The Public Policy
Rusthoven, Peter J.
to remember that those standards still do operate. it's very fashionable just now to feel superior to those floundering little wretches we see scurrying around Washington. And it's heady...
...Robinson Crusoe is an exemplary middle-class entrepreneur...
...It also reflected an exhaustion of the intense introspection of the age of Reformation...
...but if Rockefeller wants to spend a lot of money hiring a lot of people to make a lot of studies, where's the harm...
...It began when the metaphysical poets fell into obscurity and mysticism-their work dying the tortured death they always seemed to wish for i t - - and it ended when a totally different sort of writer took their place: the "Augustan," the eighteenth-century gentleman of Reason...
...Besides, Rockefeller has lined up some very talented people...
...Furthermore, I have a fair measure of respect for Nelson Rockefeller...
...And it's the business of a novel like Burr to encourage this attitude...
...This isn't a duck, you say...
...Now what, one might well ask, can possibly be wrong with Rocky's Commission...
...Timothy Wheeler's examination of the "energy crisis" in last month's Alternative is an equally persuasive presentation of the virtues of the crisis mentality, in a somewhat different setting...
...Because the Augustan artist couldn't prove it, he fulfilled Lewis' dictum and turned to satire, a thousand varieties of satire...
...Artistry itself is made to seem fortuitous...
...Homer faced ignorance and declaimed...
...One of Kenner's favorites is the scientist Alan M. Turing who invented the Turing Machine...
...The artist's forgery must appear to obey a rational method and fool our squintingly rational gaze...
...Not surprisingly, most of the publicity surrounding the creation of the Commission centered on its possible use as a springboard for Rockefeller's fourth bid for the Republican presidential nomination...
...By quoting Wyndam Lewis on the frontispiecem'~echerever there is objective truth there is satire"---Kenner defines the essential predicament of Augustan literature...
...True, big-name committees never seem to accomplish much...
...moving from there to "establish priorities...
...My own bias, unlike Christian Centurfs, is that a project which secures the aid of Irving Kristol can't be all bad...
...Interspersed among commentaries on Pope, Swift, and Defoe are tireless sorties to a crowd as colorful as they come (including, for example, Buster Keaton and Charles Babbage and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin...
...Indeed, a number of people, including this author, can contemplate that possibility with considerably more equanimity and even confidence than seemed possible in 1968_9 Nevertheless, there is one unfortunate aspect of the Rockefeller effort to this date which the media have not, and probably will not, mention--namely, the nature of the candidate's latest vehicle for keeping himself in the public eye...
...After noting that Rockefeller had yet to apologize for his sorry role in the Attica incident, they warned academia not to allow itself to be bought off by the suddenly conservative Rockefeller...
...To identify a thing was to describe its function empirically...
...If we can learn absolute contempt for our ancestors, it is no problem at all to learn absolute contempt for our peers...
...Well, the answer is quite simple_9 No one cares about how Rockefeller runs for President--the problem is just the whole silly idea that America should start scouting around for a bunch of "critical choices" to make...
...The problem is not simply, as ature in particular, has brought us since The Dunciad...
...It is not history or literary criticism, though it overflows with a humor well acquainted with both...
...Gulliver, the yahoos, and the Houyhnhnms are ideal enlightenment prototypes: empiric man, barbarized man, and rational man...
...The Commission on Critical Choices is merely one of the latest products...
...Counterfeiting is ndw an accepted form of art...
...You intuit that it lacks duckness (anatitas...
...A "crisis," in turn, is '`the decisive moment" or "an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs...
...that it didn't come from an egg...
...today we face skepticism and deceive...
...specifically, good scholars everywhere must resist the blandishments of the nefarious Irving Kristol, reliably reported to be distributing Rockefeller's largesse in an effort to recruit talent for the Commission...
...In short, crisis mongering, one of the biggest growth stocks of the last decade, is still very active on the political exchange...
...Indeed, all modern genres are part of this effort--from Swift's forged happened, as opposed to why it happened, "modest" proposal (political satire is born) is a mystery, for we are still dragging our- to Defoe's forged diary (the novel is born) selves through the age that Dryden to Wordsworth alias the unlettered natuheralded, namely, the age of art under the ralist (nature poetry is born) to Andy Warshadow of Reason...
...It should--you've heard it all before...
...Helps unemployment, doesn't it...
...With the passing of Cowley in 1667 the centuries-old role of poet as divine muse and preacher was no longer believable...
...So where's the problem...
...The budget of this little enterprize is estimated at around $20 million, including $1 million each fron Nelson and brother Laurance, and almost including, on White House recommendation, $1 million from the national treasury...
