Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
During this extended season of presidential agonies the most riveting realization for me has been that not one of the protagonists in the Watergate Spectacle and its concomitant amusements...
...Twentyfour hours before the order goes out Xerox copies of it will be in the editorial offices of every newspaper from New York City to Needles, California...
...In other areas their will is ambiguous...
...One of the few films of the month that commands attention...
...And so we come to our own royal governor and his relations with his legislature and with his Opposition Dress...
...Such conditions are bound to breed bewilderment, discontent, and instability...
...American liberalism's loss of confidence combined with this multiplicity of social disturbances to make inescapable the extreme changes that have so mysteriously oozed into our lives...
...the nostalgia flick of the year, and--your servant predicts--an Oscar nominee before long...
...Through it all not more than a few drops of intelligent commentary have appeared to stain the historical record, and the producers of these uncommon stains remain unknown to the national audience...
...9 Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams: Joanne Woodward and Martin Balsam super in this story of an aging couple trying to make sense out of it all...
...During this extended season of presidential agonies the most riveting realization for me has been that not one of the protagonists in the Watergate Spectacle and its concomitant amusements has performed with distinction...
...The prof gets all the best lines...
...Stone's Weekly: Izzy redivivus...
...My hope is that it is not a far different country...
...R, Emmett T y r r e l l , Jr...
...The Republican Party is weak at the polls and has been made weaker by its thralldom to the present administration...
...The royal governor possesses an awesome array of formal powers that scares hell out of his adversaries, but bereft of his predecessor's informal powers over Congress, he remains ineffectual and blundering...
...Senator Ervin has become an annoying gas bag and a showboat to boot...
...Now some of Mr: Nixon's antagonists tell us he is about to call out the troops...
...Feeds on the American blood-lust...
...If the Cardinal of New York gave birth to a six-pound baby girl tomorrow, I would not be surprised...
...Today it is leading the mob outside the executive palace...
...For almost two hundred years America has been a political experiment played out in the booming towns of a land only recently claimed from the wilderness...
...America has suffered constitutional imbroglio, economic catastrophe, and social upheaval...
...You dig...
...Stunning performances by Max yon Sydow, [,iv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, and Minnesota...
...The fevers of the earlier period lasted nearly a century, and who is to say that today's struggle between royal governors in Washington and the Congress will not last as long...
...Watch out for the droppings...
...it always does...
...At this very moment legislation might well be in the hopper to make Judge Sirica a national shrine or to enfranchise the whooping crane...
...The reason that so few people have anything intelligent to say about the nation's present state of abasement is that never in its history, at least never in its constitutional history, has America been sunk into precisely this kind of mess...
...Americans live under a government that has more than tripled in size in the past decade...
...Incomparably the finest treatment of the great European folk migration to the United States in the nineteenth century...
...But to get to it one must travel hack beyond the Civil War, beyond the Founding Fathers, to that dim but tumultuous century before the Revolution when the various state legislatures snarled at royal governors who were inept and unwanted...
...Government has been marinated in corruption, and it abounds with contradictions...
...What is more the very breadth of their powers frightened the already untoward colonial legislatures and intensified hostilities in a land that was already grievously afflicted with the kind of discord that is natural to a country undergoing dramatic growth and social change...
...And once again immoderate politics reigns, most obviously at the White House but also in the Congress...
...9 Jonathan Livingston Seagull: Our feathered friend flying high...
...over five hours, both halves, detailing a Swedish family's remove to America in the 1850s...
...The number of voters who honor themselves as Independents grows every year, while the political beliefs of Americans become increasingly vague...
...9 The Don is Dead: Serves him right, too...
...bar and for whom the American electorate recently showed such record-breaking disrelish...
...Funny, unpretentious, comes very close to what it's like...
...9 Day for Night: Truffaut's song to the cinema, an intricate but easy ramble through the ironies of movie-making within the well-made movie...
...No Fritz the Cat, this...
...With Anthony Quinn, the MexicanGreek-Irish-Sicilian, spreading...
...Maybe Trumbo, Freed, and Lane can take on that one next...
...Simultaneous with a pervasive loss of faith in traditional American liberal values, America was inflicted with an unparalleled expansion of its youth cohort...
...9 Last Tango in Paris: All right already, it has obviously settled in for the decade...
...The Alternative February 1974 23...
...Contrary to contemporary wisdom, the monarch actually held prepotency over Parliament by virtue of his subtle use of various forms of informal influence...
...9 Robin Hood: The Disney version, with cute little animals...
...As for his impotence in the second administration, it is a matter of daily record...
...A french connection you should make...
...Political factionalism became arabesque, and there followed an intemperate politics obsessed with conspiracy, corruption, tyrarmy, and sedition...
