing the last relics of purity in the land: first the powerless television networks, then poor Mrs...
...The faintest whiff of it is supposed to overcome us with stupefaction enchanting us to fall in line behind the artful editorialist...
...I feared for my nation...
...the in-, tellectual is too incompetent, his mind too skittish, to fasten on one problem for more than a few seconds...
...The psychiatrists call this neurosis...
...In any case solons like Lord Lindsay and Colonel Fulbright have for years given themselves to provocative if not incivistic remarks without ever suffering any of Mr...
...Fee free to buy those inspirational American flag door mats...
...Nixon and Agnew as so possessed by the devil as to defile one of America's most sacred blessings...
...I wrote the American Ministry of Information for a chrestomathy of his latest speeches, half expecting a Little Red Book...
...The intellectual is constantly looking across the counter at the common man and trying to sell him something...
...American Liberalism--an odd agglutination of abstraction, ambiguity and moonshine-has lost the old savor...
...After all, you have never heard of an intellectual chairing the board of General Motors or founding an oil empire, have you...
...We may not all share his ideals, but we have to admire his sincerity...
...Nixon who scurried to blast the story through the national wire services...
...Apartments cost more, slums have spread out, and the plain folk are different from "you and me...
...After diligently reading the Vice President's speeches I must dutifully report to you that there are dramatic moments of "red meat," but if it is a crime for him to "throw" that meat, those who serve it so fulsomely to the public are at least accomplices to that crime...
...Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle...
...Just as the government once auctioned its public lands, it should now auction its frequencies to any group able to meet the market price...
...Through the years the press has enthusiastically sought dramatic headlines, and television-radio is a big-time promoter of the more theatrical portrayals of mischief and nonsense...
...those who do not understand this youthful crusader may traduce him for dissenting from the customs of his peers, but there is much room in America for such dissent...
...Most of the time Mr...
...The Supreme Court would seem to think so based on its 1967 decision in Curtis Publishing Co...
...Agnew is not even a danger to the isolates who pay taxes nor to the magnificoes of the media, for their case against him is as ridiculous as it is imaginative...
...Agnew will not repress us...
...Rather than stock its mind with sound practical information, the intellectual wanders around cluttering it with exotic curiosity pieces, bizarre hand-me-downs and amateur magic acts, until it approaches the ordered chaos of one of those artsy-craftsy gift shops where everything is overpriced and nothing is valuable...
...Yet his first mention of this newly found minority group set The New Yorker (Radical Chic's answer to the louse underground) to conjuring up the most terrifying visions of the totalitarian nightmare...
...Such words are themselves mere period pieces, and those who spray them are charlatans, modernized versions of the quacks who mesmerized us into Prohibition and anti-anti-communism...
...But I fear there is one point I have not come to terms with, and that is Mr...
...Agnew's remark about sequestering "rotten apples," his critics assert that he is ushering in a Draconian age of repression (and with his authoritarian personality what else could you expect...
...Others-the codfish aristocrats, the parvenuesare victims of what they have themselves called "status displacement...
...In all Mr...
...Ah, but this was a mere warm-up...
...No matter what language a commentator's tongue is geared for, his audience presumes him to be a nitwit...
...In that instance the President reputedly prejudiced Mr...
...I had not always taken the media so seriously...
...Agnew's speeches have been quite thoughtful, and since his New Orleans talk-in which he identified his critics as an "effete corps of impudent snobs"-even his critics have agreed...
...Thus in spite of the absurd assertions about the awesome intelligence deposited in today's youth, a decade of relaxed mores has ended with "much of the youth of America...
...Agnew's critics have adduced one more allegation to prove him a national hazard...
...But this is not what the networks are asking of the Administration...
...It was in this storm celler of depression - with the First Amendment gone, the Bill of Rights aflame - that I decided to investigate this Agnew for myself...
...Agnew is refrigerating the nation into "polarization...
...bio wing their minds with chemicals to escape reality and the plain business of facing up to tough, everyday problems...
...It started with one of those crises which fate inevitably fires into every great man's life...
...Agnew is no menace nor is he the fiendish character about which the aristocracy howls...
...But their uncertain state of mind notwithstanding, The New Yorker's savants certainly have to admit that in a nation visited last year by 4330 bombings, 1475 bombings manques and 35,129 bombing threats, there might well exist some sort of rotten apples...
