Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" QUIDDITIES A mortified Dr. Henry Steele Commager, formerly a famed tub thumper for gargantuan presidential power and forever a pedant, now tries the old fast shuffle to explain away one of...
...New York Review of Books THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE REVISITED If Webster had not been available we would not know that "billingsgate" refers to "foul and vulgar" talk . . . and we would not be able to point out the stunning illiteracy of the intellectualoids at Newsweek: His Horatio Alger career had come to a police-blotter ending, but Spiro Agnew left one lasting monument on the national political scene: some of the most memorable billingsgate in modern oratory...
...I figure we need the money too...
...Nation VOICES OF MODERATION Just another objective news story from the Newsweek neurotics: He stood with trembling hands in the half-light of a Federal courtroom in Baltimore last week, awash in the evidence against him and bargaining like any runof-the-street felony suspect to stay out of prison...
...New York Times Book Review THE NEW DIPLOMACY A thrilling tale of extraterrestrial lewdness: Police at Winsten-Salem, N.C., got a call from a woman who said she was passed in her front yard by a UFO that "had a very long blue tail, blew wind up her dress and made the trees in her yard sway...
...Henry Steele Commager, formerly a famed tub thumper for gargantuan presidential power and forever a pedant, now tries the old fast shuffle to explain away one of his erstwhile enthusiasms...
...And Huston, swigging Coke and smoking his "rotten smelling" pipe, talked about Calhoun and Randolph as the truck moved toward Indiana...
...One night after a mid-winter mixer she and her roommate agreed to let two Dartmouth freshmen sleep on their floor...
...Are we witnessing now a shift from aggrandizement to usurpation...
...I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night," she recalled, "and when I returned, one of them had crawled into my bed...
...All strong Presidents have aggrandized power just as all strong judges have "soaked up jurisdiction like a sponge...
...He was calling for his mommy," she said...
...Newsweek 30 The Alternative January 1974...
...McGovern's nomination was, as are most candidates', partially the product of other politicians' failures, and the ineffectiveness of his Presidential campaign to a great degree a product of his own...
...The distinction, not always clear, is that the former functions within the hospitable and accommodating framework of the Constitution, and the latter does not...
...Gore Vidal introducing his scholarly review of two volumes on the military academy: On the table at which I write is a small silver mug with a square handle...
...New York Post THE GURU OF BLOOMINGTON While discussing the life and times of Tom Charles Huston, Rolling Stone, the journal of rock, canonizes a new American folk hero--possibly the Abbie Hoffman of the seventies: He made his final exit from Washington in a five-ton U-Haul truck loaded with books--most of them political biographies ----and driven by a wild man, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., a one-time folk singer and suspected Marxist who turned down a speechwriting job with Spiro Agnew last January to continue as editor-in-chief of The Alternative on a rented 40-acre farm four miles outside of Bloomington . . . . But in 1971, coming home to Indiana, the crazy Tyrrell, who once shaved off his mustache because one side was red and the other brown, bitched that there wasn't any cold beer and embarrassed Huston by exuberantly pounding on the side of the truck to get the attention of pretty girls driving west...
...he is the first, too, to treat the guarantees of the Bill of Rights with open contempt...
...Nor are some of the more worrisome questions, dramatized in 1972, about how we pick our Presidents...
...Associated Press TV INTELLECTUALOIDS IN ACTION Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Elizabeth Drew shows that TV commentators are not only profound political analysts, but real graceful writers to boot: It is becoming fashionable to dismiss the McGovern candidacy as an aberration, with or without Watergate, to assert that the Democratic party has taken self-corrective measures, that the left does not have a candidate now, that never again will the issues be acid and abortion and quotas and gays...
...Wall Street Journal ARTS & MANNERS An interesting exordium by Ms...
...His nomination was nonetheless a remarkable precedent...
...I drank milk from the cup for a good many years and from the look of the rim did a bit of teething on it, too...
...I told him to get out, and he said, 'But it's nice and warm in here.' " Sally got him out all right, but she was kept awake the rest of the night by his talking and turning in his sleep...
...Nixon, but Nixon is the first who has openly declared that he will not observe the constitutional grant of war powers to the Congress and that he will not permit any interference with his own interpretation of "national security...
...Sure I'm for women's liberation...
...But now Agnew found himself accused of crimes of the most squalid sort----selling favors for payoffs as a county official, as a governor and even as Vice President---and the cost of his freedom was dear...
...For five years, Spiro T. Agnew, 54, had been the pre-eminent public moralist of the Nixon Administration--the scourge of crime and license and permissiveness in American life...
...As the Administration's designated "cutting edge," he sallied forth to do battle with "troglodytic leftists," "radic-libs," "Speckmarked kids," and "self-appointed elitests...
...His candidacy was also the vehicle of reforming forces in American politics that I believe Hart is correct in saying are not going to disappear...
...it is inscribed to Eugene L. Vidal, Jr., October 3, 1925---a gift from the West Point football team to its mascot, which that year was not a mule but me...
...read the Nation: The development of the New Left gave to America what it had lacked since the end of World War II, a sense of optimism and dynamism...
...He pleaded no contest to one count of tax evasion, suffered the whole tawdry story to be spread on the record and left Washington in disgrace--the second man ever to quit the Vice Presidency and the first to go out a convicted criminal...
...I have no early memory of West Point...
...Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt were indubitably "stronger" Presidents than Mr...
...I think that is missing the point of 1972...
...New York Review of Books LAND OF OPPORTUNITY Clever rejoinder by Mrs...
...Nor are the questions of life styles and values...
...Newsweek THE AMERICAN CASANOVA An American coed speaks of an amatory ambush she endured while improving her mind at one of America's revolutionary institutions of higher learning...
...Problems were openly discussed, solutions debated, manifestoes issued...
...Joann Chapman, 37, the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company's first female jackhammer operator...
...Rolling Stone THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE High-grade fiction begins where lowgrade political analysis abounds...
Vol. 7 • January 1974 • No. 4