...Furthermore, it has limped along under the kind of leadership one might expect from a branch of government that for years has willingly allowed power to seep from it into the executive branch...
...Liberalism spent forty years evangelizing for presidential power and now to its apostasy it has brought the same old religious zeal...
...No one should be surprised that America in the sixties experienced high rates of crime, unemployment, improvidence, and so forth...
...The result was a long period of ferocious feuding, which prevented normal political relations, political stability, and moderate leadershiI>--eventually the colonial government gave up the ghost...
...A "women's picture," hut not for women only...
...These misperceptions eventuated in grave political consequences for the colonists...
...While the colonial legislators and pundits delusively articulated the values and apprehensions that were the everyday stock and trade of England's Opposition press, the royal governors panicked, spoke of sedition, and hurried the conflict along...
...9 Jeremy: Still hanging in there...
...That is to say, they prided themselves in being governed by a constitution peculiar to all the world because of its assurances of freedom and dignity and because of its ingenious construction...
...So in 1973 America was going it alone, uninformed by sober intellects and unaided by wise leadership...
...His journal is now kaput, but he contributing-edits the New York Review of (Each Other's) Books, so take heart...
...Reformers whip up enthusiasms for egalitarianism and participation, and then they hand over power to bureaucracies and commissions where elitism and insularity are unavoidable...
...Nixon's first administration was hamstrung by a recalcitrant bureaucracy, and a Congress that allowed him exactly one of his legislative jewels...
...They stand at a historical confluence whose diverse streams must be sorted out not by Washington's sedentary journalists but by scholars and not by tin-pot politicians but by statesmen...
...They get their man, incidentally, in case you've forgotten, and any delta-minus semi-moron under the mental age of one will believe every word of this unspeakably trashy xaflgarization of the president's death...
...An intemperate, abnormal politics ensues that is an epiphenomenon of an unstable society...
...9 The Paper Chase: Harvard Law School comes in for the Love Story treatment once more...
...tremendously popular with the red-neck mentality...
...In fact, most changes in America seem to take place in spite of logic and intelligence...
...Our society abounds with discontinuities...
...9 Executive Action: You see, fellow fascists, the right wing killed Kennedy in 1963...
...the beenie-boppers making it in Spraypaint Village...
...9 Hurry Up, or I'll be 30: Splendid tale of a young man desperate to make it---anything--before that magic turning point...
...this one is so full of it that it deserves a special award, one I cannot bestow in a family magazine...
...Stated briefly, the American colonial system presented an incendiary paradox in which the royal governors, though actually feeble and unsteady, were perceived by the colonists as powerful and menacing...
...Harvard, it is reliably reported, will survive...
...Treacly, perhaps, but a pleasant iiversion...
...Judge Sirica has shown just how far one can get in this country while remaining a pristine slob...
...Though feeble, he is feared by a suspicious, fractious, and leaderless legislature that wishes he would pack his bags: Once again the legislature engages the royal governor in an endless series of feuds which prevent normal political relations, political stability, and moderate leadership...
...the right wing always assassinates everyone...
...The parallels are intriguing and I, at least, find them instructive...
...On some issues the will of the people does not seem to matter...
...9 The New I~nd= Conclusion to Jan Troel's two-part epic (first part: 1972's The Emigrants...
...He is too much, as they say in the Family...
...Woodward is especially fine, as always...
...Then again, the British Opposition press, whose values and rhetoric the colonists avidly imitated, was responding to social and political conditions much different from those of the newly settled colonies...
...Politically the parties are in disarray...
...I realize that many soothsayers like to stress the opposite, but all that they seem to be saying is that after a decade of SDS, Black Panthers, and itinerant bembers, we are still a step ahead of the commissars or the storm troopers...
...Will Geer, Burr Lancaster, and Robert Ryan play out Dalton Trumbo's, Donald Freed's, and Mark Lane's little fantasy, setting up the innocent Oswald as a patsy...
...Now this is an unsatisfying bit of news to those who have been telling us since 1970 of the imminence of presidential dictatorship...
...You will follow orders...
...But what is also bracing is the low-grade performance of those supposedly disinterested worthies who, as they say, are merely trying to get at the bottom of things...
...Nevertheless over a very short period of time America has changed dramatically and many significant changes appear inscrutable, contradictory, and illogical...
...Charges of conspiracy, corruption, and tyranny are in the air...
...It was a constitution which blended power amongst the monarch, the aristocracy, and the commoners...
...9 J e s u s Christ Superstar: Familiar story, uncommonly well-made variety thereof...
...It was called a mixed system, and under it Englishmen prospered...
...an unconscionably violent picture that, alas, works...
...To begin with American society today is critically unstable...
...But of course it happened just that way...
...And the pundits continue their generally preposterous act...
...America has experienced extraordinary growth...