...Gratefully the Vice President is moving to the beat of his own drum...
...Had the media merely reported the Vice President's doings and allowed their audience to decide his thoughtfulness, social value, historical displacement and character, they would stand in far better stead to their readers and be, I am certain, in no greater danger of losing their immortal souls to the fires below...
...He is fresh and innovative, doing his own-very special-thing...
...It was not Mr...
...Bereft of mores and with their wellsprings about dried up, thousands of young Americans shuffle about "without a cultural heritage, without a set of spiritual values, and with a moral code summed up in that idealistic injunction, 'Do your own thing.'" The dissolution of mores "has pointed our nation toward the brink of anarchy...
...One would never have imagined that the Vice President would in a matter of months contribute constructively to American political discourse...
...He still dresses smartly but so does the doorman...
...Agnew sound like a chorus of asthmatics singing Bach's B Minor Mass...
...Presidents regularly raise such oafs to prominence on Presidential commissions as a practical joke that even the dullest citizen understands and enjoys immensely...
...Agnew speaks, he speaks about the mores of the American people...
...Agnew, let me clarify this...
...Agnew the press merely neglects his more intelligent statements, heating up the rhetoric as they go...
...Yet the furor continues, and peace-loving Americans are starting to wonder why...
...He should be encouraged...
...It is also possible the earthworm is more adept at cognitive learning under most conditions...
...I commend this engrossing report to you...
...Scottie Reston gets Ken Galbraith on the line and pants "What can we do about the Agnew crisis...
...Even social problems laugh at them...
...The McGill Manufacturing Company Supports The Alternative Approach to a Better America Valparaiso, Indianative Approach to a Better America Valparaiso, Indianaa...
...According to their interpretation Mr...
...My readings of his speeches convince me of this, for rather than revealing the enormities of the Vice President, my research indicates that in America the word "media" is a code word for aristocracy...decadent aristocracy...
...Departing from the great American tradition of disparaging one's predecessors, he graciously accorded well-deserved praise to President Johnson for "his selfless attitude (which) merits the respect of all Americans," and to Dean Rusk for giving America "an example of personal courage, perseverance, loyalty and wisdom that will be the yardstick against which present and future secretaries will be measured...
...When they began their careers, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year income bought gorgeous costumes, a fine motor car, a spacious cave and a couple ethnics to serve tea...
...It might have gone over better were the majority of Americans still believers in ghosts and goblins...
...He finds Mr...
...A democratic people's mores are the warp and woof of commonality, and in Democracy in America he categorized commonality as one of the "bulwarks of freedom" crucial to insulating minorities from the caprice of a transient majority...
...We at The Alternative fear for this land which we love...
...It is one of our most august heritages...
...Agnew's expatiations on the media, their aggrieved defenders have not detected one hint as to exactly how Mr...
...To the aristocrats this is not only scandalous, it is heretical, and for the sake of heresy, I have encapsuled some of his more recent utterances that we might all appreciate Mr...
...I have arrived at the conclusion Mr...
...The democratic ideal that everyone counts is as foreign to their minds as oxygen...
...v. Wally Butts in which they found the publisher of slanderous statements, as well as the author, guilty...
...Surely the press room astrologers do not see Messrs...
...Their criticisms of Mr...
...It loathes democracy, though intellectuals have been joy-riding on its rhetoric for many years...
...In America freedom of the press is right born of doctrine and enshrined by tradition...
...On some days it has goaded us to our most superb achievements, but on others it has fallen flat...
...The magnificoes of the media simply disapprove of what he says and fail to report it...
...Its treatment of Mr...
...Today when his nibs is chauffeured over to the editorial tabernacle of the Times it is from an apartment no longer segregated from those of the lower class...
...At the other end of the social ladder we see the common laborers, the proletariat, awakening to his support...
...Agnew's allusions to "fat Japs" and "Polacks" attracted so much criticism that it seemed Washington would have to renegotiate its transistor radio treaty and put down civil war in Chicago...
...Surely Mr...
...Yet sensational rhetoric is the creation of the media...
...It is as important for him as it is for us...
...It is an allegation I find deliriously amusing, to wit, Mr...
...Agnew has assured us that he will work within the system-but if the system fails to respond, what next...
...There is a legitimate counter culture here, and their grievances are just...
...Even the most gullible teen-aged street mystic recognizes that the media overflow with prejudice, yet Mr...
