The Great American Column
Simonds, C. H.
"The Great American Column" The former was not only free in his Catholicism, but free of it." In the Catholic liberal's scheme of things, Kennedy's detachment from religion was his main virtue and advantage,...
...Unfortunately (but not unpredictably) the shift from traditional standards of educational excellence to mass social conditioning has resulted in more student alienation from American society, not less...
...Consider--he is an impressionable boy from the hinterlands...
...Ironically, 'tAll those who had been glad at the death of God were sad at the death of Kennedy...
...Senate: He ran as a Republican...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Enclosed is $ . . . . ~for a...
...ew . . . . . . . xenewal subscription rather eccentric move on my part ten years ago would clearly be the rational thing to do today...
...A free and happy people needs occasional reassurance that the government is less honest, truthful, and virtuous than it is...
...Soon even Harvey Cox would be writing: "I used to believe, and even hope, that mankind might someday outgrow the religious phase and live maturely in the calm, cool light of reason...
...And I no longer seriously believe it will happen, nor do I hope it will...
...J u s t complete the coupon below and mail it today...
...Visiting other states, one heard such pleasant recognitions: "Oh, yeah, that's where nuclear submarines come from" or Colt firearms or ball bearings...
...Yet they are often disturbed by the obvious results--more and more youthful meatheads leaving the university in even worse shape than they entered it...
...In 1943, for example, that benevolent old fluff, James Bryant Conant, then President of Harvard, righteously proclaimed that "the primary concern of American education today is not the development of the appreciation of the 'good life' in young gentlemen bern to the purple . . . . Our purpose is to cultivate in the largest possible number of future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free...
...When government goes heavily into the goodness business, as under Roosevelt II or John Kennedy, and the newsmerchants cooperate in the hoodwinking of the public, tyranny looms...
...the endorsed Democrat was a free-lance clergyman and ADA paper-shuffler named Joseph Duffy, but a great many unreconstructed Democrats preferred an independent candidate, the moribund Thomas Dodd...
...Politics, as Wills observes, became "the only way left to talk of reality...
...Religion is invited to "praise our country, our rules, our past and present, our goals and pretensions, under the polite fiction of praying for them all...
...We must no longer, Cox answered, speak of Him in terms of mythology or metaphysics, for they are dead too...
...Although that hastily-reached decision involved abandoning a generous scholarship, offending a number of well-intentioned educational bureaucrats, and inflicting a measure of short-term anguish on my immediate family, it turned out to be the right one...
...Indeed, so secular was Kennedy in his judgments regarding political affairs that when Protestant theologian Harvey Cox sang the praises of The Secular City, he claimed that Kennedy epitomized all the virtues of that City...
...The real purpose of Cox's book is revealed in the last chapter, which addresses itself to Dietrich Bornhoffer's question, "How do we speak in a secular fashion of God...
...The Alternative, c/o The Establishment, R.R...
...And, judging from my recent contacts with the academic world, and the devastating picture painted by Peter Witonski, what might have been a Subscription Rates Are Going Due to increasing production costs we regret t h a t The Alternative's subscription rates will increase with the next issue...
...And while you're at it why not use the form on the back page to send a gift subscription to someone you know who will enjoy reading The Alternative...
...Bette Midler, just now the rage of Manhattan's gay bathhouses (she goes right in and sings, you see, and the boys crowd around, chastely wrapped in their towels, you should have been there the night Mick Jagger stopped by...
...Daniel Ellsberg turns to crime and finds it not only profitable, but the key to all the best salons...
...You still have time to take advantage of the present low price and save, especially by subscribing for the long term...
...While Weicker went about portraying him as a one-man Weatherman bomb-and-orgy squad, poor Duffy devoted his scanty energies to refereeing staff disputes over whether or not to bill himself as The Reveren~, Dodd, meanwhile, bumbled along with chin up and smile bright and every hair in place, looking more like an embalmer's chef d'oeuvreevery day...
...Bosh...
...Nixon blames the drugged jugend who lately shambled through the pages of the Luce publications...
...Now and for the foreseeable (and just when we'd finally lived down those phony nutmegs), the name of Connecticut is hopelessly coupled with that of--Weicker...
...David Bowie, the English androgyne, and Mr...
...Politics, that is to say, soon became absolutized, for in Harvey Cox's "secular City" God was dead and thus politics was forced to perform what only religion can and must do...
...He knows perfectly well that Morality, Decency & Co...
...Surveying rot and corruption on every side, poor Mr...
...Expectorate it, please, like Micawber in the comeuppance scene reiterating "Heep!') His Lachrymosity, please believe me, is not universally beloved out here...
...No more...
...There he sits, pouting and prating of Morality, Decency, Fair Play, and the American Way...
...According to Cox, only politics had stayed alive...
...But agreeing with the state--to congratulate and celebrate it--is not 'politics.'" Thus religion is trapped, frozen, in its "perpetual de facto accommodation of power...
...If he is not silenced, I fear, the television audience will rise up as one and go on a rampage of wifebeating, poor-box-robbing, lynching, sodomy, and ticket-fixing unprecedented in the annals of the Republic...
