Nine Lies About America
Valis, Wayne H.
Book Review Nine Lies About America by Arnold Beichman Foreword by Tom Wolfe The Library Press, $7.95 Nine Lies About America is an apologia for America and a polemic against disordered thinking,...
...Words such as "genocidal" or "racist" are transformed into a higher linguistic reality that often has little to do with the true meaning or significance of the words...
...Each tale assumes an enormous metaphorical significance attached to the word "America" as the poet-intellectual explores his native land via the symbolic politics syndrome...
...In much the same manner we are presented with "cultural fascism," "educational fascism," and fifty-seven other varieties of "fascism," none of which have anything to do with a strict definition of fascism and all of which contribute to the corruption and pollution of our language...
...Polemics today, unfortunately, are passe...
...This section alone would justify the price of admission...
...world gone mad...
...Thus it becomes acceptable to lament, in pseudo-hysterical terms, the advent of fascist America, materialistic America, or even genocidal America without worrying about the particular appropriateness of such adjectives, let alone their truthfulness...
...Finally, the book may be viewed as another blow by anti-Communist liberalism against the with-it New Politics...
...They fly in the face of the progressive view that your view is as good as my view is as good as his view is as good as, etc...
...Wayne H. Valis...
...Are there really "educated" people who believe that "America is a Fascist Country...
...He uses to good advantage the very quotes of the American intellectuals discussed, although at times there seems to be a superabundance of quotes...
...The fact that Arnold Beichman felt compelled to write this book is a sad commentary on the quality of much of what passes for contemporary intellectual life...
...One of the best features of the book is the elegant and provocative essay by Tom Wolfe...
...The Big Nine Beichman attacks are actually nine tales from what could be called the new American Metamorphosis, a retelling of the pretty poetics of Ovid - though in Kafkaesque terms...
...It is this apocalyptic vision of America to which Beichman powerfully objects...
...Not only politicians but also intellectuals - who, of course, pride themselves on keeping their hands clean of dirty politics - tend to substitute their own vision of the universe for the more prosaic one...
...Surely Beichman is wasting his talents answering such absurd charges - an exercise in straw-man shooting and dead horse beating, you say...
...Beichman, along with Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Ben Wattenberg and others, has recently joined in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a group of moderate to liberal progressives united in their desire to recapture the Democratic party from the crazies...
...In his usual delightfully well-written style he extends the analysis which was implicit in Radical Chic (and somewhat more explicit in Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers) to its logical conclusion...
...Alas, it should be so, but ain't...
...Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, New York, Macmillan Company, abridged edition, 1960, p. 13...
...The initial literature released by this new group is remarkably similar to much of Nine Lies About America- Although conservatives might criticize Beichman for not going far enough in particular criticisms, the book is a needed step toward returning sanity to the nation's intellectual and political life...
...that, in fact, the words are the reality...
...The litany of oft-repeated distortions becomes a ritual in which wish is confused with reality...
...The American intellectual thereby institutionalizes the Poetic Image as Truth in lieu of mere facts...
...contagious magic is founded on the association of ideas by contiguity...
...In any event, it is a pleasure to see lies branded as lies and inanities clearly identified...
...A case in point is the term "fascist...
...The nine lies'' attacked are the following: (1) "America is a fascist country," (2) "America means genocide," (3) "The Bomber Left is a moral force," (4) "The American worker is a 'Honky'," (5) "Our political system is a fraud," (6) "American values are materialistic," (7) "America is insane," (8) "The American people are guilty," and (9) "America needs a violent revolution...
...and also Behemoth: The Structure and Rise of National Socialism, 1933-1944 by Franz Neumann, New York, Octagon Books, 1963, for further explanation of the fascist political system) is ignored completely in favor of the paradox of "non-fascist fascism" (p...
...In these nine stories a collective voice known as the American intellectual (sometimes, it seems, any American intellectual) invents America...
...In-The Golden Bough, Frazer discusses what he calls "homoeopathic or imitative magic" and "contagious magic," declaring that: "Homoeopathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity...
...What is truly disturbing is Beichman's selection from such as Robert Heilbroner, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Waskow, James Wechsler, Ashley Montagu, Louis Kampf, Andrew Hacker, Robert Paul Wolff, Philip Slater, Eliot Fremont-Smith, and many others...
...In this case, the very liberal-to-radical American intellectual type has reinvigorated the imago mundi as mad house...
...With the choice of these nine particular distortions of America, Beichman has hit on the all too frequent abuse of words, language, and meaning...
...One might also criticize an occasional superficiality in the book, but it is in the nature of a polemic, especially one organized into ten or so short essays, to be unable to explore fully the implications of so many issues...
...Whether through similarity or contiguity the American intellectual in question seems to think that repetition and incantation of the words themselves - his words - have the power to bring about the reality...
...In addition they employ an honest, forthright, even blunt style which is out of place in an age of euphemisms {delinquent youths instead of criminal, less developed countries instead of primitive or backward, etc...
...In Christian theology polemics were used to combat heresy, which perhaps accounts for the reason they are generally linked to nonprogres-sive causes and to principles long since out of vogue...
...That the poetic image can and often does signify truth in literature is obvious, but that the metaphor in politics is equally veridic is to assume reality and fantasy are identical...
...One is reminded of the noted anthropologist Sir James George Frazer and his work on principles of magic among primitives...
...by S. J. Woolf, New York, Random House, 1968...
...Beichman has summoned an array of "distinguished" educators, journalists, novelists, dramatists, and literary critics, each of whom concocts more outrageous and asinine slanders against America than the last...
...Beichman points out that most of the American intellectuals quoted by him do not really appear to know what fascism is...
...Amerika the insane asylum is now described as that fascist, genocidal, violent, materialistic, guilty-of-everything, racist, hypocritical - have I left anything out...
...The fascist model proposed by scholars such as N. Kogan and Franz Neumann (see "Fascism as a Political System," by N. Kogan in The Nature of Fascism, ed...
...Or that "America Means Genocide" and that "The American People Are Guilty...
...Among respectable folk they are considered dated, unnecessarily querulous, a bit tedious, dogmatic, and distasteful...
...Book Review Nine Lies About America by Arnold Beichman Foreword by Tom Wolfe The Library Press, $7.95 Nine Lies About America is an apologia for America and a polemic against disordered thinking, and one which succeeds in its purposes...
...Now these are not the usual inanities from the Gloria SteinemJane Fonda-Jerry Rubin set...
...they, after all, are doltish clowns from whom such fare is de rigueur...
...And "by constant reiteration that America is pre- or proto-fascist, America becomes fascist...
...Of course one must carefully distinguish polemics from genuine social criticism, i.e., MacBird and such New Left fare as hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today," "off the pigs," etc...
...As he says, the usual linguistic technique applied by the "lynchers of America" is "the adaptation of an adjective as a seeming qualifier to a noun with an absolute meaning" (p...
Vol. 6 • May 1973 • No. 8
