The New Chastity
Kavanagh, Patricia
people while explicitness means "porn." Here's the rub in Last Tango: while the lovely young Maria Schneider, who plays Jeanne, Brando's three-day trick, shows all, Brando is discreetly protected...
...On the whole Congress also prefers to keep the President in office and hopes not to have to consider the question of impeachment...
...These institutions may work slowly, but they do work, and for that we may all be thankful...
...Second, there is the fact that at some point continued probing of Introduce Your Friends to The Alternative We have found that the best way to get subscribers is to give someone a sample copy of The Alternative, allow them to read it, and then urge them to subscribe...
...Here's the rub in Last Tango: while the lovely young Maria Schneider, who plays Jeanne, Brando's three-day trick, shows all, Brando is discreetly protected from the full-front treatment: that is prurience and it is, as Kauffmann says, "fake...
...I do not mean, of course, that Watergate is an expression of the alleged rottenness" of American society as a whole --that's utter nonsense...
...She chooses these things...
...they don't have to be in touch with all the different sectors of their party...
...But this aside, and for the most part, the Democrats would like to be able to at- tribute most of the blame for Watergate to Nixon himself, and not to the System...
...Sulzberger neatly sketched an essential impediment to .American suc- cess in Vietnam...
...The motivations of Con- gress in all this are similar in some ways, but much more complex...
...Many women have no answer, because they may approve of some goals of Women's Liberation and despise others...
...The only alternative is to attribute Watergate to- the System itself Now it is true that Democratic congressmen are prepared to blame the System to some extent and for some purposes...
...One reason why Congress makes this latter forecast is that if the Watergate actions are described as alien to the Sys- tem, then the mind-set that gave rise to Watergate can be attributed to Richard Nixon personally, who, after all, is the one who hired and promoted Haldeman, Erlichman, Dean, Mitchell, Magruder, Strachan, and all the rest...
...So in these respects, then, Watergate is indeed something to which we could point with a degree of justifiable pride...
...Whether it is peculiar to them is moot, since many think they have a monopoly on this troubled spirit...
...This candor is no doubt one reason for the apoplexy of doctrinaire Libera-tionists...
...This is not to say that this system must give rise to Watergates, or that Water gates are the only kind of pathology to which our method of presidential politics is prone...
...Midge Decter starts by pouncing on some of the radical claims of Women's Liberation...
...The answer goes to the very heart of the American political system, and to its greatest emerging slaw...
...My own view is that it is a little of both, but that it con- tains much more science fiction than anyone has yet acknowledged...
...Come home Don Marloneone, you're needed in Hollywood...
...The real objective of Revolutionary Warfare is to achieve vic- tory on the main battlefield which is neither military nor in Vietnam but polit- ical and in the U.S...
...Women's Liberationisks who reject traditional female roles are avoiding responsibility, Decter says, avoiding "a life in hostage to the rhythms of time and mortality, to the needs and thus the ephemerality of flesh, and to the risks of opening oneself, making oneself avail- able, to the demands of others...
...Each of the new subscribers will receive a gift card in your name...
...So why didn't it weed out Nixon in 1968 and 1972...
...one year $7.50 [-] two years $14.00 Name Address State & City Zip Code Name Address State & City Zip Code If the above subscriptions are gifts from you, please fill in your name and address below...
...In fact, she concludes, the voluntary nature of these tasks places excruciating pressure on a woman to perform them perfectly...
...Another reason is the conde-scending, almost snide tone which dodges in and out of the writing...
...In particular, they are happy to go along with the cam-paign-spending reformers, led by John Gardner, in attributing some of the blame in Watergate to campaign-spending laws...
...Another pathology to which it is prone is the nomination of the unelectable candidate, as happened to Myths of the Vietnam War --The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered by Robert F. Turner in "Southeast Asian Perspectives" Number 7 September, 1972 In an especially lucid moment several years ago, C.L...
...for...
