Editorial I
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial I: Apathy: A Reappraisal From the New York Times I see that somewhere on the eastern seaboard recently there gathered a group of America's most illustrious intellectuals to hand down...
...But apathy, to be admired in its fullness, must be percipiently grasped, so we must understand what exactly the wowsers fear America has become apathetic about...
...It is what has turned vast reaches of our urban paradises into franchized slums, abounding with boodle for the visionaries of city hall ?nd misery for the poor...
...Are Americans indifferent to good cheer, beautiful women, butterflies, serenity, and fresh fruit...
...Have Americans become apathetic about a more lush Gross National Product...
...precisely stated it means much more...
...It means all of us are not going to goose-step together and that Pius George is not going 10 lead us out of Vietnam and into the fire...
...Everyone put their finger-paints away, held hands, and trembled...
...Commitment and high purpose is what got us into Vietnam...
...Would the Bill of Rights have been defiled and anti-communism have fallen upon such hard times if Senator McCarthy had been accorded snores...
...The result of this abstruse process is that our mod Puritan decides what he requires of society, and organizes society in such a way as to realize his objectives...
...For one, it seems to annoy all the right people...
...McGovern, it is the fresh wind of change...
...Calamity was upon the New York publishing tycoons...
...I see Americans as insensitive to the wowsers, to all their dizzying plans for rearranging society, and to using politics as a yoke on free men...
...It is nothing of the sort...
...Then he came off looking like the new Roosevelt, but in other races the plain folk of the Republic pulled about the same levers they always pull...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.t Tyrrell, Jr...
...Simply stated it means that Americans are indifferent to the much heralded New Age...
...To be apathetic is to be insensitive to suffering, says the OED...
...I see Americans as indifferent to moral totalitarians...
...It means that Americans have tired of their blowzy acts of charlatanry and are turning to old movies and football...
...The citizenry did not give Mr...
...There are acres of good things that can be said about apathy...
...Nixon an overwhelming mandate, they gave Pius George a bop on the snoot...
...Apathy, that infamous crippler of Good Causes, had come out of the hell holes of Dubuque to suffuse the Republic and swat the New Age in its prime...
...Apathy reigns at the top of my chart of preferred values and democratic virtues...
...The polls never showed Mr...
...Minogue the crowd over at The New York Review of Books suffers quite a lot over just about everything...
...Anything that ages the New Left, or whatever it calls itself these days, deserves a good word and encores...
...Let the penthouses revolutionaries moan as they will, I consider the revival of apathy a stupendous blessing...
...Not at all...
...Indeed we need more of it...
...When I heard the sweet news of its resurrection, my bartender's business doubled, and I laid in a copious supply of cheap champagne...
...Apathy means that Americans sniff at the New Age...
...For the exegesis of apathy in the particular context in which it is used today, we must trudge off to the OED and to Kenneth Minogue, the wise and apathetic political theorist...
...Apathy will make the country grow...
...His fondest aspiration, his life ambition, is to arrange society so as to ensure a certain moral behavior...
...Apathy is a rejection of the comprehensive view of politics held by the busybodies who have been burning to launch us into new priorities and the glories of "fundamental change...
...It has its place in a robust democracy, and I think old James Madison had it in mind when he penned Federalist Fifty-One...
...When politics is apprehended in this way, that is to say as a technical activity, one must adhere to some sort of standardized sensibility embracing all of society...
...And this was deliciously proved in the recent shouting match...
...Certain once fashionable frauds now talk about it as though it were a prelude to the Dark Ages...
...That would be illogical and imprudent...
...Good riddance to the nuisances...
...Americans are indifferent to one of the most comprehensive spooneries of all time: the notion of standardized suffering...
...What is more, would the nation have been afflicted by such windy frauds as Huey Long, Henry Wallace, The Saturday Review of Literature, Gloria Steinem, William Kunstler, Norman Mailer, vitamin C and patent medicines, organic foods and cybernetics, if the soporific winds of apathy had caressed the land...
...Would we have suffered the absurdity of Prohibition if the majority of Americans had merely snickered at the idealistic whoops of the WCTU...
...That which has driven the Brothers Berrigan to their frozen chambers and has induced Jason Epstein to go into the tin pan business is nothing other than the appalling realization that a prodigious majority of Americans no longer shares their enthusiasms, their enthusiams for gloom, uplift, and crash experiments at the expense of the other fellow's comfort...
...And according to Mr...
...Now of course I do not celebrate or enjoin a national commitment to apathy...
...If this be apathy, I prefer it to the oily, all-embracing rhetoric of the New Age...
...Editorial I: Apathy: A Reappraisal From the New York Times I see that somewhere on the eastern seaboard recently there gathered a group of America's most illustrious intellectuals to hand down their prophesies on what America will be like for the next few years...
...Nixon as a popular messiah until he was paired with the candidate of Puritan Chic...
...The reincarnated Puritan is possessed of a standardized sensibility leaving him dissatisfied with the world because it contains suffering-a sad situation if ever there was one...
...It is what sustained the national draft...
...After running their hands over the bumps and ridges of what they consider to be the nation's skull they all agreed that we are in for a period of woe, variously described as apathy, moral lassitude, torpor, and so forth - grim tidings for us all...
...So the career moralists, the wowsers of Aquarius, Radical Chic, and all the other daft relicts of Puritanism are going to take to the bread lines...
...Thus, Puritan Chic politicizes life right down to its most private intimacies...
...I do not recall the names of these worthies, but I do recall that they were in solemn accord as to our immediate situation...
...It is...ah Mr...
...I do not see Americans as particularly indifferent to suffering...
...He is possessed of this standardized sensibility because he sees politics as a technique for pursuing long term social objectives...
...Well ta, ta...
...I can hardly think of a period in American history when a large dose of apathy would not have served the commonweal handsomely...
...The Rotary triumphs...
...Puritan Chic believes that suffering is everywhere and so Americans must be indifferent to everything...
...The national epidemic of idealism that recently reran its course through the universities left many of them on the brink of well deserved bankruptcies...
...Most of the great universities of the land are now practically indistinguishable from insane asylums and what passes for learning in the lesser institutions could better be carried on in mud puddles...
...As I see it that does not make America quite the ghastly place that Puritan Chic would make it out to be...
...If we all snoozed continuously the men of enthusiasms would have an easy time of it, and in no time we would be strapped with their latest obsession...
...The bad news swept into the editorial offices of the New York Times like a blight...
...But what I do say is that apathy deserves a reappraisal and an intelligent appreciation...
...The Bernsteins might never throw another cocktail party ever again...
...So what...
...When that awesome group of prophets got together and revealed that America was in for a debauche of apathy, they meant that Americans are indifferent to about everything that matters to them...
...Understood in this way, then, apathy is a very good portent...
Vol. 6 • January 1973 • No. 4
