Flush Times Return for the Career Moralists
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Flush Times Return for the Career Moralists"
...To me a convention of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) is as incomprehensible as an evening spent eavesdropping at the city drunk tank...
...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...
...The spending took place because men of goodwill, hurried by the claims of ideologues, wished to elevatc the lives of vague congeries of their fellow Americans...
...Then the universities started going up in smoke, and word spread that the students were oM enough to vote...
...For welfare reform does not seem to eliminate poverty...
...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...
...To listen to the rightist is to take in the bizarre and the dubious...
...For the ritualistic leftist lives in constant fear of the American Legion and the Justice Department...
...3) welfarists insisted that welfare was a respectable way to make a living, and so it became...
...And at the Vatican, Sister Flowera collapsed while checking the hems of women visiting St...
...Obviously the man deals in antiques...
...And no one of any significance considers these years to have been particularly salubrious, not policy-makers, not politicians and certainly not the poor...
...Neville Bonner, a parttime carpenter and boomerang maker, disgraced himself when he was sworn in as the first aborigine in the Australian Parliament...
...The Ninety-Second Congress held recess for the summer, and officials in Iguala, Mexico reported Miss Feliz Calderon Montes expired in her hammock when she rocked herself into entanglement...
...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...
...To the editor of American Op/nwn, Coca-Cola and mah-jong sound like an orgy...
...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...
...It occurred not because famine was upon the land -- much to the contrary...
...Unfortunately for the ritualistic leftist, Prohibition, immigration quotas and the League of Nations are not matters of great importance to many contemporary Americans...
...George Meany, head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., demanded the President institute mandatory controls on wages, prices and profits...
...Lindsay most about the Nixon Administration was its "retreat" from the Bil of Rights...
...Nixon surprised busing advocates by stating he "opposed busing of students to achieve racial balance...
...Not surprisingly he envisions himself as the authentic spokesman for real patriotism and real Americanism...
...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...
...Finally in Spivey's Corner, North Carolina, Mr...
...Indeed it seems to produce it and it produces other things like fragmented community and broken families...
...In his hands, tolerance of ethnic or religious diversity became caresses of encouragement for ethnocentric intolerance and sordidness...
...Admirers were struck dumb and critics choked, but Presidential aspirant George McGovern sounded the tocsin of the libertarian economists (followers of economist Milton Friedman) when he described the plan "economic madness," declaring that the President "has no confidence in our workers, our business and in the free enterprise system...
...In their theatrical screeds they tell us that poverty is ravaging the Nation's spirit...
...the problem with the Ritualistic Rightist is that he wishes they had never ended...
...Lest they suffer such a bleak fate the anti-war peddlers are going to have to sell their clients another program...
...That is to say that as Americans expended ever more money on welfare, ever more people went on relief ( mostly through Aid to Dependent Children), and this occurred in a time of prosperity and low unemployment...
...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...
...continuing crisis (continued from p~ge 2) anteed Lockhead's $250 million loan during the same week Mr...
...support...
...This year when the career moralists come to the campuses, caterwauling about America as if it were Victorian England and suggesting that poverty be washed away in a flood of crisp green dollars, let us remember how successful they were in ending the longest war in American history, and let us remember also what on ignominy it has become...
...His claims to thoughtfulness are empty and idiotic...
...Of course the disturbing thing about the ritualistic leftist is not his bewildering abundance of contradictions or even his transmogrification of liberalism...
...Unemployment had fallen to the unprecedented peacetime level of 3.5 percent, and America was enjoying its most lush period of prosperity since World War II...
...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...
...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...
...Fred J. Tooze, divulged to an executive session of the World Woman's Temperance Union that last year Americans spent more than $2.5 million an hour on demon rum...
...to avoid the leftist is impossible...
...Is that not the cat's pajamas...
...Gordon (Bud) Filer of Altoona, Pa., the Kingelect of the Hoboes, lashed out at those pundits who lump the hobo into the same category as the tramp or the bum...
...Their imbecilify is epitomized by Mayor Lindsay's high falutin tergiversation to the Democratic party and by his aspirations to the presidency...
...2) as welfare payments rose welfare became a more economic way for the working poor and the lounging poor to live...
...His political spokesmen, whom he invariably envisions as towering messiahs, are generally moral idiots...
...Still not a peep has arisen from the ritualists about the egregious incongruity...