...To be sure, political motivations were operating behind the scenes even in these insti-tutions, but they cut in both directions (if the Justice Department was a bit slow and reluctant to come to the obvious con- clusion, the press'and Congress were, es- pecially at first, a bit quick) and so can- celled each other out...
...Therefore they redouble their praise of the System, so that for the next three years Nixon will stand as the man per-sonally responsible for what happened, a political being who is alien to the System and who, together with his political heirs, ought to be rejected by the people at the next electoral opportunity...
...Is all this talk of the System good political science, or is it more nearly in the cat- egory of science fiction...
...and the result is that we end up selecting men for president who lack not only the skills of the pro, but also his habits and methods and preferences in aides...
...Then you should be reading this intelligent quarterly edited by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell...
...The assertions of the author --counter- assertions to the Liberationists --are filled with eminently attaekable general- izations of female psychology based on her personal perceptions...
...For, in the author's view, the free- dom to be a housewife is complemented by the option of having another career and sharing housework or paying ser-vants...
...Book R.,iew Its force and vitality is in its exploration of the mind of a man so distraught owing to his wife's death, so temporarily inse- cure about his manhood, that he sinks to the depths of debasement to expunge his misery...
...w Edward C. Banfield Jlllll I I II I III In several other crucial respects, however, the Watergate episode stands as an indictment of the System because, when properly understood, it must be seen as a pathological outgrowth of some of the most central characteristics of the System...
...Of the young girl on the verge of sexual initiation, she says, "Since there were no standards of conduct, either to obey or to violate, since she herself was to be the arbiter and the standard, she was pressed into a species of self-knowledge it had once been one of the purposes of sexual games and encounters to help her to attain to...
...the primary system has re-placed the brokered nominating con-ventions...
...7.00 Name...
...By praising the Sys- tem, he suggests that the entire episode has now come to a close and that justice has been completely served..and second, he wants to denounce his aides and their actions while also dissociating himself from them...
...The personal following and the amateur club have replaced the local party organ-ization...
...Only an amateur, one without political experience, one who does not make politics his career, one not socialized into the craft of politics, one defined not as a craftsman but as an ideologue or a courtier-only such a person could have undertaken Water-gate...
...It would be a pity were he to stay on the reserva- tion...
...The Watergate story does vindicate the press to some extent, the investigative and pro secutorial systems to some extent, and the courts and grand juries to a very great extent...
...First, he lays out the pieces of his- torical misinterpretation in all their de-tail and ingenuity: that the United States became involved in Vietnam to restore French colonialism...
...The Committee for the Re-election of the President could have had-for all I know it did have- millions upon millions of dollars of such dirty money and still not have done the deeds which we group under the rubric of Watergate- dirty tricks, the EUsberg burglary, the White House coverup, and the rest...
...Who ever reminds us that after Ho left Vietnam at the age of twenty-one (in 1911), he effectively expatriated himself, that he became one of the founders and official representatives of the French Communist Party, helped originate the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 not as a Vietnamese "THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA has an enviable but embarrassing budgetary surplus ot $850 mil- lion, which Governor Reagan would like to return 'to the peo- ple who had it in the first place.' That proposal is too drastic for some ot the Governor's critics, who conclude he is a danger-ous radical, .~ For a free copy of which is exact- NATIONAL REIy rlgh...
...But what I do say is that Watergates are not the only price we pay for our current system of presidential selection and for its divorcement from an ever weaker two-party system...
...And, hardly her most profound statement, but one of the more invidious: "It is difficult to say just how large a contingent of that it make me think...
...Each subject is introduced with a recap of the written literature of Women's Liberation...
...The only dif- ference between the congressional and the presidential use of this rhetoric is that the President hopes that it will help to exonerate him, while Congress cal-culates that it will not...
...City~ . _Zip Code The Alternative June-September 1973 situation, he praises the System for two reasons...
...Most important, he wants to concede wrongdoing on the part of his aides and to encourage their prosecution, while at the same time discouraging further inquiry into, or speculation about, his own role...
