Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
T OCQUEVILLE instructs us that there are two aspects of politics that should never be confused. One embraces art, the other scierice. The art of politics entails "coping with everyday problems...
...Roxey Bolton again demanded that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration refer to hurricanes as "him-icanes," to be named after men rather than women, as is the present custom...
...They bespeak the politicalization of pessimism...
...The sight of Muskie hemming, hawing and shuffling about, sweating and thrashing on network television's Sunday morning interviews has a disturbingly authentic whiff about it even to the great man's most devoted cronies...
...The crisis sickens...
...Nixon's concession to the mental defectives of the electorate...
...Today the land is visited by strange winds...
...Accompanied by his heavily armed wife, Stanford professor H. Bruce Franklin held a press conference to calmly discuss the university's surprising attempt to fire him...
...Did they think that, in an election that is appearing to shape up as a test of truth in government, Mr...
...And t.ben after his Des Moines speech he was redefined as Agnew the Menace...
...Flagitious gusts have swept into some of the most tranquil and established regions of American life bringing with them currents of neoisolationism, anti-intellectualism, reviving puritanism, technological dread and social mobility monitored by racial, religious and sexual quotas...
...What other philosophical bloc will support him...
...Nixon would discard one of the few men in public life who has distinguished himself even with his enemies as a man of candor ? I suspect that the President realizes that the media's antipathy toward Mr...
...As Peregrine Worsthorne has pointed out it would be a nation governed by an educated elite...
...And so far as I can judge, of all the politicians likely to figure in the 1972 shouting match, the only two who approach polities as a science are Eugene McCarthy and Vice President Agnew - - though Senator Jackson's subtle audacity suggests better things...
...His own party_ does not seem to have habituated i~elf to his eccentricities, and his chances of survival outside that party are limited...
...His promoters might hope to transform the mule-faced senator from Maine into Lincoln for an evening, and in his astonishing television performance on the evening of 5 January they showed how they .could serve up a pretty bizarre prosopopoeia of Churchill...
...The Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson and a mob of lesser men practiced the art of politics...
...the dogma is still degraded...
...Agnew and Mr...
...Deep uncertainties concerning the goal of American society have not characterized much public discourse during this century - - not even during the troubled 1930s...
...And the discontinuities are not limited to technology, for it is manifest that profound tremors also threaten our culture and our polities...
...Nixon's plan was a generous and thoughtful initiative...
...After all, in spite of the stuff that he has p u b l i s l ~ he is acclaimed a poet and no one has been heard to ~ckero Now to depict the Vice President as one of Tocqueville's dabble~ at the science of politics is somewhat more provoeaUve...
...They have a taste for t h o s e deeper matters of which Tocquevine w r o t e . Mr...
...Professor Parsons describes himself as an expert in Chinese bear paw consumption...
...McCarthy's America would be a socialist republic...
...Nixon would cut his last thread with such a large ideological bloc...
...but eventually the truth even staggers into America's electronic theatre...
...I would net deny that he has a hunch about the evil that lurks in men's hearts, but I would suggest that that intnition comes from a more intimate source than mere observation of his fellows...
...Two giant redwoods near Mill Valley, California assumed horizontal positions...
...It provides for passing needs...
...The art of politics has been practiced with various degrees of dexterity by every politician who has ever opened his yap...
...The art of politics entails "coping with everyday problems and adapting itself to a multitude of varying circumstances...
...This is why, in the final analysis, Nisbet's appeal is to a dead dogma...
...Knowledge is power, whether you like it or not...
...9 But for the livable world ~owd it was another catastrophic month...
...Evidently it is a time for men of affairs to address those deeper issues...
...R. Emmett TyrreU, Jr...
...Schlesinger's words, "not to confliers of policy", but to those questions underlymg policy, to the nature of society and to the nature of men who compose that society...
...and William F. Buckley, Jr., is that before the 1970 elections Mr...
...then at least in the minds of the ~axpayers...
...Agnew seems to have more encouraging prospects...
...they are sure to add "going to do for me...
...Agnew analyzed those common sentiments and universal inclinations which bind societies, and he articulated what he felt were the yearnings inipelling men to achievements...
...He has reflected on man's e~ence, and from his reflections he has drawn conclusions which inspn-e a wholly consistent array of policies...
...McCarthy's situabon is ~ precarious...
...Did they think that the only Republican with a grip on the affections of the blue collar workers would he expendable in an election year...
...He is the politician as artist, and whenever such men ask that eternal question "what is man...
...Having reported his fellow Americans" "'vague mmasihess that our values are i n a ~ t i c , ' " he concluded that the existed not because our values were played out but because of the abandonment of " ' t r a d ~ patterns of discipline and expeetabon.- Up until the time thut he, in tho service of Mr...