...with Eisenhower, we need only The Alternative May 1974 25...
...Keeps junior faculty off the streets_9 And even if Rockefeller is using it to run for President againmwell, there are a lot worse ways to run for that office (or haven't you been reading the Washington Post lately...
...And it's heady stuff, this business of setting ourselves up as intrinsically superior to national leaders, of gleefully reducing them to somewhere beneath our own level (a different thing altogether from disagreeing with their policies or even deciding they're a pack of damned rascals...
...As long as the technological progress woven into our environment becomes ever less comprehensible to the intelligent mind, we can infer from Kenner that the urge to counterfeit will grow...
...His seeming shift to the Right disturbed them, but they had invested so much time and ink over the last twelve years arguing that Rockefeller alone could save the Republicans from disaster that his recent positions were at least partially forgiven as necessary concessions to the many backward among his party...
...Whoever is writing the ~2Vlodest Proposal" is a brilliant economist...
...In the heyday of the Royal Society it was in vogue to be seen not with a sword or penquill, but with a magnifying glass hanging from your pocket...
...The Turing Machine is a computer programmed to disguise itself, in response to questions, as a human being...
...Thus, their stories about the Commission continued in the chummy "Rocky" vein first adopted in the late fifties---but speculated cattily that the million-dollar gifts of Nelson and his brother might be viewed as violations of new federal laws setting $50,000 limits on family contributions to presidential efforts...
...Ruskin wrote, that mass production competes with art in technique, but rather that mass production is a principle which competes with art in legitimacy...
...and this latest quest for the big prize may even prove successful...
...You utter scholastic nonsense...
...It was directly connected with the fashionable empiricism of such figureheads as Newton and Locke, according to which traditional metaphor seemed childishly unreal...
...Vice President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger are there, ex offic/o, joining such names as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Clare Booth Luce, nuclear physicist Edward Teller, and former Miss America and I've Got A Secret panelist Bess Myerson (currently doing good deeds for consumers...
...T/me and Newsweek, while advancing no novel themes about creeping conservatism in the groves of academe, were nonetheless torn by Rockefeller's latest move...
...But exactly what by Hugh Kenner paper Doubleday Anchor $1.95 m, In other words, we test the Turing-fake against our own, superior fake...
...then attempting to deal with crises in Vietnam, in race relations, and the cities...
...Kenner cites the French philosopher Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) who "exhibited in Paris a mechanical duck which could waddle and splash, beat the air with detailed feathered wings, wag its head, quack, pick up grain, ingest this with swallowing movements, and eventually excrete the residue...
...I refer, of course, to the Commission on Critical Choices itself...
...We know, or at least we think we know, why this revolution took place...
...National Review, for example, was wary of Rockefeller's past...
...Christian Century noted much the same factors as National Review, and also saw the Commission as an adjunct to a presidential bid, However, the editors of that worthy journal saw Rockefeller's recent activities as an expedient and deplorable change for the man who once fought so well and bravely against the twin evils of Goldwater and Nixon...
...To satirize something is to counterfeit it, to reproduce it (in the manner of Vaucanson's contraption) with such care that even its absurdity is manifest...
...Rockefeller, after all, remains a figure of import in both national and Republican circles...
...and so on, ad nauseum, with the current stops being Watergate, the "crisis of confidence in government," and the ever popular energy shortage...
...pausing, in the wake of serious national "failure," to subject our "value systems" to "critical and searching reevaluation" before we 'treexamined and rearranged our priorities...
...Ever since science and technology rendered art per se an inferiol' reflection of nature, a vague and "prettied-up" way of saying something more clearly presentable as fact, the artist's defense :has been to counterfeit fact...
...Often we don't have to change the counterfeited model at all...
...R iew The Counterfeiters NEAR THE CLOSE of the seventeenth century something of a revolution shook the craft of English letters...
...Banfield cites some telling instances of crisis thinking at work--the best, perhaps, being that of the young rioter, who in the context of the 'tracial" and 'hlrban" crises became convinced that '%e was not a boy out raising hell but a victim of injustice fighting for a college education...
...Objective truth," of course, had a strangle hold on that age, a hold that tightened until reality had no property save "extension, hardness, and color" (Locke) and language had become a mere labeling machine for atomized pieces of data...
...With a good enough program, a Turing-person is indistinguishable from a real person, unless we observers find a better definition of what a real person is than the one used by the machine...
...Counterfeiting is his last chance to be taken seriously...
...Counterunique attempt to solve the mystery, to feiting is one of the awful costs of modern show our imagination just where art, liter- civilization...