...Z ip...
...Assuming an endless litany of grievances for both sexes to recite, where does a sensitive person begin to construct a sensible pattern for living...
...we have ignored it only because we are too caught up in our rhetorical strategies to see or acknowledge it...
...the jet plane, the fat cat, and the media specialists have replaced the traditional party-based election cam-paign...
...Such men may find that this arrangement gives them max-imum room for maneuvering, maximum time to think and study, and maximum opportunity to exert presidential power and presidential preferences over the bureaucracy...
...The North Viet-namese, Sulzberger reported, believe that their strategy is workable because "great powers engaged in small wars are more vulnerable at home than on the battle-field...
...That is, Nixon can be described as the underlying cause" of Watergate...
...Your Name Address State...
...II, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Watergate is likely to implicate con-gressmen, either directly or as a result of counter-investigations launched from the Executive Branch...
...By describing Watergate as a triumph of the System, he suggests that they were alien to the System while he, by contrast, is the System's servant and defender...
...Take, for example, the claim that Ho Chi Minh was a popular or natioffalist "George Washington...
...So much for academic integrity...
...In cases of deser- tion or divorce, it is all that some women have...
...and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence...
...While a good astringent wave of argument has been needed badly for some time, per-haps the author has indulged herself at the expense of productive discussion of what is at least perceived by many as a crippling personal and social problem...
...or, to put it the other way around, our political party or-ganizations have become weaker and weaker over the past decades, to the point where they exercise shockingly lit- tle influence over the selection of pres-idential candidates and presidents...
...Of housework, she says that, rather than the lack of responsibility which Betty Friedan claimed was the root of dissatisfaction, the housewife "experiences this life as a constant process of decision and so a constant assumption of responsibility...
...Some body said it...
...the situation will improve...
...The connection is not at all obscure...
...that American leaders utterly mis- took the communism of the nationalist Vietnamese for the monolithic, expansion- ist communism of Lenin and Stalin...
...they are not forced on her...
...4.00 Fifty Copies...
...Decter's willingness to be subjective leads, on the other hand, to intriguing but equally unv, erifiable insights...
...About many things, about the talents of Bernardo Bertolucci, Maria Schneider, Jean.Pierre Leaud, about the tenuous relationship of love to sex, and about Marlon Brando, whose brilliance as an actor is confirmed once again...
...The movie should not, please, be dismissed as "dirty...
...Mail to: The Alternative, Bulk Sub-scription Dept., Room 473, R.R...
...Robert F. Turner, a Vietnamese affairs specialist on the staff of the Hoover In- stitution at Stanford University, cata-logues and examines this received wisdom under the rubric of Myths of the Vietnam War...
...Then Turner's devastat- ing analysis reveals it all for hokum, and the.GOP in 1964 and to the Democrats in 1972...
...Example: "For a woman, coitus is a happenstance, roused and dispensed with on the same occasion, being only itself and touching nothing else...
...Not all women who have their eyes open are unhappy, but clearly there is a major malaise among American women...
...Spokeswomen (excuse me, spokes-persons) claim that women are op-pressed, says Decter, but in fact they enjoy freedoms they can't handle...
...II I~ I I I I I I II Great American Series When constituents begin asking politi-cians, "What have you undone for me lately...
...Address...
...2.00 Twenty-five copies...
...Clearly the press has also played a role in the weak- erring of political parties...
...For all these reasons, Congress too has begun to praise the System...
...are governed by the majority opinion of a confused public...
...Indeed, Turner's 55 p .s and 200 footnotes describe a case study of the muse of history being ravished...
...If we do that, and if we learn and act on its lessons, only then will there be a real possibility that this dis- graceful episode will be transformed into an enduring triumph of the American democracy, and of the System which helps to define it...
...John Adams Card-carrying parrots of Big Sister and easily threatened men who specialize in brute put-downs have failed to grasp the complexity of the woman problem...
