Editorial I
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Smartening Up the Chumps Raise a stein! As the bell rings for 1973, the hardpressed members of the civilized minority have been granted a collective reprieve from the New Age, an age of milk and...
...Then suddenly the Dark Ages...
...Perhaps some of you feel that I exaggerate the excesses of the late 1960s, Puritan Chic, and the PR men of the New Age...
...Under his reign the fat would melt from the blowzy womenfolk...
...The earnest talk turned to American imperialism, genocide, and mass repression...
...What is more, they sprayed guilt around as though it were disinfectant...
...Edward Epstein exposed the tale as a hoax but no one paid much attention, for there were soon even more thrilling allegations hurled against America...
...What of the epigones of seventeenth-century Puritanism...
...To be numbered amongst the just, one's utterances had to be lurid, abusive, or oleaginous...
...They would become professional baseball players, bankers, and brain surgeons...
...The problem was really how to get a family of imbeciles off a diet of Coca-Cola and potato chips, and that is, given our vestigial scruples about individual freedom, a difficult demand to place on social policy...
...Even the Red Cross can do nothing for them...
...Though the advocates of the New Age were dealing with serious matters, they always managed to approach them with flared nostrils and flailing arms...
...Nevertheless, the corrosive effect of these earlier indictments of America began to take hold, and increasing numbers of Americans began to hate their country and exalt in the exquisite vapors of guilt...
...Or perhaps it is one of those gassed-up hags bemoaning the tyranny of her glands...
...Well about them an eerie sough pervades...
...Comedians portray them as poor souls and then howl at their botches...
...Stokely Carmichael would still be a small-time bunko man were it not for the show business he made of civil rights, and much the same can be said for celebrities like Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, the Berrigan duo, and the author, Charles Reich, LL.D., J.D.But for every one of these prosperous charlatans, there lies rotting the corpse of one of their bird-witted followers who committed his very life to their tommyrot, and thousands more are not much better off...
...They would rise to high places in the new government, and men would admire them...
...And the more sensible varieties of Republicans and Democrats are again breathing normally...
...It could be the great Clod Populist himself, muttering that Americans "were the real losers" when they shoved him over the edge...
...Politicians and pundits swallowed it whole, and the public discourse teemed with canards...
...But now the slow burn is setting in - once again they have been had...
...Good Samaritans offer them a hand but shake their heads at the ensuring burlesque...
...Merriment and good cheer tickle the atmosphere in every refuge of civilized society...
...Then there was that report made famous by the intelligentsia over at The New Republic and The Nation to the effect that thirty-seven million Americans were dying of starvation...
...It was a grand revival of the American tradition of the tall tale, with the astonishing difference that these people were actually in earnest...
...Student thugs, racist thugs, and religious thugs all had their day...
...And well they should...
...These congenital dupes put their trust in the Clod Populist and his movement for the New Age...
...The screeds of apocalypse and sin have subsided to a mere rumble of incoherence...
...It is hard to say, for the ringing eloquence of yesterday is no more...
...Rationality was the weapon of the Devil, a manifestation of insincerity and inertia...
...The prognosis is uncertain...
...How well I recall Camelot's claim that seventeen million Americans lived in poverty...
...And now at the end of their latest crusade for justice, even the most intrepid of the dreamers is beginning to yield to the vectors of doubt...
...desperation can sustain only so much so long, and then even the fanatics of Puritan Chic begin to doubt...
...The result was an odd illusory rhetoric whose fundamental element was exaggeration...
...But what of the panjandrums of the New Age...
...It became unsafe to burn libraries, disrupt (continued on page 25)d on page 25...
...As the bell rings for 1973, the hardpressed members of the civilized minority have been granted a collective reprieve from the New Age, an age of milk and honey and high purpose whose dawn has been brassily heralded since the mid-1960s, yet an age whose dawn has failed to dawn...
...The discourses of the radicals and of the Ritualistic Liberals have lost velocity and direction...
...They maunder endlessly about such spicy stuff but, alas, no healthy American seems to give a piffle or a damn...
...They are the butt of every hot-foot, the object of every horselaugh, the perpetual butterfingers...
...As we bask in the Age of Nixon, it is possible that you have managed to suppress your memories of the promised glories...
...Then Old Beagle Ears waved his magic wand, doubled the power of the state, and by the middle of his fated reign, the number of poor had jumped to thirty-four million...
...Further investigation indicated that starvation was really another thespian misnomer for inadequate nutrition...
...Intoxicated further by each rhetorical enormity they confected, they had leapt right out of this world by 1960 and they were ardently speaking the wildest nonsense...
...What of the fey slobs who live in caves and feast on universities...
...For a whole season idiots went around the country claiming a great police conspiracy had taken the lives of thirty or so virtuous Black Panthers...
...Possibly it is the new Darrow, Herr Kunstler, yowling about repressed brats, genocide, and worse...
...If my observations of the American asylum are correct, doubt is beginning to sink into the yokels of Puritan Chic and though it would be premature to send them to the embalmers, it is safe to diagnose their present condition as one of very grave befuddlement, induced by doubt...
...Many of those who marched for peace and liberation and visions of sugar plums wore holes in their shoes, while their leaders rode in limousines and amassed ample fortunes at the expense of their gullible brothers and sisters...
...What of that element of American society that dreams of flying carpets, a franchise boom for Health, Education and Welfare, playgrounds for all mankind, and gaiety, always gaiety...
...From their sick beds all we hear is a delirious chorus of declarations about WAR, GENOCIDE, IMPERIALISM, MORALITY, SEXISM, THE YOUNG, LIBERATION, and REFORM...
...And what we hear is the sound of bafflement...
...These are the sad wretches who have gone through their entire lives wearing clothes, faces, and ideas that never quite fit...
...But I remember those gorgeous days in all their furious flatulence...
...Moral enthusiasm became seasonal...
...For some, that old familiar feeling of having been taken for a ride is starting to creep in, and for these oafs this past election period must have been especially glum...
Vol. 6 • February 1973 • No. 5