...If you make everyone pay for it, the struggle for power will become increasingly intense as the tax base expands...
...Of course these thoughts are not so terribly surprising...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 3) 1968 following was never reliable, and now like the locust it has moved on to the more bountiful corn of Pious George from the Prairies...
...That, as this decade progresses, may become a singular blessing...
...Who gets the loll which has shaped the minds of men in the last century...
...The only two in captivity are males and anyone knowing the whereabouts of a female should contact Senator George McGovern...
...America's consensus on what constitutes the good life has fragmented, and the hour is well at hand for the emergence of men who ask those deeper questions...
...On the following day he announced that shouM the enemy agree to a cease fire throughout Indo-China, a prisoner exchange and internationally supervised elections open to all parties in South Vietnam, the United States would withdraw totally from South Vietnam within six months...
...The state-financed Prussian universities in which the modern doctrine of academic freedom was born required such a neutrality dogma...
...The media took it as a great surprise recently that President Nixon endorsed his place on the "winning team...
...Did they actually think that with the restiveness of the conservatives Mr...
...Now Mr...
...When the final ballots are in, we shall see if "them pointy-heads" command a majority, thus revising the academic dogma, if not in the minds of the relativists on the faculties...
...Certainly most of their policy decisions have left some mark on the way we live today, but neither their correspondence, nor their public utterances, nor even their legislation provokes terribly complicated meditations on the nature of society...
...McCarthy is a different sort of politician {as George Will notes in this issne's "Letter from a Whig'L Everyone realizes that he peers more deeply into public affairs...
...It was only a short time after his national political debut that the media identified him as Mr...
...Franklin Roosevelt put himself to the task of plugging holes in a leaking dam...
...The pofitician as artist or the politician as scientist comes and goes at the bidding of history...
...He spoke" of the law, the family, religion and incentive...
...Dorothy Irwin of Sylmar, California when it sent out a picture of her sitting dazedly before the pile of toothpicks that had been her house before it was shredded by a bulldozer sent to the wrong address...
...It might be drab, for some asphyxiatiug~ but it would he different and it would arise from a particular view of man's nature...
...The private universities and the private colleges may be in financial difficulty, but the politicians are willing to leave them alone...
...Their astonishment when the obvious intrudes into their smartly conceived dream world is never unexpected...
...And though Shiek Mujibur Rahman was released from West Pakistan, the Radford, Virginia city council voted to kill an estimated 150,000 starlings - - so taking one event with another there was adequate reason for gloom amongst ecology buffs...
...is based on the very nature of man...
...Everyone knows that Mr...
...It is not as though they have not bamboozled themselves before...
...Men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and, of course, James Madison practiced the science of the game...
...His (cemlimed m ltage Zl) The A l t e r n a t i v e ; March, 1972 3 _9 History was made by the women's liberationists when Milwaukee's bureau of sanitation abandoned its prohibition against employing women to shovel snow...
...Agnew - - his statements reflected an intelligently conceived vision of the nature of man...
...9 In education the University of New Mexico made headlines by expanding its Navajo language program - - it now includes 66 students...
...Despite government promises to save the whooping cranes there remain only 59, two more than last year...
...At the Pardeeville, Wisconsin annual watermelon eating championships a Chicago teacher spit a watermelon seed 37 feet, four inches to win the seed spitting event...
...John Adams' assignment was more breathtaking and more sublime...
...It later expired while being rushed to the Mayo Clinic...
...called upon "responsible and tough-minded scholars" to use psychedelic drugs to a i d in their researches...
...Nixon knows this, and I expect his Vice President will remain on the national scene -- at least until November of 1972...
...Prospects dimmed for the endangered blackfooted ferret of White Rock, South Dakota...
...Make those who want it pay for it...
...His is, as be said in 1968, a "lmlilicar alternative...
...So now the question is more fundamental: power: Who gets control of the only established church in America, the public school system...
...Seeing men.as flawed creatures, Mr...
...If education is to be financed "democratically," i.e., through coercive taxation, and if the nation is really pluralist, how can the educational system reflect that laluralism without becoming multiply schizophrenic, then relativistic, then nihilistic, and finally a farce built upon a discarded myth...
...He never scurries about, throwing up a patchwork of burrowed policies...
...Agnew addressed himself, m Mr...
...John McDonald nominated Barbara Jo Brimmer and Valerie Shoen to the Naval Academy...
...And the revolution came two steps closer to consummation when in a flush of traditional American idealism, Senator Jacob Javits and Rep...
...The tax-supported university is as a political issue...
...For one exquisite interlude from his Des Moines speech tmtil well into the 1970 elections, Mr...
...9 Bella Abzug had a throat operation, and "Miss Nude America," Valerie Craft, was charged with indecent exposure in Evansville, Indiana...