...City...
...In any event, pol.9itics cannot and probably should not be prevented from exercising a marginal in- fluence over our public institutions...
...the Watergate variety is incomparably the most virulent...
...So what we need to do now is to put aside the science fiction of our man-ipulative, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about Watergate as a Triumph of the System, and to turn instead to the task of developing a proper political science of Watergate...
...Last Tango in Paris, for all its male chauvinism, for all its distracting touches of artiness, for all its oversell, does make me think...
...Is there a backwater in the country that has not had some leavings of this rendition floated upon it...
...The strategy and the confusion have been fueled in the United States by Hanoi's academic bagmen (as the British would put it) and assorted, native-grown muddleheads who have produced an Anti- Vietnam History Lesson and sold it as the standard text for media as well as college use...
...This much is widely acknowledged...
...clearly illuminates the myths as, in his words, "a collection of historical and factual inaccuracies and half-trutlas...
...She confines herself to domestic complaints, which she elegantly labels, in the style of her adversaries, "Shitwork," "The Beast With Two Backs," "Wiving," and ".,Breeding...
...That system selects a very special sort of person with very special skills and characteristics...
...that Ho Chi Minh was the "George Washington" of Vietnam...
...Underlying the President's rhetoric is, of course, his determination to remain in office and to exonerate himself and his Administration...
...Everyone has quite properly observed that Watergate would never have happened had the people around the President and in the CRP been authentic political professionals...
...Such men have a tendency to turn the White House staff and the admin-istration as a whole into a personal court where personal loyalty is the prime con-sideration...
...Reforming campaign financewhich will turn out to be much harder to do without creating new and equally serious defects than might at first glance seem-will almost certainly have little or no effect on the incidence of Watergate-type abuses in the future...
...THE PUBLIC INTEREST Box 542 Old Chelsea Post Office New York, N. Y. 10011 Please open the following subscriptions to "I'HE PUBLIC I NTEaESr and bill me...
...There are many reasons for this position, some of them entirely honorable, others less so...
...And third, there is the fact that, if it does come down to im- peaching President Nixon, Congress would prefer this to be seen as an action taken by the System in behalf of the val- ues and preservation of the System-not as a political act by political men...
...Nor do I even have particular reference to the problems of campaign finance, though these are not trivial and do arise out of the public law and informal practices which define one particular sector of the System...
...Enclosed is...
...Among other things, a pro knows that you don't bug the opposition, or commit other felonies, because the benefits are always small and the poThe Alternative June-September 1973 tential costs enormous...
...You can help us to increase our readership and at the same time in- troduce your friends to one of the liveliest and most provocative jour-nals in America...
...Some have explained it in terms of Nixon's personality, which is not entirely wrong, but which leaves un-answered a further and absolutely crucial question: if Nixon's person-ality is what accounts for his willingness to hire and rely on amateurs, then what is it that accounts for the fact that Nixon, with this personality and this pre- ference, was able to successfully neg-otiate the cruel Darwinian gauntlet that is our presidential selection system...
...that the war was a struggle by the nationalist NLF to liberate and reunite their nation, which had a thousand-year tradition of unity...
...As for these latter, there is, first of all, the fact that keeping Nixon in of- fice for the next three years with his moral authority gravely impaired is a first-rate way of improving the chances that a Democrat will be elected Pres-ident in 1976...
...One's impression is that it is rather large...
...But I do mean to say that Watergate bears a direct, organic, cause-and-effect relationship to our currect system of presidential politics, and that until we make this connection we shall not have fully comprehended precisely what Watergate means to us...
...It is hard to say what should be done to shore up this absolutely crucial political institution and to reintroduce its beneficent influences into our system of presidential parties, but it is clear that campaign finance re-form won't even begin to do the whole job...
...Presidential politics are now almost entirely separate from the political party...
...Incidentally, Watergate-type behavior is not the only pathological consequence of our increasingly party-less pres-idential politics...