...After disturbing fellow convicts by pressing leaflets upon them in the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Conn., Philip Berrigan, the celebrated peace-priest, was shipped off to the federal prison in Springfield, Mo...
...Antigun laws will solve the problem of guns, but anti-drug laws cannot possibly solve the drug problem...
...London was more livable during the blitz...
...Mter his administration, nothing worse could befall New York City than that he be elected President...
...If there exists a coherent set of principles conducing him to the conclusions he holds they are enigmatic, for his conclusions are chaotic...
...One of his favorites is The .~lew York Review of Books, a journal that is didactic, self-righte0us and written in solecistic Middle English...
...When it becomes one, who knows, we might all lose our franchise...
...the ritualistic leftist is an annoyance everywhere else...
...So that we do not allow the frauds in this profession, through the sheer velocity of their effusions, to establish another one of their ideologized realities, it is time thoughtful persons think in public those thoughts that many policymakers have been thinking in private...
...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...
...Was he boiling because of inflation, the war, crime in the streets or any of the other issues which trouble the contemporary Americano...
...Somehow the ritualistic leftist has arrogated every decent liberal value and twisted them one by one into abject abominations...
...Filer said hobo is "simply the traditional name for a migrant worker...
...Of course not...
...Peter's basilica...
...The ritualistic rightist is a nuisance to the civilized person whose travels take him through dark hamlets in Mississippi...
...Simply stated, the reasons for the "welfare explosion" are: 1) it became the social workers' custom to get people on, rather than off, welfare...
...There you have it - - everything but a reference to Sacco and Vanzetti...
...They say that it is degrading us and that to eradicate it we must pump billions of dollars into our welfare system -- not revise the system, just bloat it...
...n 10 August Mr...
...Simultaneously he snorts at materialism and spirituality...
...H Through the middle and late sixties America was visited with one of the most dizzying sprees of welfare spending in her history...
...While remaining a driving issue in this nation of intuitive Good Samaritans, poverty in America is now an increasingly complicated issue whose most exigent need is intelligent, far-reaching analysis...
...Nixon's party...
...Policy-makers call them the years of "the poverty explosion...
...As our nation prospers, our judgment as to what constitutes poverty will inevitably change...
...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...
...A researcher for the President's Commission on Pornography disclosed that young girls are often aroused sexually by rock music...
...On 15 August President Nixon startled the nation by making a hortatory address on economics which the pundits represented as unlike any presidential address since FDR...
...Elsewhere in this issue George Will arrestingly presents what he calls a conservative critique of the contemporary welfare state...
...His scholarship is turgid propaganda, booming kookery and moonshine, but it is pondered in all the great universities where it is increasingly held unassailable...
...Nixon's Asian diplomacy and Vietnamization - - faced with an uncertain job market, and if Mr...
...He begs for a rational social order and goes panting off after every romantic cause shimmering on the horizon...
...The ritualistic leftist's devotion to freedom impels him to loathe America while celebrating Cuba...
...The issue is simply not yet what they call "'a priority...
...Ten years ago there was more sympathy for lowering the driver's age than for lowering the voting age...
...If he reads at all, the ritualistic leftist reads from a very restricted list of journals...
...Their presence has put a twinkle in the eye of every career moralist...
...Hence he is a notorious sucker, and the results can be as devastating as they are bound to be humorous...
...Today the years 1965-1968 are designated by another epithet...
...and even tried to censor what we see on television and read in our newspapers...
...American poverty is -- though to say it is to jeopardize one's status as a human being - - a matter of relative deprivation...
...The execution of communists in the Sudan continued threatening extinction of communist leaders in that troubled land...
...Goodwin blasted (continued to page 23...
...When career mo/'alists describe poverty in lurid terms borrowed from the pages of Dickens, they are not describing poverty in America...
...Down under, aborigine Mr...
...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...
...His belief in recognizing de ~acto governments leads him to exhort recognition of Red China while shunning Rhodesia or South Africa...
...The National President of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Mrs...
...During the sixties the number of people on relief in New York City alone quadrupled - - three quarters of that increase took place in the last five years...
...Compared to Teddy Kennedy, Harding was a genius...
...Paul E. Parker, 80, was defeated by Mr...
...According to the celebrated Chicago Tribune, the thing that troubled Mr...
