Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial/R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Art of the Obituary • Every now and again the poetic glow comes upon me, setting off an urge to write something other than my customary composition. I incline...
...Senator McSoandso was a hopeless dolt...
...It was, so characteristic.' "Indeed it was...
...He could never get into the White House, and as the years wore on his oratory became more desperate and lunatic...
...To kill and devour animals was not only unhealthy and unjust but also a desecration against one's spirits...
...this time a rock star has breathed his last...
...He was always most amusing...
...Professor John Kenneth was a superb example of those frenetic know-it-alls whose doctrinaire nostrums contribute so much to the economic and social problems they claim to be solving...
...Senator McSoandso was widely known to be the most gullible man to enter public life since William Jennings Bryan...
...and because he needed to make this absurd system appear plausible he sought out paragons with which to dazzle us...
...John's foul body will be cremated in an outdoor ceremony to be held at Stonehenge...
...He may be interested in some form of art, but he has almost no interest in the anatomy of the political, economic, or social system...
...In the unlikely event that he does have some understanding of the culture, he will lift not a finger to support it...
...During his last days he rarely called his broker and even ceased to make threatening calls to his estranged wife, Yo Yo, who lives in London with his four-year-old son, Splendid Horizon...
...le Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 35...
...Generally he specializes in offending people...
...There are some advanced societies where they can be counted on to practice their profession with prudence and dispatch...
...These are the salad days of journalism and of the essay...
...Death was attributed to old age...
...New priorities, lush governmental subsidies, and the liberation of everything from aggrieved minorities to saucy ids were to assure us an era of incomparable joy...
...He lived on a diet of high intensity vitamins, for he believed that one's body was the domicile of spirits...
...That is the kind of loveliness I am capable of, but writing about one of the paradigmatic goo-goo despots is not my only ambition...
...One cannot even rely on a public-spirited assassin...
...and waltz into the world of belles lettres, where I devote myself to that curiously neglected literary genus, the obituary...
...His ideas were not unlike those of Mother Gandhi, and I have always suspected that were he to win the Presidency he would surely visit us with her form of government...
...Such morons as Lee Harvey Oswald, Arthur Bremer, and now Citizen Fromme give all assassins a black eye, and anyway they never have the good taste to provide me with the kind of corpus delicti I seek to glorify...
...His pursuit of bodily health occasionally conflicted with his pursuit of mental well-being, for he spent much of his later years ingesting amphetamines, sniffing cocaine, and smoking hashish...
...It is a fact that only intensifies my spirit of lamentation...
...Scoundrels from all walks of life appear in these files, and naturally politicians are well represented...
...There would be far more statesmanlike restraint on Capitol Hill if the solons lived with the realization that hours after their departures for the hereafter America's future Faulkners might be pounding them into the stuff of literature...
...with intelligence the contrast begins...
...and to act in such a way as to discredit democracy, capitalism, and the human race...
...I yearn to elegize freshly departed rock virtuosi, jet set professors, and philistine business tycoons, to name but a few...
...The ceremony will be open to his fans...
...He harangued Americans every day of his long career, and all Washington knew he spouted the same witless sonorities in his sleep that he intoned on the floor of the Senate...
...again delicacy induces me to conceal the identity of the deceased...
...Still his orations and misadventures were always amusing...
...So it is that when the poetic spirit arises I am forced to write without respect to the pathological condition of my subject...
...John Kenneth was a lifelong botch...
...At universities they were chiefly used in introductory American history courses, American historians being known for their economic ignorance...
...This is certain to be the case if, as we are told, art represents the yearning of the cultivated minority...
...Doctors report he died of a massive coronary brought on by fright...
...He had his own grand design, but he would believe any idiotic canard that would make that design appear feasible and exigent for America...
...Let their hearts sputter and pop to a halt, let their juices cool for but a moment, and instantly I shall be committing wanton arpeggios on my Royal...
...He raised up one penurious despotism after another for our edification, and whether we nodded in appreciation or not Senator McSoandso bellowed for legislation that would render the American citizenry secure and manageable...
...His sentences were elegant, but his books made no economic sense at all...
...When they do I shall be ready...
...Finally, though I have only sketched one, I should like to write an obituary about that characteristic capitalist genius who makes a huge fortune and then immures himself in a castle somewhere, venturing out solely to make more money...
...John was a nuisance all his life...
...Even the nocturnal haranguing was characteristic, for he was a nonstop haranguer...
...John also renounced vegetables, for he claimed that he once heard a cornstalk sob when it was shorn of one of its ears...
...In no way has it hampered my literary output...
...I do not mean to imply that this gullible blatherskite was simply a dupe...
...Even in yesteryear's America there were assassins who were at least drawn from the higher orders and who displayed education and tact—some were drawn from the arts...
...Unfortunately years have passed since a proper rogue exited for the hereafter...
...Consider the following, inspired by the antics of a distinguished United States Senator whose identity shall remain masked until the day he departs for his Heavenly holiday: "Senator George S. McSoandso passed away early this morning after a restless night during which he shouted hundreds of thousands of words from speeches he had given throughout his long political career...
...They never were used by serious economists, though they sold successfully—mainly to readers who admired short titles or who had seen the orotund Professor spin his yarns on late-night television shows...