...They amount to the renunciation of progress and the rejection of America's role as a world power...
...Personally, I'm not betting on the pointy-heads...
...Education cannot be neutral...
...What really arouses the media is that Mr...
...On 24 January an assortment of six religious and intellectual leaders led by the Very Rev...
...But the Associated Press got a chuckle on Mrs...
...McCarthy is never so much at home as when he talk~ of men's needs and men's natm-e...
...the university is like a church...
...Indeed, it was the degradation of the academic dogma...
...ACADEMIC DOGMA (continued from page 18) Turks, old Turks and George Wallace have made it plain ~hat the really fundamental academic dogma -- intellectual neutrality -- is a myth...
...9 On 19 January David Hoffman of Bloomington, Indiana set out to break the world record for showering held by Peter Sehell of Germany, and on 24 January President Nixon unveiled his third straight deficit budget dubbed by his colleagues as a full-employment budget...
...To coerce them into financing any "uni"versity is to invite disaster...
...It would he mannered and it would he orderly...
...McCarthy vary widely, we ean categorize tl~m buth as fitting into the same political mold...
...So it is that, though the ~ of Mr...
...Nixon, fell intD ~amm~riqg the social issue nearly to death - - a elmre that Kevin Phinips tells us displeased Mr...
...they are questioning the historic direction of American society...
...It would he civilized...
...It inheres throughout their public utterances and their correspondence, and the fruits of their labors have allowed us to keep this virtuous ship on course up to this very day...
...And it seems to me that if political discourse dm-ing the 1972 presidential eleetkms is to stimulate serious thought and to prove adequate to the deep rumblings of our time R will have to be led by these two m ~ . , The politieal careers of both men are unfortunately in doubt...
...And humanitarians became edgy when word came from Kinshaasa, Zaire that President Mobuto has agreed to "liberate" the pygmies from their "wild state...
...Philip Berrigan went on trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where Berrigan told reporters his purpose was to attract attention...
...But practitioners of the science of politics are a rarer species...
...Those who advocate these currents are questioning more than a particular policy...
...When myths are called myths, they are about to be disposed of...
...We cannot return to knowledge for its own sake, that old Greek ideal, unless we also return to the idea that knowledge must be built upon fundamental presuppositions, that these are ultimately religious in nature, that all men do not agree on these, and therefore, that serious education and serious scholarship will always offend someone or some group...
...A century later the result of that impossible dogma manifested itself: the German university of 1937...
...Agnew derives not from his manners or from his criticism...
...The science of politics...
...McCarthy and Mr...
...In such political struggles, Hayek has warned in chapter ten of The Road to Serdom, the worst seem to get on top...
...It depends on his interests, faculties and needs....This aspect of politics shows us those laws best adapted to the general and enduring state of mankind...
...politics Cannot be taken out of such a university...
...But no one, from Senator MeGovern to Congressman McCloskey, thought it would be accepted by the enemy...
...McCarthy has always faced up to the import of his positions...
...Of course, men like Senator Edmund Muskie and flopsy Vance Hartke intoxicate themselves with their delusion...
...Gary North The A l t e r n a t i v e ; March, 1972 21...
...But the truth, a truth validated by such diverse commentators as Arthur Schlesh~er, Jr...
...The National Organization of Women's Mrs...
...For him politics was a matter of "coping with everyday problems...
...he took it upon himself to consider the nature of the dam...
...The following day everyone, from James Reston to Senator Fulbright, agreed that Mr...
...It also seems to be the dimly perceived view of most Americans...
...Bonny Bong, a monkey residing in Santa Barbara, California received a one week jail sentence for scratching...
...In the Everglades rescuers toiIed furiously to free a rare two legged musk snake trapped in a highway construction mishap...
...But Mr...
...In technology Peter Drucker has already written of the forthcoming age of discontinuity...
...Indubitably historians -rese&,'ehing the late 1960s and the early 1970s will see penetrating fissures...
...They were right...
...This, above all else, is the built-in dilemma of modern education...
...And at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association Professor James Parsons, Ph.D...
...But the most deft cosmeticians of the telegenic art can do no more than remodel a man's appearance - - and then only "for a staged performance...
...Agnew are men of a different east...
...Agnew's view of man revives the view shared by our Founding Fathers...
...Agnew's speeches transcend mere legislation and suggest a wildly different view of man than that held by a majority of the press corps...
...If laid down in the 1930s, old John Adams' saturnine reflectmns on the nature of man would have seemed whimsically irrelevant - - though the 1930s was not a jolly time - - and I doubt any electorate in the Republic would have endured him save the inhabitants of Kansas or possibly Arkansas...
Vol. 5 • March 1972 • No. 6