...The salient point of this, of course, is that mere availability of funds does not eliminate poverty, for today in America poverty is not what it used to be...
...Leonard Goodwin, 67, in the Third National Hollerin' Contest...
...Regarding both poverty and welfare reform there is a lot of windy nonsense about...
...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...
...Obviously the welfare explosion was also a poverty explosion -- a very odd occurrence for boom times...
...Johnson had declared the "War on Poverty...
...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...
...4 The Alternative October, 1971 Fortunately the Vietnam War has ushered in a fit of national selfexamination unsurpassed in American history...
...Women's Achievement Week failed to receive W.C.T.U...
...When we talk about poverty in America we are talking about families and individuals who have much less income than most of us...
...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...
...Calling for some tax cuts and a ninety-day freeze on wages, prices and rents, he unharnessed the dollar from gold, imposed a ten percent surcharge on many imports, asked Congress to postpone action on welfare reform and revenue-sharing, promised to cut federal employment five percent and froze federal pay hikes for six months...
...Remember in August when he broke with Mr...
...George Nathan Flush Times Return for the Career Moralists As the guns cool in Vietnam they seem to be heating up at home...
...As for the reasons for the increase in family disintegration, obviously no family needs a father to husband resources when government does a more lavish job...
...George McGovern is an amusing windbag...
...this fall on the campuses those slices of anti-poverty rhetoric are certain to become thicker and thicker...
...He is an automaton of ritual who duly stands by while wise men sanction his every opinion and aspiration...
...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...
...What is alarming is that he has appointed himself proctor of American virtue...
...Writing in the 1967 summer issue of The Publ~d Interest, Victor Fuchs described it authentically when he said: "By the standards that have prevailed over most of history and still prevail over large areas of the World, there are very few poor in the United States today...
...So in 1972 a luminous pack of eighteen-year-oMs will be sent off to vote...
...arrested thousandsof people - - protesters and bystanders alike - - without legal authority...
...Chiding the idea that money will buy happiness, he urges its expenditure to ease urban discontent, or practically any other social, problem...
...Clarifying much confusion Mr...
...Welfare is even more deserving of this sort of analysis...
...His art is anti-aesthetic, but it claims lush rewards and high acclaim from the critics who reside, not surprisingly, in the universities...
...spied on our citizens with military agents...
...But here they confront a galling irony...
...The sale of rock records continued to climb at a record rate in the United States...
...Those whose exertions made for them budding careers in anti-war promotions are now - - due to Mr...
...Political bombings and massed violence are, and the public interest will not be served by confusing yesterday's foolishness with today's social problems...
...Those who began their careers demanding an immediate end to the war in Vietnam now are demanding an end to poverty -- they say they want welfare reform...
...The ritualistr: leftist is an ardent crusader...
...R. Emmett TyrreU, Jr...
...And after peering deeply into the mirror, the American Republic -- once held up as the most beautiful republic of them all -- has perceived a startling array of ugly creases, ominous discolorations, even warts and hair...
...If Mr...
...oSecretary of State Rogers announced that the UnitedStates would vote for seating both Chinas at the U.N., and the President morosely read of a $23.2 billion deficit for fiscal 1971...
...Interlarded amongst their anti-war rhetoric they have always placed just a little anti-poverty rhetoric...
...The astonishing fragmentation of the families of these poor, now supposedlv so blessed by public generosity, was even odder and a little heartbreaking...
...Lamentably for the serious student, it is his most literate journal...
...cOn 8 August the astronauts of Apollo 15 landed in the Pacific Ocean, and on 9 August authorities in Northern ireland arrested three hundred alleged terrorists under the Special Powers Act allowing internment without trial...
...The arrests ignited a week of unpleasantness leaving twenty-six dead and many more critically ill with gunsh()t Wounds.-Russia and neutral India signed a "twenty-year "friendship pact" on 10 August while India's relations with Pakistan worsened...
...He has made the richest city in the world the poorest...
...oAs the school year drew closer Mr...
...According to the mayor, "Washington has tapped telephones without court order...
...Here I shall only adumbrate some of the complexities of poverty and welfare which the career moralists are apt to skate over...
...Two of those warts we call poverty and welfare...
...he can no more pass up a "good cause" or a "'moral obligation" than can a hound trot indifferently past the community fire hydrant...
Vol. 5 • October 1971 • No. 1
