Among the Intellectualoids
Maloney, Stephen R.
their ability to direct federal money into their districts, are able to build up personal support independent of party allegiances. The proliferation of primaries has weakened the role of party...
...Not that the reading would necessarily inspire them with the ideals and ethics of their prospective profession...
...Decter sees the "true grievance" of Women's Lib as not discrimination butas anger at the fact of being women...
...A point made by Orwell in "Politics and the English Language" seems appropriate here: "Whenthere is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink...
...Moreover, because it has established its credentials as a radical publication, Ms...
...In keeping with Ms.'s usual attitudes toward language, the anonymous defacement of property is "courageous" and "honest...
...One imagines that some of the plastic gewgaws sold at Peace rallies were constructed in part of materials developed by Dow Chemical...
...American hospitals, it is true, have found that a large majority of mothers much prefer their babies' being "eyedropped" to the possibilities of syphilitic blindness, but let that pass...
...Spock, Bill Coffin, and the kids marched shoulder to shoulder through the canyons of Manhattan, the days when there were real Enemies of the People and the cry was "Tricky you-know-who and Agnew too...
...Similarly, the mass media have helped to develop an electorate which responds more to the personalities and issue positions of candidates than to their party labels...
...We are to require, in short, where policemen live and how doctors practice their religion, but we are to say nothing about the question of abortion—except to announce perhaps when the local clinic is having a twofor-one sale...
...Already the deans of journalism schools are being trampled flat by thundering posses of would-be world-savers who are suddenly impressed with the power of the pen and the plethora of unemployables tumbling from other more theoretical and useless academic assembly lines...
...A lawyer before he began singing dithyrambs to Mean Joe Greene, Howard "comes out" as a supporter of ERA...
...The only proper function for a lovely female knee is, in the eyes of this magazine, to be jammed into the groin of one of the male chauvinist pigs who oink their way through the American landscape...
...Mike Gravel...
...The initial instinct of the reasonably conscious person who wants to write about Ms...
...And trolls they seem to be...
...Or consider these ringing words: "There are no bitches, only women in an intolerable situation...
...In this connection, we laugh when we read in Animal Farm about everyone being equal but some being more equal than others...
...is pregnant with full-color ads sponsored by our friendly corporate giants, many of which are being sued by various women's organizations, but which realize how profitable it is to advertise their products in anticapitalist magazines...
...Another aspiring lexicographer (a female) in the same issue talks about her numerous and 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 ongoing love affaiis and then announces, "I know I will periodically return to celibacy...
...All that Ms...
...All women, in this view, are not only created equal but also indistinguishable...
...And, if you don't like it in East Berlin, why then join one of the numerous "Grief groups," or if you are rendered speechless, a "Gestalt, nonverbal analytic group" should suffice...
...He obviously had a hard time of it...
...Book Review/Eugene H. Methvin Boogers, Haints, and Bunco Artists • • Six or seven moons ago, a New York Times reporter ventured into the Tennessee hinterland town of Dayton to check on the enlightenment and progress of its denizens upon the fiftieth anniversary of the famed Monkey Trial...
...What Ms...
...We can note about the Ms.-fits what Orwell did about the journalistic intellectuals of his land, "their severance from the common culture of the country...
...for "gay Catholics...
...the hallmark of the authoritarian mind is that it cannot bear diversity...
...Susan Lydon avows that hospital obstetrical care is "a metaphor for the lack of respect for human life inherent in American culture...
...Leonard Levitt subtitles his superb Esquire piece, "The awesome power of Gloria Steinem...
...After a great deal of prayer, meditation, and toothgrinding, Ms...
...For pure verbal incompetence, unstayed by any editorial hand, consider the following from Howard Cosell in the October issue...
...Lydon's references to her own experiences exemplify Ms.'s attitude toward recent history, public and private...
...Consider the fascistic treatment her newborn received when "she" (some people have all the luck) entered this vale of tears...
...It is the classified ads which are most revealing, for it is there that Ms...
...Whether we want to or not...
...For the major impact of the magazine is not in the Board Room of G.M., or even in the catacombs of HEW, but in the way Americans use their language...
...The very mention of his name was enough to evoke muttered imprecations, steam hissing from the ears, and an occasional pa-tooehy, sans tobacco juice, alas, progress and vogue having generally extinguished such habits among the Daytonians in this enlightened era...
