Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" THE ULCEROUS AESTHETICS While reviewing the merits of a recent Supreme Court decision on spicy stuff, Dr. John Leonard, novelist, elucidates the well-known "ulcer theory" of aesthetics, a...
...He was punched, kicked and spat on...
...Three hours later other student leaders were attacked in the same lecture hall when they tried to address a meeting called by the I~E's Afro-Asian Society, a left-wing-dominated body with more Asian than African support...
...And for the first time in history we've had burglars on the White House payroll...
...The Muzak that twangs and buzzes in public buildings and restaurants and on aircraft uses the materials of art for what is literally an anesthetic purpose: More, it is an intrusion on the privacy of the sense and mind, and I would have no hesitation about outlawing it...
...it may even be thought of as anti-art...
...One of the student executive said last night: ~This has put the LSE back several years...
...Joe Cummings, one of the e'mature" students, who tried to calm the meeting, called after the incident involving Dr...
...Time DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY The shameful state of historical perspective at one of America's most intellectual gazettes: Furthermore, for the first time in history we've had a quasi-conspiracy to grab an election...
...It comes out of the gut...
...art enhances it...
...Eysenck, was thumped by militants and forced to flee for the exit door...
...It is the purpose of all art to shock that is, to impel the viewer, reader or auditor to see with new eyes what he has previously taken for granted, to recognize certain patterns or relationships in life that were formerly hidden or insufficiently apparent...
...New Republic TRUST THE NATION An intelligent rebuttal of the fiend, Banfield: Strict racial inferiority is still too strong for many to accept in a society where overt racism is considered impolite...
...The thrust of the Left is against reason...
...and Mr...
...Rex Osborne, from Grays, Essex, a second-year student studying economic history, was severely bitten on the left arm, Mr...
...This is the intellectual version of a Jerry Birbach at Forest Hills, who says that he is not against blacks living in his neighborhood, just all poor folks---as if that made it better...
...To return the sanctioning of what's permissible in art to those very communities it may be trying to discomfit is to ensure censorship and mediocrity...
...His colleagues, who attempted to clear a way for him, were similarly attacked...
...Dotson Rader on F/r/ng Line BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Profound observations from the intellectual minds of Time magazine as they consider one of Hollywood's most prodigious artistes: Monroe was the essence of soft, vacuous femininity--but she could be as bright and unyielding as a diamond, and she had deep yearnings for intellectuality...
...Nick Spurrier, another history student, was thrown down a flight of stairs...
...David Thomas, from Penarth, Glamorgan, had his arm trapped in a door...
...It's anti-rational...
...Anti-art dulls awareness...
...The motivation behind, say, the desire for those abstractions doesn't come intellectually...
...One of them, Mr...
...Professor Eysenck was taken by a taxi in a dazed state to the Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, where he was treated for shock and cuts, but was found to be otherwise uninjured...
...That's why it's anarchistic and nihilistic...
...Unlike, say, TV...
...Even in the days of protests and demonstrations, sit-ins and talk-ins there was nothing like this...
...Art that merely soothes is not art at all...
...It's anti-rational...
...New York Times Magazine THE REAL CONSERVATIVES After many years of earnestly searching for genuine conservat i v e s - n o t "ultra-conservatives" or "ultra-ultra-conservatives" or "extreme eonservatives"--C~dfrey Spevling has finally found them: These people (the Watergaters) felt deeply about the direction of our country and the need to carry on a counter-revol u t i o n . . , it was this zeal for re-establishing a conservative approach to running this country that was really at work in the campaign excess...
...New York Times Book Review DTs Anthony Burgess, bard, offers a gen~ uine, high-toned treatise on liberty while simultaneously slathering over the fundamentals of his trade: Freedom is always a terrible responsibility, but no human being may shirk it...
...Professor Hans Jurgen Eysenck, Professor of Psychology at London University, who is 57, was pulled to the floor in the LSE's new theatre when he was attacked by a group of about 26 people...
...His spectacles were broken and the side of his nose cut before, shocked and bewildered, he was dragged clear by members of the student executive...
...He is also Director of the Psychological Department at the hospital...
...To leave it to others to decide what is good or bad for us is a sinful abdication of a human right and a human duty My misgivings about total permissiveness in art are entirely esthetic...
...It's been trying for more than a century to make us uncomfortable...
...It tends toward extremes...
...We are back inside the frontier mentality...
...Banfield argues that those doomed to perpetual inferiority are not the black, as such, but poor people of all sorts, whose inability to plan for the future through delayed gratification consigns them to perpetual servitude...
...Class chauvinism is in many ways more profoundly reaction than racism, and Banfield's book will be the text of class chauvinism for some time to come...
...Christian Science Monitor THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH A devastating moment of candor, in an otherwise idiotic discourse: You're continually trying to find rationality behind what people do politically--particularly what the Left does politically...
...London Times 30 The Alternative November 1973...
...And that's why attacking the Left for this and attacking the Left for that is a very rational argument, but it doesn't work...
...It comes emotionally...
...Dissent MAKING RELEVANCE EDUCATIONAL Proof the open university flourishes on the world's most famous island: One of Britain's most controversial psychologists, whose views on genetics and race have provoked argument on both sides of the Atlantic, was attacked at the I_~ndon School of Economics yesterday afternoon less than a minute after he had begun a lecture...
...John Leonard, novelist, elucidates the well-known "ulcer theory" of aesthetics, a theory which enchants cosmopolitans and raises every nuisance to the level of artiste: Art isn't '~average...
...A more subtle approach, like the one used by Edward Banfield in The Unheavenly City (reportedly one of the President's favorite books), is far preferable...
...Nation OLDE CURIOSITY SHOPPE Curious reasoning from one of Dissent's schoolmarms: A Kristol essay, commanding in tone, supremely confident about subjects that are elsewhere held to be still in the flux of controversy, assuming always that anyone who thinks differently is perverse or inept, is scarcely designed to incite reasoned discussion...
Vol. 7 • November 1973 • No. 2