...Mindful of all the contradict-ions and changes bestirring American society, no one should be surprised that the Congress is shot through with discord...
...9 England Made Me: From Graham Greene's 1935 novel, transposed from Stockholm to Berlin, this tale of a scoundrel adrift in a world of same stars Michael York, and he's a pip...
...9 Walking Tall: Reissued story of a Southern sheriff cleaning out the baddies...
...Charles Reich, persons under thirty are the primary source of practically every social problem known to man including excessive giddiness, mawkishness, and acne...
...Though the colonial governors possessed awesome forrnal powers, they lacked the kind of informal powers that would have allowed them influence over the unstable politics of the time...
...The clod mentality rolls on...
...The colonists thought of themselves as living under a governmental system essentially the same as that of the mother country...
...I cannot see how this paradoxical condition differs vastly from our own...
...It is enormous, it is supposed to accomplish great feats, and it is incompetent even to deliver the mail...
...Our royal governor, apparently powerful and menacing, provokes our Congress and our press to suspicion and excess, and then responds in kind...
...Theodore White has made it a matter of historical record that Mr...
...an hour and two minutes of the indefatigable left-wing journalist going about his business...
...Today our illustrious royal governor finds himself in the same pickle as old Lord Bellomont, the late Governor of the the late colony of New York...
...Last summer he gravely pronounced the greatest national crisis in the history of the Republic at hand, and then waddled off to spend the next few weeks lounging, fishing in the wilds, and posing for photographs...
...Nevertheless, Mr...
...This roaring pageant took place during a time of unmatched technological revolution, which America often led, and of international political discontinuity, which America influenced crucially...
...And yet today government is increasingly unable to govern, usually because of the intrusions of these busybody reformers who are simultaneously for government and against it...
...There is no way of knowing if this period of change has ended or how it will finally end...
...Unfortunately the colonists' perceptions of this mixed system and of their own system embraced several fateful misconceptions, the most crucial of which was the extent to which power really was mixed in England...
...At any rate, all the elements of the colonial struggle are in place today...
...They suggest enlarged government to monitor the lives of a citizenry upon whose freedom's they are forever rhapsodizing...
...Reformers score it for being unresponsive, but when voters express themselves overwhelmingly on issues like busing and spending, the reformers demand that government's representatives ignore them...
...Well I await that day with eager expectation...
...Imprudence characterized beth sides...
...9 I.F...
...Then, too, there have been political and governmental instabilities...
...The Democratic Party is fraught with contradictions and ~orely afflicted by that crowd of mountebanks whose views are as silly as anything ever dreamed up in a Greenwich Village (continued on page 23) The Alternative February 1974 3 _9 American Graffiti: 1962, the hop, rock'n roll, four lads and their lassies...
...All of this unstable change has been in the cards for years...
...During the century prior to the Revolution the realities of political life were wildly at variance with popular perceptions, not an unusual situation of course, but a situation conducing to as much confusion in those days as in our own time...
...The only thing that is certain now is that when this time of presidential agony is finally over, American democratic process will be far different than it has been in the past...
...Must see...
...In time, social anxieties combined with political anxieties, elicitiug a syndrome of extreme reactions beth from the royal governor and from the colonial opposition--a syndrome which strikes me as prefigurative of our present political ax fight...
...The military will be out of gas...
...The vast majority of Democrats have revealed themselves as a low mob of sharpsters and shysters, with no more appetite for governing a democratic republic than for putting in an honest day's work...
...All proceeds now go to the Mugwump Indian Reservation, which has made Brando a brother: "Rumble Rump," they call him...
...Izzy in a tizzy forever and evermore...
...Remember Sirhan Sirhan...
...If the gorgeous spectacle of Washington politics and public discourse have not evoked a very satisfying commentary from the journalists or a very intelligent policy from the practicing Machiavellis, it should come as no surprise Still if one reaches far enough one will find an episode similar to our present agonies...
...To be sure the ignominy of the Administration's behavior has taken on an aura of grandeur as each new botch surpasses its predecessor in tawdriness, slovenliness, and arrant stupidity...
...Still the bizarre politics of 1973 are unique...
...Neither recent experience nor tradition illuminates them...
...Today the American population contains a larger proportion of young people than ever before, and with due respect for the carcass of Dr...
...there have always been grave contradictions in America's regnant philosophy, liberalism, and recently tensions have grown critical...
...But prolonged war and the vapors of ideology have suddenly induced the solons to grab for their lost power, and it is a monument to the perversity of our time that the very ideology that has mustered them from their snooze is the ideology that once seduced them to slumber...
...Unfortunately, there are no statesmen at hand and the scholars are generally off campaigning and erecting soap boxes...
Vol. 7 • February 1974 • No. 5