...I for one welcome the relatively minor and innocuous misdeeds of the Nixon Administration as healthy signs, portending as they do a decline in the moral tone of government, and a consequent expansion of the citizen's freedom, undreamed of since the days of Ulysses S. Grant...
...Nixon has the better case...
...Intimidated by their ever more grubby offspring, and in hopeless awe of the higher education label, they continue to dump their postpubescent charges into academia's lap in the vague hope that, after four years there, little Ernest and Ernestine will be ready to face life or matrimony without further parental bankrolling...
...And, alas, when this occurs, observes Wills, "the divine is subordinated to the human~ serves Caesar...
...Several crises later, Mr...
...Fretting about corruption in government, in times like ours, is like worrying about the possible spread of mononucleosis at a sex orgy...
...Now, whom does Senator Weicker think he's kidding...
...Haven Bradford Gow Time was when I liked being from Connecticut...
...But people have been predicting the death of God for centuries...
...tin secular society," wrote Cox, "politics does what metaphysics once did...
...I concluded that while a few things in life are worth standing in line for, American higher education is not one of them...
...Its only accomplishment has been to place more meaningless, devalued diplomas into the hands of more mediocre people than ever before...
...But, moan the Weickerites, government must set a good example...
...It brings unity and meaning to human life and thought...
...not telling men to do this or omit that, just congratulating them for whatever they do or do not do...
...This is what Americans quaintly call 'freedom of religion,' and what the Bible calls idolatry...
...But, alas, although Kennedy's tragic death signaled the rebirth of mystery, it did not end the confusion regarding the secular and spiritual realms, for increasing numbers soon began viewing politics as not only the proper instrument for achieving "The Great Society," but also as the means of our deliverance...
...Since it is power, not money or orgasms, that amuses him, he did, or permitted to be done, or was too busy to notice, all those things that so outrage Senator Weicker, whose indignation is marvelously limited, missing as it does every permutation of lewdness, debauchery, fraud, perversion, and simony in its singleminded The Alternative November 1973 21 concentration on, of all things, corruption in government...
...He nails Alger Hiss, and while his own putative friends breathe their relief and turn to other matters, Hiss' chums launch what amounts to an industry...
...are mere suitable-for-framing rumpus room curios, no longer traded on the American exchange...
...Like so many mounds of overlarded hamburger, they graduate, after four years of aimless oozing, having 22 The Alternative November 1973...
...Tuning in the Top Forty, he hears h/s kind of music: The Andrews Sisters singing "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy," only to be told it's not Patty, Maxine, and Laverne but Ms...
...He even hits the sawdust trail, joining a burgeoning crew of thieves, rapists, murderers, Indians, sworn overthrowers of the Constitution, and imported navel-contemplators, each and all of whom coin money by assuring the rubes that Nixon is a monster...
...In the Catholic liberal's scheme of things, Kennedy's detachment from religion was his main virtue and advantage, since "Kennedy represented the first tenet of a Catholic liberal by being so exclusively secular in his political judgments...
...Let a virtuous government sneak into power, and it straightaway grabs the citizen by the ears and tries to lift him up into the realms of light, cf Robespierre (like Weicker a wearer of tinted spectacles...
...All in all, I cannot help believing Mr...
...It becomes "a social ornament and buttress, not changing men's lives, only blessing them...
...For this he blames Richard Nixon, even more stridently than Mr...
...Over on the cultural front, Nixon beholds children swooning over the likes of Mr...
...Nixon must have concluded, in his rather simpleminded way, that he might as well have a little fun along with everybody else...
...Alice Cooper, who simulates fornication with a snake on stage (a spectacle hitherto reserved for sailors passing through the Panama Canal...
...And so Weicker went to Washington, giving the last laugh to Dodd, who must be laughing still as he beholds the pompous clowns who censured him yawning and squirming through his successor's weepy tirades...
...God's death had been the death of mystery . . . . But Kennedy's death signaled the rebirth of mystery-the mystery of evil...
...Perhaps the greatest irony of all these reform movements is that, besides destroying the traditional values of a university education, they have consistently failed to achieve their own avowed goals...
...After all, Wills sardonically observes, "such criticism would be 'politics,' in which churches should not meddle...
...What developed from this confusion concerning God and Caesar was, in the words of Wills,"a very one-sided arrangement, based on mutual aggrandizement--the state will leave the church alone, so long as church never criticizes state...
...Some of us with long memories recall how he made his way into the U.S...
...While a utilitarian function continues to be served by result-oriented departments such as engineering, chemistry, and medicine, the old goal of a true liberal education--the original aim of the university as an institution--has been drowned by successive waves of instrumentalists, social reformers, and substandard students and faculty, always in the name of some higher cause...
...It was a delightful campaign...
...XCarthy...
...The parents who pay for this questionable operation seem to accept it as a moral duty, unquestioning...
...Religion, then, becomes nothing but a vehicle for the maintenance of order in society...
...R ,iew What Went Wrong With American Education by Peter Witonski Arlington House $6.95 Ten years ago, on an uncommonly hot September afternoon, having spent thirty minutes perspiring in queue to register for an idiotic freshman geology course at George Washington University, I reached a decision...
Vol. 7 • November 1973 • No. 2
