Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial/R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Once Again, The Locust Years • • Around the middle of the 1960s a critique of American society surfaced, arguing to the effect that American foreign policy was...
...America has limited influence on the calculations of foreign powers, but I would suggest that America do what it can to influence those powers toward sober conclusions...
...Foreign policy legislation must be more purposive than the gallimaufry bills thrown together for domestic consumption...
...He is unable to perform physically or emotionally when he is brought face to face with decisive activity...
...And, after reading his entire narrative, I've got the willies...
...But once Mr...
...I, screwing up my courage before this formidable sage who before the 1972 election notified New York Times Magazine readers of Senator George McGovern's impending victory, would say yes...
...If it was not progressive liberals who harangued that theme of isolationism which they spied in the policies of a continuum of men from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to Senator Robert A. Taft, Sr., then who did...
...They bring on wars, which is why foreign policy cannot be kicked around the Senate like so much domestic legislation...
...One of these questions concerns the way democracies establish their foreign policies, or as the question is posed today: "Is that bipartisanship in foreign policy, which our postwar consensus sustained, a good thing...
...Most likely they will be presented as conceptually alluring policies, mysteriously subverted by The Coca Cola Export Corporation and other foreign subsidiaries of the Robber Barons...
...In such wilds one must proceed cautiously and knowledgeably...
...Indeed he has recently dismissed the whole idea of bipartisan foreign policy as a Cold War aberration, often impolitic, often wrongheaded, and out of cadence with twentieth-century American experience...
...After all, if progressive liberals were not responsible for internationalism, who was...
...But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them...
...In the Far East General Hideki Tojo grew in stature and ambition...
...I can do nothing though, but ignore her...
...Winston Churchill called the thirties the locust years and those years reveal the grave difficulties democracies face in dealing with aggressive militaristic regimes...
...Future historians, I suspect, will note that a certain kind of liberal at work during the 1960s saved religious fundamentalism in America by injecting it into the godless world of American politics...
...But, physical activity leaves him limp...
...Hence, he merely becomes another hollow man who whimpers...
...To do all of the above is to tempt imminent disaster...
...While Yossarian chooses to stay in the hospital instead of going back to the war, Heller does not allow Slocum any kind of rational choice...
...Speakers will include Irving Kristol and Robert Bleiberg For information, write: George Nathan, The Alternative, P.O...
...The bombast of domestic politics is not taken so philosophically by foreigners...
...Once Again, The Locust Years • • Around the middle of the 1960s a critique of American society surfaced, arguing to the effect that American foreign policy was causing intense discomfiture amongst the better sorts of Americanoes, and that if that policy were not radically revised American society would be overcome by a great pother...
...Schlesinger in his more sensible moments, have long considered bipartisanship a desideratum of great importance to democratic governments...
...My daughter makes me feel foolish again...
...In such circumstances democracies tend to act without resolution, without wisdom, and occasionally without honor...
...And again I have that powerful, momentary, spiteful impulse to injure her, wound her deeply with a cutting retort, to reach out over the dining room table and smack her hard on the side of the face or neck, to kick her viciously under the table in her ankle or shin...
...Edward Hallett Carr reminds us that, before the First World War, "In democratic countries, foreign policy was traditionally regarded as outside the scope of party politics...
...Arthur Schlesinger, an eternal partisan of anemophilous liberalism, would say no...
...Even though the critics of these policies held the redoubts of great influence, there was still bound to be a messy period of national pother, the very existence of which—for it was prophesied by the critics—lent plausibility to their noble work...
...As the news of the day makes poignantly clear, we are now very close to an embodiment of Nevin( Chamberlain's England, and to add to the bleakness of our ordeal there is II( Churchill to deride...
...It was easy to laugh off such an episode in England, but in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations...
...He repeatedly tells the reader that he wants to hurt those who intensify the anguish of the absurd...
...Nonetheless, what is positively perverse is that those who raised this critique were, in many respects, responsible for the policy...
