In the Shadow of Yesterday's Foolishness
Nathan, George
Editorials In the Shadow of Yesterday's Foolishness The problem with the Ritualistic Liberal in contemporary America is that he thinks the 1920's never ended;...
...To me a convention of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) is as incomprehensible as an evening spent eavesdropping at the city drunk tank...
...Ten years ago there was more sympathy for lowering the driver's age than for lowering the voting age...
...His belief in recognizing de ~acto governments leads him to exhort recognition of Red China while shunning Rhodesia or South Africa...
...Nixon's party...
...Compared to Teddy Kennedy, Harding was a genius...
...Not surprisingly he envisions himself as the authentic spokesman for real patriotism and real Americanism...
...George Nathan Flush Times Return for the Career Moralists As the guns cool in Vietnam they seem to be heating up at home...
...His political spokesmen, whom he invariably envisions as towering messiahs, are generally moral idiots...
...Even his supporters agree that about his only qualification for that high office is that his profile would improve the appearance of one side of a ten-cent coin...
...spied on our citizens with military agents...
...Anyone who dared question the freshly-minted exaggerations about the wisdom and reliability of eighteen-year-oMs was written off as a disciple of Fisher Ames...
...Of course not...
...The only difference I can see between him and William Jennings Bryan is that McGovern will never even once get the opportunity to be rejected by the American people...
...Of course the disturbing thing about the ritualistic leftist is not his bewildering abundance of contradictions or even his transmogrification of liberalism...
...There you have it - - everything but a reference to Sacco and Vanzetti...
...the ritualistic leftist is an annoyance everywhere else...
...His claims to thoughtfulness are empty and idiotic...
...Political bombings and massed violence are, and the public interest will not be served by confusing yesterday's foolishness with today's social problems...
...the problem with the Ritualistic Rightist is that he wishes they had never ended...
...Then the universities started going up in smoke, and word spread that the students were oM enough to vote...
...he can no more pass up a "good cause" or a "'moral obligation" than can a hound trot indifferently past the community fire hydrant...
...If he reads at all, the ritualistic leftist reads from a very restricted list of journals...
...According to the celebrated Chicago Tribune, the thing that troubled Mr...
...to avoid the leftist is impossible...
...So in 1972 a luminous pack of eighteen-year-oMs will be sent off to vote...
...If Mr...
...Is that not the cat's pajamas...
...To the editor of American Op/nwn, Coca-Cola and mah-jong sound like an orgy...
...The issue is simply not yet what they call "'a priority...
...According to the mayor, "Washington has tapped telephones without court order...
...To the editors of The New York Review of Books, the swinish William Kunstler smells "as sweet as Clarence Darrow, and history has proved Darrow to have been an honorable man...
...One of his favorites is The .~lew York Review of Books, a journal that is didactic, self-righte0us and written in solecistic Middle English...
...Nixon's diplomacy really does yield up his generation of peace these people might well be forced into less spectacular modes of employment, say at the capitalist's door...
...He is the new wowser, the reincarnation of Babbittry and, in more and more realms of American life, he weaves the new orthodoxy - - one somewhat less civilized than that prevailing in Albania, a nation he greatly admires...
...arrested thousandsof people - - protesters and bystanders alike - - without legal authority...
...For the ritualistic leftist lives in constant fear of the American Legion and the Justice Department...
...What is alarming is that he has appointed himself proctor of American virtue...
...Still not a peep has arisen from the ritualists about the egregious incongruity...
...Unfortunately for the ritualistic leftist, Prohibition, immigration quotas and the League of Nations are not matters of great importance to many contemporary Americans...
...Antigun laws will solve the problem of guns, but anti-drug laws cannot possibly solve the drug problem...
...Hence he is a notorious sucker, and the results can be as devastating as they are bound to be humorous...
...The Alternative October, 1971 3 Editorials In the Shadow of Yesterday's Foolishness The problem with the Ritualistic Liberal in contemporary America is that he thinks the 1920's never ended...
...When it becomes one, who knows, we might all lose our franchise...
...Chiding the idea that money will buy happiness, he urges its expenditure to ease urban discontent, or practically any other social, problem...
...The ritualistr: leftist is an ardent crusader...
...George McGovern is an amusing windbag...
...Lindsay most about the Nixon Administration was its "retreat" from the Bil of Rights...
...Obviously the man deals in antiques...
...The ritualistic leftist's devotion to freedom impels him to loathe America while celebrating Cuba...
...Remember in August when he broke with Mr...
...To listen to the rightist is to take in the bizarre and the dubious...
...The ritualistic rightist is a nuisance to the civilized person whose travels take him through dark hamlets in Mississippi...
...London was more livable during the blitz...
...He has made the richest city in the world the poorest...
...As I see it, the ritualistic leftist feels that everything government does not preside over, it shouM preside over, and about half the things it does preside over, it shouM not preside ore...
...To his mind, A. Mitchell Palmer could strike at any minute, and it is his gorgeously imaginative mind that forever holds me at the edge of my chair...
...Simultaneously he snorts at materialism and spirituality...
...He is an automaton of ritual who duly stands by while wise men sanction his every opinion and aspiration...
...But if one of those same responsible eighteen-year-olds, after spending his afternoon in a voting booth, decides to spend the evening in a saloon, he is liable to be clapped into the calaboose...
...His scholarship is turgid propaganda, booming kookery and moonshine, but it is pondered in all the great universities where it is increasingly held unassailable...
...He begs for a rational social order and goes panting off after every romantic cause shimmering on the horizon...
...and even tried to censor what we see on television and read in our newspapers...
...If there exists a coherent set of principles conducing him to the conclusions he holds they are enigmatic, for his conclusions are chaotic...
...Their imbecilify is epitomized by Mayor Lindsay's high falutin tergiversation to the Democratic party and by his aspirations to the presidency...
...Nixon's Asian diplomacy and Vietnamization - - faced with an uncertain job market, and if Mr...
...Lamentably for the serious student, it is his most literate journal...
...Hence, the ritualistic leftist is most deserving of a firing squad - - and a test of his orthodoxy is just how literally he will interpret this line...
...Somehow the ritualistic leftist has arrogated every decent liberal value and twisted them one by one into abject abominations...
...Government may not breathe on the porno peddler but must rush to the scene if some fiend is selling cereals which do not really snap, crackle and pop or breads which do not actually build strong bodies in eight different ways...
...Lindsay epitomizes the imbecility of the ritualistic leftists who adore him, his public utterances nail down the point with which I began this article - - to wit, that the ritualistic leftist thinks the 1920's never ended...
...And he becomes amusingly indignant if criticized for wearing a lurid rendering of the American flag or if questioned about one of his peculiar interpretations of America's early years...
...Was he boiling because of inflation, the war, crime in the streets or any of the other issues which trouble the contemporary Americano...
...Those whose exertions made for them budding careers in anti-war promotions are now - - due to Mr...
...His art is anti-aesthetic, but it claims lush rewards and high acclaim from the critics who reside, not surprisingly, in the universities...
...Though the paradigmatic ritualistic leftist thinks and acts as autonomously ~s a laboratory rat, he is convinced that he is "doing his own thing," which lands a certain snootiness to his every banal act...
...Lest they suffer such a bleak fate the anti-war peddlers are going to have to sell their clients another program...
...Mter his administration, nothing worse could befall New York City than that he be elected President...
...In his hands, tolerance of ethnic or religious diversity became caresses of encouragement for ethnocentric intolerance and sordidness...
Vol. 5 • October 1971 • No. 1