...We may, in short, end up by dying laughing...
...In the words of Tom Wolfe, "the press would rather have Gloria be Women's Liberation than the other trolls under the bridge...
...One doesn't need Norman Mailer to tell us, although he did in The Prisoner of Sex, that it is an exaggerated faith in technology that sends apparently sane women hurtling off into the circumambient gas of feminist rhetoric...
...Time, 1970...
...In an article, "But What About Our Sons ? ," two Ms...
...ultimately, therefore, toward a world in which nothing goes wrong...
...Sample this selection from Ingham's excited stall-gatherings: "Long live popular unity in Chile...
...Ms...
...only one of these pieces has ever appeared in a book, and now we have them between two covers in 206 pages, including the anthologist's 28-page essay on the subject's newspaper career...
...Only one figure, the Timesman found, still raised any hackles...
...moreover, there are going to be "family cafeterias built into every housing complex...
...It is an almost-perfect vehicle for modern intellectualoidism...
...pass a law requiring" children to carry until age 18 the names of both parents—at which time a surname (her name...
...and a horde of counselors, psychotherapists, and operators of "feeling centers" (for casualties of the sexual revolution...
...She was yanked up by her feet, slapped on the bottom, weighed, eyedropped, braceletted, cleaned, dressed, handed briefly to me for inspection...
...The increasing dominance of the mass media as a definer and communicator of issues has to a great extent deprived the parties of another of their most essential functions, and has enabled candidates to appeal directly to voters...
...In keeping with the "Let's Pretend" tone of the Women's Movement, Ms...
...require all city employees to use public transportation" and to live in the city where they work...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 23 The questions inyolved are overwhelming: what is the nature of life...
...Finally, there will be "more responsibility by the entire community for the children...
...Warming up, Kincaid condemns "Labelle," a popular black singing group, by saying that their "beat" is more reminiscent of white songstresses than blacks...
...It is in the magazine's interest to nurture feminine frustration by serving as a veritable bubble-machine of Liberationist dreams...
...The old-timers had mellowed...
...As Clay Felker, Gloria's former editor at New York, is rumored to have said, "With those legs that girl ought to be a writer...
...assures us (S)He was—He would not have rested on the seventh day but on the seven hundredth, right after creating the Affirmative Action Committee...
...In her Time essay Miss Steinem appears quite willing to take the oath as the Commissar in Charge of the Equalization of Everything...
...grows out of the illusion of national omnipotence created by the successes of modern technology, from the space flights to the birth 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 control pill...
...Astrographology, numerology, and astrology parade their wares...
...by Stephen R. Maloney Among the Intelleetualoids, If one has the ms.-fortune to spend several days reading Ms...
...Not many male journalists can resist a few leers and some lip-smacking when giving a brief mention to her fine mind and then hurrying on to the important parts: her fashionably-streaked, Clairol girl hair, her Grablesque legs, her Venus de Milo breasts, her Sweetheartof-Sigma-Chi face...
...anthropes and Men perish in the verbal mustard gas dispensed by that magazine...
...This periodical (who would dare call it a monthly...
...The paucity of good Nixonite villains to hate is reflected in the choice of subjects in some recent Ms...
...One assumes that such "viable" organisms are lucky to have the protection of the United States Constitution and a Judaeo-Christian tradition that turns out to have a good many more maternal instincts than the good ladies of Ms...
...And yet Ms...
...For Mencken, much of the practice of journalism, as of politics, involves a kind of humbugging akin to the making of the movie Jaws, and the creation and marketing of that fish with six-inch teeth...
...correspondent who follows a questionable assertion with two clichés...
...She is, in Leonard Levitt's compelling phrase, the "intellectual's pin-up...
...and then showily rescuing us all at the last minute from the menace...
...Thus, Gloria Steinem ("mem...
...Moreover, in this uncertain future it is likely that the ideological divisions among the American people will be much less clear-cut than, and perhaps very different from, what Rusher and Phillips expect them to be...
...reflects the politics of nostalgia, the time when Dr...
...Firestone asks for is the "elimination...
...ads is one from September: "Attend German Democratic Republic Conference, East Berlin, October 20 to 25th, 1975 and learn their advanced feminist views...
...Paul's admonition against women speaking in church...
...combines its amorality with an authoritarian attempt to impose its own standards (or more precisely, its lack of standards) on everyone else...
