Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial/R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Catastrophic Imperative • • Contemporary America works cruel and enigmatic treacheries on simple folk like me. Reality keeps changing false faces, and lo,...
...What impels your local pundit to swat capitalist enterprise even while capitalist advertising sustains him, or to genuflect before...
...Certainly unpleasantness lies in the path of that smug and sectarian creature who is always so fond of America's enemies, so critical of its friends, and so contemptuous of its institutions...
...Finally, I offer a fourth hypothesis for explaining the perverse persons who believe the unbelievable and insist that we believe it too...
...There is a terrible arrogance in their line on Israel, a destructive insolence in their animus against business and the conditions of liberty, and a downright suicidal passion in their vehemence against intelligence operations, defense spending, and, in brief, the very survival of democratic institutions...
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...Muggeridge describes as liberals have death wishes...
...The destructiveness of these enthusiasms may appear, on first glance, to place the United States in grave peril, and it has become very fashionable to bewail America's dismal prospects...
...disconsolate and a little randy he spends the rest of his life not unlike Mr...
...Tradition, the banker's inherent distrust of financial vogue, still reigns—though not without rivals—in Baltimore, and perhaps in other cities like it...
...Such principles seem to comprise an invincible prescription for catastrophe, yet they are urged upon us by some of the most distinguished pundits in this advanced Republic...and still I snicker...
...those who would destroy America might also, if given the chance, incinerate the whole globe...
...British socialism, though the mail service operates at thespeed of erosion, might be nothing more sinister than a low I.Q...
...Succinctly stated, I believe that a small number of pundits—generally the most intelligent of the breed—are motivated by evil...
...The gullible may believe that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
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...A death wish might have motivated Bertrand Russell, but what of Dan Rather—he thought existentialism was a treatment for late bed-wetters...
...Muggeridge casts his net too wide when he asserts as he does in this essay that a death wish stalks all liberals...
...I have spent a generous amount of time reading about and analyzing the minds that fasten on such fantasies...
...Appearances notwithstanding, the freest society on earth is the most oppressive...
...Whether it be Pickett' s Charge or the medieval Christian's dread of house cats, memorable disjunctions in history have been caused by nothing more unusual than a botched judgment...
...Internationally, those regimes that appear most menacing and oppressive to human freedom are freedom's most idealistic defenders...
...Even the average Ivan snoring away in the Politburo must realize that the same vanities that lead Senator Frank Church to disregard the security of America might lead him to disregard the safety of the whole world...
...I have taken up the matter with a neurologist, and I have settled on four hypotheses...
...It is important to remember, moreover, that not all bankers have joined the revolt from convention...
...and in America today many of those who urge us to the certain destruction that would follow were we to abscond from our responsibilities are people crippled by the terrible flaw of hubris...
...why have there never been stupidist historians...
...I have always thought it curious that none of the great thinkers of the West has ever propounded an historical interpretation based on the prodigious influence of stupidity...
...All the highfalutin disquisitions of our cognoscenti aside, these infinites are neither aspired to for their practical value nor for their theoretical comeliness, but rather they are chosen for their dramatic value...
...There are signs that moderation has won a new following...
...One should take him as seriously as one takes the local Ford salesman...
...A perfect specimen of the breed is John Kenneth Galbraith...
...Surely such premonitory musings are not new to the Kremlin...
...Grand cultures have arisen because of it...
...Ponce de Leon...
...not even Mr...
...Finally, though we may debate the source of their perversity, we must remember that their enthusiasms are destructive in the extreme...
...its friends are its enemies...
...I have made field trips to Washington, to New York, and even to London to watch the rascals in action...
...It explains the rise of great leaders...
...A third hypothesis that I offer to explain leftist perversity is one that I do not care to dwell on at too great a length...
...He was correct, of course...
...I shall present no names, but I would suggest that some of those around us who so furiously exclaim against what is rational and salutary and are forever prescribing what is palpably destructive are themselves consciously evil, even exhilaratingly evil...
...Eidelberg now teaches at Claremont Men's College...
...Brezhnev's craftiest Americanologists could guess what crazy George might do...
...I speak of man's eternal proclivity for stupidity...
...ERRATUM In our August/September review of Paul Eidelberg's A Discourse on Statesmanship, Dr...
...What of the banking system itself...
...The result, at any rate, is a very thorough, and, at least according to Citibank, which is quoted throughout, a very accurate book...
...Its decision evidently came at the prodding of the Federal Reserve System...
...Old Brezhnev realizes that hubris knows no bounds...
...Everyone by now knows that Moscow was as interested in McGoo's 1972 defeat as the Committee to Re-Elect the President...
...What if some lunatic subscriber to the New York Review of Books became President and decided the only way to really reform the world would be through worldwide nuclear holocaust...
...It is a scenario to contemplate...
...Unfortunately such imbecile notions are inflicted upon me at every turn...
...How does one explain such perversity...
...but assuredly a death wish, or something very like a death wish, explains the perverse doings of some liberals...
...There are Marxist historians and Catholic historians, there are those who hold to cyclical theories...
...Nevertheless, I shall remain steadfast in my belief that sound facts and careful logic are the surest routes to the truth...
...For years the message of the left cognoscenti has been iterated and reiterated with the same ardent fixity that one expects from, say, a Seventh Day Adventist...
...surely a few of them understood old Joe's Moscow trials...
...As a hypothesis it explains vast epics...
...Actually it seems to me that Moscow, Peking, and the Third World are also in deep trouble because of these ruinous enthusiasms...