...Sound familiar...
...One expects this mentality as a substitute for analysis from any number of journals and individuals--but not, one would hope, from the next Republican presidential nominee...
...but after noting his always-sound position on defense, his support for Nixon on Vietnam, his stand during the Attica prison riots, and his recent crackdowns on welfare and drug abuse, they concluded that the Commission might help make the governor a serious candidate "for the first time...
...We've been playing this particular game since the early sixties, starting with "an agenda for the nation...
...Pope, like all counterfeiters, was afraid to subordinate genre to artistic purpose...
...This rather alliterative entity--created, founded, and presumably patented by Rockefeller himself--plans to bless the nation over the next few years with studies of economic, social, political, and philosophical "trends," and has already lined up an impressive list of worthies to further its tasks...
...Nor do I doubt that the collective talents of the members of the Commission may yield some intelligent and even valuable work, in addition to the standard quota of pap...
...Dryden, who was then just rising to fame, initiated the new role of poet as arbiter of good judgment and taste...
...Art, according to Kenner, has fallen into just this paradox over the last three centuries, only the artist must distinguish not between a real person and a Turing-person, but between reality and increasingly sophisticated systems of knowledge...
...Unfortunately, though, the crisis mentality is not just a harmless diversion that sells newspapers while giving good Americans something to be concerned about...
...P a t r i c i a Coyne The Public Policy P l e a s e Pass t h e C r i s e s by Peter J. Rusthoven LAST DECEMBER, with appropriate fanfare and publicity, Nelson A. Rockefeller resigned his lifetime job as Governor of New York to become chairman of something called the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans...
...If Rockefeller continues to focus his efforts along the lines suggested by the title of his Commission, he may well find his fourth bid for the White House as disappointing as the last three--not because his past is too "liberal," or his current maneuvers are too '~transparent," but simply because the majority of the party should be looking for more than another peddler of "critical choices...
...When we read that "a typewriter is itself a clerical system in which marked and markable objects are manipulated according to rule"--this statement is satire as it stands...
...But it is unfortunate that Rockefeller could not resist the temptation to lead his well-heeled Commission under the shopworn banner of "crisis...
...In a world overflowing with rational systems, political, economic, religious--even classical literature had become a system, replete with rules--the good artist is a good mimic...
...This prospect was greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm or dismay, depending on whom one read...
...And it is not what you think it is...
...All this, of course, is part of the grand political game, and as such is quite legitimate...
...and Time magazine notwithstanding, I believe his shift to the Right may involve something more genuine than an attempt to soothe suspicious, conservative Republicans...
...The moral is clear: to solve a good counterfeit is to create a better counterfeit...
...And this, I think, would titillate Vidal mightily...
...This last was killed because some viewed the proposal as an indirect subsidy to a Rockefeller presidential bid...
...It may, of course, be premature to criticize the Commission on Critical Choices on such grounds...
...Edward Banfield's analysis, presented to a largely unappreciative academic community in his impressive 1968 work, The Unheavenly City, remains the most perceptive statement on this topic: "Although it is easy to exaggerate the importance, either for good or ill, of the measures that government has adopted or might adopt, there does appear to be a danger to the good health of the society in the tendency of the public to define so many situations as 'critical problems'--a definition that implies (1) that 'solutions' exist or can be found and (2) that unless they are found and applied at once, disaster will b e f a l l . . _9 . although there are many difficulties to be coped with, dilemmas to be faced, and afflictions to be endured, there are very few problems that can be s o l v e d . . , although much is seriously wrong . . . . No disaster 24 The Alternative May 1974 impends unless it be one that results from public misconceptions that are in the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies" (emphasis added...
...asCounterfeiters is a remarkable and perhaps sembly line (pop~ art is born...
...Hugh Kenner's The hol's mimicry of a Campbell Soup Co...
...Despite this setback, however, Rockefeller's Commission gives every promise of leading a rich, full, famous, and eventually verbose life, as it sets to work outlining "critical choices" for us all...
...This book is quite short (168 pages, better suited in all respects to paper than to hard cover...
...Webste~s tells us that "critical" means "crucial" or "indispensable for the weathering, solution, or overcoming of a crisis...
...Prove that it's not a duck...
...We once ridiculed politicians by exaggerating their mannerisms of speech...
...Even Alexander Pope, who until his midtwenties shaped his career after Virgil's, speaks out as his urbane Horatian self not nearly so often as he crafts paltry substance with breathtaking style...
...He translated epics while he authored mock-epics...
Vol. 7 • May 1974 • No. 8
