The Continuing Crisis
Editorial have us believe that it is the Vietnam War. But that jungle rumpus continued uninterrupted through the long winter even while the charlatans snoozed. And, of-course, it is as obvious as...
...they mutilate the spirit...
...Bruno Bettelheim that these lemmings are actually "obsolete youth," the networks hope to give them a purpose...
...Wallace a future constituency...
...Nonetheless, it seems that the commentators are forever lavishing attention on the lemmings, getting duped by the charlatans' staged events and reacting to their vaticinations of doom...
...Agnew and fellow critics should remember just one thing as they look for serpentine motives behind the com-menator's bosh...
...For the lemmings have never bothered to establish a viable political organization-and there is a simple reason for it...
...They are neither...
...But I believe it is incorrect to lump the electronic press along with these others...
...And the two or three thousand peace lemmings who recently rode into Washington are but a puny fraction of the university population of over seven million young people who want the war ended, but who realize that such things as armies are not so easy to disassemble as television props...
...II But why do the lemmings come to Washington...
...What of the uglier of our brothers...
...It is an act of Christian charity to call a fat woman beautiful...
...The peace lemmings are generally wretched, half-formed little creatures...
...They need to feel whole...
...Nixon and Mr...
...Agreeing with Dr...
...Of course their stories are as crooked as a dog's hind leg...
...And, of-course, it is as obvious as the mustache on the Queen's face that Mr...
...So what brings out the charlatans and the vultures every spring, and why do they swarm around Babylon on the Potomac...
...So, the lemmings march on Washington...
...But one must follow closely the reasoning of saints...
...The commentators are sentient, intelligent men possessed of deep resources of virtue, and I admire them...
...And how is it that the vacant blabber of Maine's old mule-faced patriot doubles in frequency with the return of the cherry blossoms...
...This is not to say your radio or television speaks God's truth...
...The thousand or so ill-tempered veterans who paraded so maudlinly and mischievously through Washington were but the deranged residue of the 2.49 million mature men who served their country dutifully in Vietnam and who are returning to live in dignity...
...And most of those who praise them are a combination of the two...
...Nixon is the first President in the last five to scale down the war, and this reduction has been continuous...
...Of course, the weather is also nice in Fort Lauderdale or Daytona Beach...
...For I believe that theirs is an act of charity...
...Agnew are "polarizing the community...
...No one knows...
...Those who denounce the performers of network news as demons are for a certitude seeing horns where halos rise...
...The only names that continue to appear across the air waves are those of the charlatans and they are simply too shifty for the mutilators and the mutilated...
...It does no harm to report their anti-intellectualism as the achievement of "the brightest generation in our history," their simian aesthetics as a "new sensibility" and their surliness as the sweetness of youth...
...The male of their species was always the tenth man on the baseball team and the twelfth man when it came time forfootball...
...Through all their seasonal processions none of their leaders-no matter how drenched in electronic grace-has ever been around for a second season...
...But, to many of the peace lemmings, high falutin purpose is a kind of catnip, and making a martyr of oneself at a beach party cannot compare with making a nuisance of oneself at the State Department...
...So many of the lemmings go to Florida first...
...Their female could never find the kind of cosmetic to make a walrus look like a human being...
...They even mutilate themselves, and they destroy their own leaders...
...They are hysterical and superstitious...
...The McGoverns, the Kennedys and the Muskies...
...Even the fawning adults, who think every under-thirty neurotic is a member of the Chosen Generation, would choke on the claim that the peace lemmings marched on Fort Lauderdale so that peace might come to Vietnam...
...In everything they tried most lemmings never quite fit...
...Or why flies frequent garbage heaps...
...The commentators are correct...
...Certainly they do not journey to Washington merely to get their pockets picked by Jerry Rubin and to enhance the celebrity of the Great Democracy's fourth-rate Eisenhowers...
...The goody-goodies who composed the mob at the White House Conference on Youth were a pack of brats...
...And a great nation can afford to clean up their debris (the bill after the 1969 Vietnam War Moratorium was $688,714) and soothe their premonitions of uselessness...
...It is a grievous injustice to Eric Severeid to identify him as just another brand of Kennedy, just another John Gardner without the vaults of baloney, just a Muskie without the sawdust to clog his coco...
...For garnished with their middle-class baubles and traumatized by their brush with the university's thalidomide intellectuals, these college-aged peace lemmings are the perfect chumps, and at their expense a growing host of swindlers are getting fat...
...They need something to believe in...
...Further, in spite of all the lemmings' obvious destructiveness, somehow the commentators palm it off as the work of creative young minds, and when the lemmings disrupt campus speakers, prevent peaceful assembly by moderate students, intimidate professors and harass government officials, somehow the commentators fall into caviling about how Mr...