...For my first tentative explanation I am wholly indebted to the English sage, Mr...
...Such creatures have occurred before...
...It is precisely because these economic prescriptions are so malefic that he roars for them...
...Admittedly this is a startling new perspective on world politics...
...It is too shocking and I do not want to be taken as a provocateur or a kill-joy...
...In The Poetics Aristotle adjudged hubris a terrible flaw...
...Turn it over in your mind...
...Eventually he dies of an overdose during a glandular injection...
...An enthusiasm for America's enemies, a disrelish for its friends, a burning passion for the most counterintuitive reasoning—this motley band of notions creeps out of the universities and the high-toned reviews and steals into the great newspapers, the broadcasting networks, and even the gaping mouths of our pols...
...This is the dogma adhered to by the average reader of the New York Review of Books, and because it has always struck me, provincial that I am, as the dogma of a congenital ignoramus, I shall forever be victimized by the astounding revelations of the Morally Committed...
...John J. Balles, president of the San Francisco Fed, was quoted at the same time as saying that "the cult of performance" must be put aside: "Now is the time to look primarily at the soundness of earnings and the quality of earnings...
...Malcolm Muggeridge, who eloquently stated it in his essay "The Decade of the Great Liberal Death Wish" (Esquire, December 1970...
...And one cannot help but wish, with Martin Mayer, that bankers would become a bit more like bankers...
...Domestically, those institutions and policies traditionally held to be the bulwarks of civilized society are actually inimical to it...
...Let us be charitable, there are other kinds of liberals and definitely there are other kinds of cognoscenti...
...To explain their perversity one must turn to one of the most underestimated causes in history...
...A lot can be accomplished by one stupid prince...
...I realize that such allegations are extremely jarring to modern sensibilities, but I still maintain the belief that there remain in our midst scoundrels whose excesses transcend mere naughtiness...
...A theme of epistemological import inheres through all this, to wit: that which is actual, true, and objective is really that which most flagrantly violates mere appearance, plain logic, and hard facts...
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...Death, whether consciously or unconsciously longed for, does indeed stalk such behavior...
...It is hubris, an arrogant and suicidal aspiration toward some gauzy infinite like equality...
...Reality keeps changing false faces, and lo, that which I once perceived as a trifling or a benefit suddenly whips off its sheep's clothing, bares its teeth, and latches onto my leg...
...The more idiotic the infinite one prescribes for mankind, the more effectively one dramatizes his own audacity, his own aloofness from the mundane, his own heroic self...
...Hitler's taste in architecture...
...May I remind you of the Stalinists of yesteryear...
...Anyone with the economic intelligence of an orangutan realizes that Galbraith's economic nostrums would actually increase inequality while leading us to economic catastrophe, but I submit that if his economic nostrums would lead to anything other than catastrophe he would not be thumping his podium for them...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) one take this tireless socialist, his eye forever on the infinite of egalitarianism even while his body soaks in the luxurious ambience of Gstaad and glides down the slopes with the world's most trivial and boring people, the beautiful people...
...Certainly, the economy itself will have much to say about the strength of American banking...
...What I suggest is that if those Americans who seem so intent on destroying America gain much more influence, the Bolsheviki and their Chinese cousins may join forces with the American Legion...
...Yet not all of those whom Mr...
...Personally, of all my hypotheses explaining the abominable and illogical enthusiasms of the left cognoscenti I find hubris most fetching...
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...Not long ago, the Bank of America, largest of the nation's 14,000 banks, announced it is slowing its rate of growth...
...Eidelberg was incorrectly identified as Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Dallas...
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...How seriously should (continued on page 25) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 Boston electronics company, was finally righted...
...The book is filled with people, which makes it at once lengthy and readable...
...America's enemies are its friends...
...Now I believe that Mr...
...is engaged in a lifelong struggle for a noble cause, but the wise few realize Arthur is really engaged in a torrid tango with his spirit...
...Could it be that Mayer mentioned sources simply to thank them for help...
...Nothing would stand against his zeal, and in no time Moscow, Peking, and Washington would be turned into cinders...
...Some of them seem to have a lust for power, others seem to have a hatred of reality, but all of them have something more fundamental coursing through their malevolent spirits: it is an arrogance, an insolence, and a passion...
...Unto death I shall persevere in my simple belief that the editor of the New York Times editorial page would be improved by electric shock treatment...
...Indeed they are encouraged...
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...Muggeridge's is an explanation undoubtedly helpful in explaining such mischief...
...Hardly a week goes by that I do not encounter some knuckle-headed intellectualoid pouting about American improprieties or extolling the achievement of, say, Mao Tse-tung, one of the world's mostexperienced butchers and a poet whose taste in verse is comparable to the late Mr...
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...It explains the causes of ghastly wars...
...Their obvious destructiveness is what allows him to show his defiance for society, a defiance that is a direct function of his hubris...
...I should say that only the more intellectual liberals are so troubled, that is to say the kind of liberal who lives his whole life according to the precepts of logical positivism until suddenly one morning he awakes recalling that on that precise day some thirty years before he spent an afternoon reading Liberalism and Social Action when he was supposed to attend his first fox trot lesson...
...The CIA turns out to be the KGB, the free society becomes a conspiracy against both womanhood and the fuliginous, Israel becomes the last redoubt of Nazism, doctors are apparently trying to poison me, and prison inmates are actually oppressed poets and metaphysicians while prison guards are criminals...
Vol. 9 • October 1975 • No. 1