...They of course loathe him...
...He manifests his public-spiritedness by maintaining useless shrines such as extensive formal gardens featuring rare and probably poisonous Ethiopian desert shrubs...
...His wife told reporters this morning that the distinguished Senator had just broken into that famous cadenza of 'Come Home America' exhortations when, as she put it, 'I heard a gurgle and switched on the light just in time to see that look of earnest heroism that he always wore in public fade from his face to be replaced by the blank look of perfect innocence which he always wore during briefings with his aides and while watching educational television...
...Good riddance to another loudmouth from the 1960s...
...for, if his family does not immediately squanderhis wealth, his family and his foundations drain it into some useless organizations or into groups that are arrantly subversive...
...Because he feared that free men were capable of any infamy, he confected a rattletrap system of government control...
...Oh the Republic abounds with assassins, but assassins devoted to the commonweal ?—I ask you...
...In fact my files bulge with unpublished obituariesawaiting the cooperation of their subjects...
...I hope the rocks fall on them...
...In the briefest period imaginable they have aided, abetted, and at times presided over the gutting of our society and the near bankrupting of our country...
...continued on page 35) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) "He was a constant participant at protest rallies, and since the end of the Vietnam war he has nodded through a prolonged melancholy...
...I incline away from raw polemics, treatises, and bulls...
...I shall miss him...
...We have been victimized by charlatans, fanatics, and ignoramuses...
...His popularity initially derived from his maniac energies and from the fact that he was practically the only American economist who could actually write coherent English, though he seems to have thought in Chinese or Uralic...
...The literary preeminence of the obituary may very well mean the salvation of the American Republic...
...Professor John Kenneth wrote 21 books, not one of which gave any evidence that he actually read books...
...What is more, he believed anyone who told him that they actually were doing horrible things...
...Once again let me dip into my file...
...He would believe anything...
...I leave this to your contemplation and patiently await the day when the culturati recognize the artistic merits of the obituary...
...It was too much for him...
...If he has any concern at all for his fellow men it is for the admiration of his enemies...
...To the contrary, he is then apt to donate an incredible sum to an organization dedicated to the destruction of the culture, for he suspects any system that has allowed him any room in which to operate...
...for what cultivated individual can read the daily headlines and not wish that the stars of said headlines were, in a word, kaput...
...Oh those Americans who were drowsing in poverty did not worry him...
...John was one of the four Worms, a rock group that wrote and sang songs urging fraternity, equality, and crackpot socialism...
...He actually believed his own ardent exhortations, and early this morning it appears that the cumulative significance of all those monstrous testimonials suddenly burst into his mind's eye...
...Eventually he took on more horror stories than his frail constitution could bear...
...Nevertheless, because of the extraordinary velocity of his pronunciamentoes, people generally forgot his earlier gaffes...
...Say what you will about health care in America, my only complaint is that lately the healers have not provided me with a properly qualified carcass for my art...
...He simply never trusted his fellows, and he lived in constant fear that they would do something horrible...
...Literary interest in the obituary will of course be a terrific boon to my career, but allow me to suggest that it will represent something more...
...And how I long to publish this one: "Retired Harvard professor John Kenneth died last week en route to Gstaad, Switzerland, where the renowned proponent of socialism usually wintered amid herds of movie idols, millionaire playboys, and Arab real estate agents...
...Internationally acclaimed rock star, John, died today at the age of thirty-six...
...Well here we are ten or fifteen years after the great fevers set in, and about the only joy experienced in America is experienced by East Coast psychoanalysts gloating over their bank accounts...
...Alas, today they are more often than not pathetic lunatics, roaring with unappealing prejudices and a kind of upper atmosphere liberalism that emanates from National Public Radio and is seldom taken seriously by anyone save an occasional college professor and his obsequious graduate students...
...I called it his open look...
...What he hoped to achieve in his lifetime was government control over every detail of every American's life...
...I say I glory in the act, because most of these trashy fellows have wrought a great deal of mischief, and I cannot wait to descant upon them as they trip headlong toward their eternal rewards...
...Professor John Kenneth distinguished himself for being elegantly wrong on practically every issue of the day...
...Yet, considering the frauds and dolts who frolic amongst us, I expect that the obituary is the literary form of the future...
...But give the Americano something to jingle in hispockets, give him some responsibility or some respectability, and Senator McSoandso was in a fury to tie him down...
...It strikes me as unlikely in the extreme that, for instance, many American politicians would act as graspingly and loutishly as they do if their obituaries were to become literary sensations, eventually appearing in anthologies of American literature...
...The end came clamorously as he began going through his famous 'The Sky Is Falling' speeches, speeches generally associated with his historically fruitless Presidential campaign...
...and I itch to eulogize...
...Frankly stated, I glory in the solitary creative act of writing obituaries for the esteemed personages of our era...
...Nevertheless the comparison ends with ideology...
...though not one of them could ever get along with anyone, and each of them made more money than a Wall Street bond salesman...
...It is said that the novel is dead...
...When he dies, there remains but a hole where some wealth once was...
...He is the best argument I know of for democratic socialism, and before we are stranded in that particular form of government I want to commemorate his achievements...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