...Why this erosion of party has taken place is a long story, and nobody has yet told it all...
...Clearly it used to weed out amateurs and persons who relied on amateurs- Nixons, in short, on the above, only partly valid theory of Nixon's personality and skills...
...This is so because the actions of "'nondictatorial and democratic oppon ents...
...that the United States first broke the Geneva Agreements of 1954 and refused to allow free elections in 1956...
...that simply is not a good reason in any case for pooh-poohing a film and here it really doesn't apply...
...the freedom to have a lover or husband or child is also the freedom to have none...
...quite the contrary on both counts...
...The question, of course, is: Does Watergate really vindicate the System as thoroughly as everybody is claiming...
...All these stem, in one way or another, from the same political source: the erosion, in some areas to the point of devastation, of the political party...
...By contrast, if the Pres-ident were impeached, Mr...
...What is not so widely acknowledged is the reason why Nixon was surrounded by amateurs in 1972...
...If she decides not to perform these roles, she has no right to whine about social pressures that would have her be other- wise...
...Why did Nixon manage to make it all the way to the White House...
...The deliberately limited scope of the book gives Decter room for an unmiti-gated assault on the theoretical under-pinnings of the movement, but by de-molishing the logic she does not make ARE YOU LOOKING for a clear-headed discussion of cur-rent social problems...
...They don't need to be skilled in dealing with a variety of different local organizations and interests...
...Great American Series Facts are stubborn things...
...But as we have also seen, this arrangement also seems to create a maximum probability of Watergates...
...These subscriptions will beginwith the next issue...
...D lesbians has been exerting influence on and through Women's Liberation...
...Such men are often isolated from contact with the various sectors of American society...
...This is not, of course, to say that all these pathologies are of equal magnitude...
...it ruthlessly weeds out all other kinds of people...
...and on and on the myths run...
...The force of Last Tango is not, con-trary to legend, its sexual directness, which is greatly overstated by commen- tators and quite tame in this film, com- pared to many others in recent years...
...25 Ten copies...
...Cultural changes seem an im-portant part of the explanation, and so are certain developments in public law over the last seventy years...
...Agnew would become President --and for various reasons, not the least of them incumbency, his chances in 1976 could be very good...
...indeed, it helps their image in the media if they are amateurs...
...Much of this original rhetoric has all the stylistic thrill of a diabetic coma, and it gains little in the retelling...
...No female today has to become a housewife, a lover, a wife, or a mother...
...Single Copy...
...Clearly one of the likeliest legislative outcomes of Water-gate is further reform of campaign fi-nance --a long-time Democratic ob-jective, inasmuch as Republicans gen-erally have much more money than Democrats for presidential campaigns...
...Yet a third pathology is the in-creasing lack of coherence in the parties of Congress, and indeed the growing bud- getary irresponsibility of Congress...
...I ask of a "serious" movie not that it make me think better of things, but The New Chastity ---and other Arguments Against Womens Liberation by Midge Decter Coward-McCann, $6.95 For several years it has been impos- sible for a woman to live in her own apartment, hold a responsible job, or make an intelligent remark without having some wiseacre sidle up and ask knowingly, "You a member of Women's Lib...
...For Watergate was very much an outgrowth of our current system of presidential selection and of the entire character of presidential politics in the present age...
...The Alternative June-September 1973...
...These deserve close scrutiny and probably merit some kind of reform, but I am impressed by how independent of Watergate most of the Vesco-type abuses are...
...State...
...The re...
...issues of the June-September, 1973 Alternative...
...VIEW, write: Dept, 8, 150 E. 35 Street, .9 t N. Y. 10016...
...The result is that presidents don't have to be pros to be elected or even nominated...
...Just fill out the fol- lowing coupon to order as many June- September Alternatives as you can use...
...For one thing, you could go to jail- which would mean that your life's work as a professional politician would be instantly and forever ended...
Vol. 6 • June 1973 • No. 9