...To understand the inconsistencies of Mr...
...If it didn't become jaundice and went away, they could discharge him...
...Yossarian had an undying spirit that proved that he and, hence I, could retaliate in some way against the inconsistencies of absurdity...
...The third decade of this century bears a riveting similarity to our present trials...
...Heller once was able to create an antihero with whom I was pleased to identify...
...SARKES TAMAN INC...
...In an absurd world, however, that premise is false...
...one cannot speak so lightly about foreign trade legislation or neutrality laws...
...And so, as the postwar foreign policy consensus withers under the bombardment of its critics, we find ourselves struggling through this momentous present, a sad time of American ignominy and inaction, a time in which we are forced once again to address those timeless questions democracies always face when the world feels the ghostly fevers of war...
...In fact I doubt that any democratic electorate is, at least in matters of foreign policy...
...Schlesinger now applauds the achievements of such worthies as Senator Homer T. Bone in stultifying Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Roosevelt...
...These policies are sent into a world over which we have less control and in which miscalculations bring on something more unpleasant than electoral upsets...
...Meanwhile the Americans were living through a period of blissful isolation and the American Congress was immobilized by partisanship...
...In the immediate aftermath of this civil war many things remain unclear, and we still have no sure idea of how the victors will rewrite their official version of American history...
...I hope that Something Happened was just a temporary sojourn in the world of nihilism, and that in 13 more years he will give us another wonderful novel which reasserts his faith in the power of man to overcome the mundane through affirmative action of the spirit...
...That we have to grope for the answers but forty years after the answers imposed themselves on the European democracies is cause for a tremor of fatalism demanding a surge of resolution...
...Nothing happened that really mattered in one way or another...
...he only giggles at his own inanity...
...Evidently Mr...
...To think otherwise is to toy with the same fantasies that trivialized the diplomacy of Chamberlain and Daladier in the 1930s...
...And because it was the genius of a people matured by the lessons of appeasement, annealed by a great world war, and tested continually during the postwar period, the reversal of these policies could not be an easy matter...
...There is opportunity in America...
...so he left to find a more rewarding existence for himself...
...To ignore the consequences of one's own policies, to patronize and deceive an electorate is to dangerously weaken a nation from within...
...I see no reason to depart from such policies today, not when the critics can conjure up nothing more inspiriting than the policies of the 1930s...
...But it is obvious by now that in dealing with militarists diplomacy is futile when not accompanied by military might...
...Hence, he spends his entire life looking for explanations of sequences that have no logical basis...
...Before that Americans focused on their domestic problems and raised George Washington's farewell advice first to folk wisdom, thence to dogma...
...He knows that "if it became jaundice they could treat it...
...47401 Adb...
...If this continues, the critics of American foreign policy are going to be performing before empty seats when they attempt to turn the State Department into an international equivalent of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare—which is probably the essence of any genuine reform they might suggest...
...Unfortunately we live in a world inhabited by greedy militarists and aggressive totalitarians, and as the first half of the century made clear, democratic nations do not fare very well in diplomatic jousts with militarists—not when their citizens are looking inward...
...Already they are edging in that direction...
...He knew he was incapable of changing the status quo...
...During most of the decade only neutrality legislation could get through Congress, as Arthur Schlesinger from an earlier incarnation astutely observed...
...And what about Heller...
...Few wars are fought over blowzy farm subsidies...
...For instance, Mr...
...frothing pious platitudes while foemer forge their arms...
...America in the 1930s was at one with the Britain Churchill observed: "This was one of those awful periods which recur in our history, when the noble British nation, seems to fall from its high estate, loses al trace of sense or purpose, and appears tc cower from the menace of foreign peril...
...The critics act as though a democratic electorate is a giant tuba, capable of playing any tune the critics blow into it, once minor adjustments are made...
...What has made this civil war so discommoding is that the policies being criticized in the middle 1960s were policies issuing from the postwar genius of the American people, a genius that liberals had meticulously shaped, and a genius that really believed in the Four Freedoms, the Truman Doctrine, and John F. Kennedy's inaugural address...