...Yet if, in what he says, he is discommoding the decadent aristocrats in the media and on the campus, he is also making a genuine contribution to political discourse by invigorating one of the most important elements in democratic society...
...Repression was upon us...
...Agnew seems a constant reminder that there are other perspectives on social problems and that some social problems are and have for decades been facts of life...
...Today, however, I am my old self and I stand conscience- bound to inform you that the Statue of Liberty is secure - you may still bomb it...
...Their case is a little weak, but let us pursue their most popular allegations...
...George Wallace in his most bigoted eloquence did not draw the sustained derision that now showers the Vice President...
...These thoughts were on Chet Hun-tley's mind...
...But today such devotees of the occult as remain are the butt of public ridicule...
...Agnew as Doctor Nixon's Frankenstein, and all they have managed, aside from discomfiting his golf game, is to display themselves as foolish and dubious...
...When the government granted licenses, it then sanctioned a monopoly in restraint of trade...
...Agnew's achievement, the media's failure and the importance of strong mores to a free society...
...Agnew could silence them...
...Even the Hon...
...It is typical of their prodigious talent for passing the buck...
...Actually, Mr...
...Beginning on the sound sociological premise that "order in society begins with discipline and authority in the home," he concludes that the last decade's tumult arose when "traditional patterns of discipline and expectation were discar-,ded...
...It is the origin of The Federalist Papers, the proving grounds for our Hemingways and Har-dings and the charnel house for false pretense and malfeasance...
...In days of yore I had laughed them off with the same merriment I generally accord female shot putters, and visiting African royalty, for no half-intelligent American takes a television commentator seriously...
...What will be his resort...
...as with Saint Paul, mine was a moment of revelation from which I would never be quite the same old rascal...
...Indeed this Agnew was bad stuff...
...Burch would silence network television's criticism by threatening withdrawal of FCC licenses...
...Listening to a commentator's silly telegenic maunderings makes, I suspect, even the Pope laugh...
...His ideal president would be something like Leonard Bernstein, but never, never a man who defends the "dull things...
...Lest my more dubious readers convict me of cunningly suggesting the press guilty of a breach of propriety in its reportage of Mr...
...We have nothing to fear for traditional American liberties...
...Now Mr...
...Under democracy though they remain uneasy, for the superior man who usually overcomes the conflicting asininities of the crowd and governs, places them in positions of ridicule...
...I write from a profound sense of mental and physical exhaustion, for I have just read every jot, tittle and splutter uttered by Spiro T. Agnew since the plain folk of this great republic anointed him Vice President of these United States...
...Last May Mr...
...So what else did you expect from an intellectual...
...Rather hysterically they allege, and I here cite The Saturday Review as but one of the plaintiffs, that the Vice President is threatening with extinction the communication media's revered right of free speech...
...Recently we saw an even more remarkable example of their weakness in the famous Manson flap...
...On one side we see this young man, this brave young idealist ridiculed for speaking a language we do not understand, upbraided for his "distinctive" dress and alien ways...
...Of course not...
...Singlemindedly they have destroyed America's transmitters of mores...
...is an itinerant golf caddy and political editor of THE NATIONAL TATTLER...
...Somber television commentators were reporting the nightly prowlings of the feared Agnew...
...Even assuming his Commander-in-Chief brings up the heavy artillery, I annot fathom how the administration will oring the media to heel without first destroying itself...
...Somehow all this furor seemed a bit odd...
...Restaurants are crowded and taxis hard to get...
...Agnew and dissent from the Liberalism prevailing at NBC...
...Polarization when spoken, say, by David Brinkley means that the Republic's plain folk agree with Mr...
...Dull things like incentive...
...Even if-much to the embarrassment of America's elite corps-the citizenry supports the Administration, I cannot imagine that support to be so slavish ,that they would deny themselves one of the linchpins of their democracy...
...No would-be Lincoln ever caresses a microphone without first pinning these inspirational words inside his seersucker...
...Indeed Mr...
...Nixon who roared in a banner headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Times (Quoth: "Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares" - declares, no less...
...These revelations trouble James Reston...
...It is subversive...
...Now for me, there is a breezy vagueness about the term, "rotten apples" - and at any rate to denounce them just does not sound like a clarion call for genocide...
Vol. 4 • November 1970 • No. 1