...Is this so wrong...
...When the commentator reports mindlessness as thoughtfulness, destructiveness as creativity and banality as singularity, many intelligent Americans conclude that they are either fools or impostors...
...So when the television commentators see them throwing one of their massed tantrums they put it all in a rosy hue...
...But the majority of veterans, and the majority of students are not rodents, and they are wary of charlatans who are out to mulct and exploit them...
...Agnew cites the commentators' incomparable fish stories, their deft intonation of weasel words, their cunning paralogistics, I must dissent...
...George Nathan...
...As most are ignoramuses and many are bounders their activity could not fail to be destructive...
...And surely that far away look in pious George McGovern's eye would not be cast towards 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if he did not sense a mystic relationship with the academy's restless lemmings...
...Then too, their marches have had all the effect on government policy (that is American government policy) as Geritol on a month-old cadaver...
...The news networks realize this and have compassion for them...
...They must be made to think that their scrawny, febrile endeavors are great deeds, that they have a strong arm on the rudder of the Great Republic, that their vicious, bestial way of life will send civilization soaring...
...In 1968 the lemmings surely did not have their way with Mr...
...Indeed, the average news commentator is as gentle as Saint Francis and as charitable as Miss Nightingale...
...they mutilate institutions...
...they are doing God's own work...
...Humphrey or with Mr...
...They mutilate property, private and public...
...But the typical news commentator sits gaping before his microphone and declares1 that the kind of young man performing such stunts is "likely to feel intense patriotism...
...Asking such questions is like asking why shyster lawyers haunt ambulance depots and emergency wards...
...And they are too stupid to appreciate the strange doings that abound on Capitol Hill...
...The lemmings are mutilators...
...III So it is that the peace lemmings and the charlatans can be dismissed as dolts and swindlers...
...To the average thinking person any impudent dreg burning an American flag, urging a Viet Cong victory or flaunting a ring made from the plane of a downed American pilot is an unadorned incivist...
...And it is off these helpless creatures that the modern American charlatans make their shady livings...
...The most perceptive explanation for the marches on Washington that I have read is that the weather is nice and there is not much else to do...
...He has reduced the number of troops in Vietnam from the 549,500, stationed there by the Johnson Administration to 284, and in December only 184,000 will be in Vietnam...
...Naturally, all of this is untrue...
...Where are the Hawks and the Browns of yesteryear...
...the Rennie Da vises, the Jerry Rubins and the David Dellingers come to life in the spring, because it is in springtime that the nervous swarms of peace lemmings make their exodus from the great universities, streaming into Washington, D.C...
...They are ugly ducklings that realize they are growing into dodo birds...
...in the future none of them will fit...
...The uglies need to be told that they are beautiful...
...For American policy is decided at the polls by the people...
...Even when the eminent Mr...
...Nixon, and no one has ever claimed that their subsequent rampages or marches affected the 1970 elections-except to assure Mr...
...Reich would be back in New Haven instructing aspiring F. Lee Baileys in the barrister's art of intimidating female jurists, and Davis would be off joining the Elks while sweating furiously for acceptance in the Junior Chamber of Commerce...
...Americans have come to expect their young to make preposterous demands, and Washington is the town in which to do it...
...The commentators' exaggerated coverage of the march of the lemmings was one of the most unsordid gestures of this century...
...IV Now it is manifest that-contrary to the mythopoeic utterances of the commentators-those peace lemmings who rise up every spring are not constructive members of society-much the contrary...
...Their eyes must always be pointed to the horizon, so they will not fall into a sulk over their present low state...
...After all, how would Charles Reich (LL.B.,J.D...
...or Rennie Davis be spending his sober moments were there not swarms of peace lemmings to victimize...
...Naturally such an exegesis is considered high profanity amongst America's idolaters of youth, but the elaborate arcanum they have hammered out about youth embraces such a bewildering mass of spurious reasoning and idiotic notions that it is impenetrable to an intelligent American, and no reader of The Alternative worries much about arousing their disapprobation-in fact most consider it a mark of distinguished achievement...
...Further he has cut defense spending from 45 per cent of the budget in 1968 to 37 per cent of the budget he sent Congress, January a year ago...
...Besides many of them did not want to study anyhow, and their professors have convinced them that they are right...
...Others say it is mismanagement of the government, but governments are always mismanaged-and Americans actually enjoy the spectacle of bungling statesmen vigorously promoting inefficiency, scandal and humiliation...
...Why does Senator Rupert V. Hartke, who during the last election season uttered such calm, conservative sonorities, now become such an annoying windbag...
...the Reichs, the Gardners and the Ramsey Clarks...
Vol. 4 • May 1971 • No. 6