...Churchill's account of a similar episode in pre-war England...
...From that point on, as Germany knocked off one weak neighbor after another, the democracies stammered and looked for the fire escape...
...When the Italians snatched Ethiopia the members of the League of Nations shrieked and swooned, but they recognized the Italian conquest...
...In suggesting there should be a broad bipartisanship in foreign policy I am not being anti-democratic or "imperialist...
...Schlesinger one must understand that he is the kind of partisan ideologue who takes his own views with the most revered seriousness while dismissing opponents as either unserious or nonexistent...
...I hope not...
...and I would pause to wonder at how Mr...
...In the beginning of the book, for example, Yossarian is in an Army hospital with "almost jaundice...
...Slocum, however, is merely a shell of that fighting spirit...
...Alas, I fear my reflections cannot end here with happy visions of Secretary of State Arthur Schlesinger vainly exhorting 210 million baseball fans to chip in for a system of junior colleges for the idealists of modern Indochina...
...A citizenry can only endure so much confusion before it reverts to the simplest credos, and I suspect that if the pounding of their sensibilities continues Americans will stagger back to the simpler truths of isolationism...
...They have vast international designs for what they would call "cooperation" with the Third World and even the Communist world...
...411...
...His premise is that something happened sometime to make him what he is...
...Slocum's first line in Something Happened is "I get the willies...
...All around the world many calculations are being made today...
...Hence, Slocum looks for solutions whichare inaccessible, if not altogether nonexistent...
...The popinjays who have been chirping about the injustices and debacles of our postwar foreign policy and who are so delighted with the inaction of the poseurs of the 94th Congress, the Congress that is so extravagant at home and so parsimonious abroad, the Congress that abuses our NATO allies, ignores the Communist intrigues in Portugal, and refused to live by the implicit obligations of the Paris Agreement—the popinjays who see the whole post-Watergate period as a glorious episode would do well to recall Mr...
...The intellectualcritics of American policy are themselves too pretentious to be isolationist...
...Box 877 Bloomington, Ind...
...Disillusionment with Wilsonian idealism turned American intellectuals toward the kind of introspection that has captured our own aging subjects of Camelot...
...Schlesinger and his fellows accord their own notions the kind of seriousness characteristic of the religious fanatic...
...The calculations continue as a truly preposterous collection of men attempts to hobble our intelligence forces, return our troops from Europe, accommodate every vagary winging in from the Third World, and further debilitate our military...
...Through it all a grim axiom emerged: the successes of aggressive militarists encourage more militarists...
...Schlesinger and his associates are going to have a difficult time shipping pharmaceuticals and grain to the new governments of Southeast Asia...
...He knows that the hospital is the safest place to be during the war, so he doesn't intend to be released...
...The calculations began some years ago when our universities capitulated to radicals and to know-nothings, when social problems seemed to multiply, and when the old stability of American life began to fade...
...Slocum never understands or accepts the fact that the world in which he lives is absurd...
...I do not mean to imply that there was no room for diplomacy in Southeast Asia or that military tactics were the sole answer...
...Senators and Congressmen should possess a sense of deference for the complicated conditions of international life, the historical framework that is so much a part of communication amongst nations, and the sensibilities of their own citizens...
...Schlesinger and his crowd now claim that bipartisanship was easily possible at the outset of the Cold War because there existed noserious opposition to President Truman's foreign policy, a foreign policy they supported...
...What the middle 1960s witnessed was—among other things—the outbreak of another of those civil wars which have periodically envenomed the disagreements of American liberals during this century...
...I am not even certain that President Kennedy will remain the earthly vessel of Divine wisdom...
...Over a century ago Tocqueville assayed the disrelish democracies have for the conduct of energetic foreign affairs, and students of American history have long noted this tendency amongst Americans...
...Does he too giggle and get the willies now...
...When Nazi Germany disregarded the Treaty of Versailles and militarized the Rhineland, the French vacillated and the British actually rushed out to sign a naval agreement allowing Germany naval tonnage in excess of that which both nations had agreed to in the 1919 treaty...
...By ignoring these considerations, foreign policy critics have ignored one of the inescapable elements in the formulation of democratic foreign policy, namely the (continued on page 32) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1975 it, and then create his own rules by which to live...
...To think that a great nation, a nation whose strength insures the peace of so many points on the globe, can simply walk away from contested commitments, can renege on treaty agreements as though they had evaporated with time, or can cut back on defense expenditures in the face of competition from abroad is to mock history...
...Yossarian, however, is not confused at all...
...A fascination with pacifism swept American campuses just as it had swept English campuses, and native American isolationism intensified with the country's growing economic weakness...
...Only since the Second World War have Americans inclined toward a global foreign policy...
...I cannot say with certitude that Taft will remain a benighted provincial or that President Eisenhower will remain an amiable slug...
...Well, that policy was not radically revised, American society has been overcome by a considerable pother, and what makes the above reflections verge upon the wry is that those people who raised this critique, replete with shocking vaticinations, were for the most part the same people who caused the pother...
...I doubt the American electorate is so adaptable...
...Slocum wants to fight, but his spirit isn't strong enough to justify action...
...Those who did not were left without a country...
...In the first instance they simply ignore the existence of the Taft Republicans...
...Bloomington, Indiana The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 35...
...The sensibility of the average American has suffered an enormous amount of abuse in recent years as the critics have debonairly bludgeoned him for being a militarist or a dullard or whatever else might service their short-term polemical purposes...
...The last such row was won by the anti-Communist internationalists who routed the forces of Henry Wallace, the Progressive Citizens of America, and other assorted strummers-of-harps in the late 1940s...
...Perhaps the best contrast between Heller's affirmative black humor and his new negative approach can be seen in Slocum's inability to fight back at a world which has denied him hope of a satisfying existence...
...Our military involvement in Indochina was not a wise policy, not from a strategic standpoint and certainly not in the way i was executed...
...All of these considerations have been ignored in recent years both by many American politicians and by almost all critics of American policy...
...Nevertheless, if Americans revert to their pre-1941 position, Mr...
...But by the middle 1960s, though still lusting for the scepter, many of the anti-Communist internationalists had wearied of the burdens of power, and when the strummers-of-harps again aspired to control American liberalism many of these anti-Communists capitulated...
...If nothing else, we could laugh at the ludicrous atrocities...
...0 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) sensibility of the electorate...
...Johnson': commitment had been made there re (continued on page 35) 32 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 197 EDITORIAL (continued from page 32) mained no recourse but to honor it...
...In Catch-22, Yossarian continuously defied the system...
...I would lose all energy and souland be left with almost no substance I could feel...
...Schlesinger has changed his formerly glum estimate of diplomacy during the 1920s and 1930s—fallow years for American foreign policy and years visited by not a bud of bipartisanship in Congress...
...For thirty years the best way to do this has been to present a united voice to the world on matters of foreign policy, maintain a strong military posture, honor foreign commitments, and act soberly ourselves...
...What I am certain of is that the next official version will not speak of "containment," "anti-Communism," and "internationalism" as the unlimited glories of yore...
...Today they pronounce bipartisanship impossible because of their profound moral objections...
...His running away from it was simply another form of defiance...
...Foreign policies are not brought to bear on problems resting within one's own jurisdiction, but they are nudged out into the treacherous world of foreign jurisdictions...
...The Alternative Is Sponsoring a Conference on The Corporation and the Future of Free Enterprise June 13 and 14 The Mayflower Hotel Washington, D.C...
...He doesn't laugh at the absurdity...
...This is not to say that foreign policy should not be subject to thoughtful debate, but the debate must not proceed with the abandon that characterizes so many of our political shouting matches...
...Serious persons, including Mr...
...In the second instance Mr...
Vol. 8 • June 1975 • No. 9