...demonstrates, is a dangerous thing...
...Mencken was first, foremost, andperdurably a newspaperman...
...Other than an occasional swelling in the breast when every fortnight or so a woman takes a shot at Betty Ford's "oppressor," feminist political activity seems to consist today of shouting "ERA Now" and of abstaining from Gallo wine...
...Sounding like a black Grand Kleagle, Kincaid informs us that "white audiences recognize the superiority of most black entertainment...
...In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell enunciated an important insight that goes far toward explaining the verbal fishwifery of the people who write for Ms.:" All mechanical progress is towards greater and greater efficiency...
...For the woman who used to think she had everything: "Liberating vibrators...
...wishes for our land is not the matriarchy of Lysistrata nor the autocracy of Comrade Davis but the Manhattanization of America, the imposition of the values of the erstwhile Lindsay supporter, the "with it" New Yorker...
...It is the conflict between the Grand Inquisitor, offering bread and miracles (i.e., technological breakthroughs) and the man or woman willing to accept the terrifying, but exhilarating, burden of freedom...
...We have "liberating Blue Work Shirts" (if not a collection of oxymorons, perhaps an appeal to the lady who used to read True Confessions...
...Observe, gentle reader, the operative verbs in these "suggestions...
...If this analysis is correct, the prospect of the emergence in the 1970s of a stable new majority comparable to the New Deal coalition is almost nil...
...Jargon is the tool of the person who once had something to say but has forgotten what it was...
...He was the Baltimore Whangdoodle, that's what—probably the most gifted and gaudy magnifico ever to practice American journalism, and certainly a unique specimen...
...correspondents seem to spend a lot of time in hospitals (although not enough, some might say), what with the need for abortions and "related services...
...If we accept Ms.'s definition of the social situation, with males and females glaring at each other across a rhetorical no man's (no person's...
...The feminist intellectualoid asks questions of this sort: "If we can send a spaceperson to the moon, why can't we invent a machine to change the baby's diaper...
...correspondents mention how "one pregnant woman told us—within earshot of her three-year-old son—how disappointed she had been that he had been a boy...
...That function is, quite simply, scaring the hell out of the American people, occasionally devouring a few hapless victims...
...His career as working journalist spanned a half-century, 1898-1948...
...As a fugitive from the politicized 1960s, the magazine points up the real thrust of that decade: the elimination of distinctions—sexual, moral, and intellectual...
...has 16 editor-persons but no grammarians or semanticists...
...The McGovern debacle of 1972, the end of the Vietnam war and its attendant domestic unrest, the return of tranquility on the nation's campuses, and the eclipse of militant black and student leaders all signal the failure of New Left hopes for a revolutionary transformation of American society...
...Even more depressing, we are flooded with the stagnant waters of existentialism: "growth potential," "self-realization," and even "identity crisis...
...And another mother: "I censor all his books...
...is nothing if not dialectical: its central thesis is the oppression of all females by (almost) all males...
...How, for instance, would one go about parody-ing the style of a typical Ms...
...demands the authority to make everyone equal...
...She is the whited sepulchre of Women's Lib...
...But by reducing discussion of the issue to the shibboleth of "It's my body," Ms...
...they move easily from agreeable, if idle, forms of idealism ("peace on earth") to a frothing millenialism...
...One periodically returns to that condition about the way one periodically returns to virginity...
...The gospel of Women's Liberation according to Ms...
...The result of all these seemingly irreversible developments in parties with little coherence, is candidates who are increasingly independent of their parties and voters without much party loyalty...
...the editors, if they had their due and ran society, would, among other gentle prod-dings, "require cops to spend a month in jail incognito...
...In other words, Big Brother and Big Sister are going to be watching you...
...There is, furthermore, an appalling, unnatural mean-spiritedness in much of the Women's Movement...
...what is the responsibility of a mother to her fetus (formerly known as the "unborn child...
...If we asked Sayre who the "some of us" who knew all these marvelous things were, we would obtain perhaps the complete guest list for the Cesar Chavez and Black Panther affairs (Gloria Steinem procured the mariachi band for the former...
...There will be an "equalization of parental responsibility...
...The consequences of this complex development are difficult to foresee, but they are unlikely to lead to a clear triumph for what is conventionally considered the political Right or the political Left...
...one always has the feeling that the lady is never indicating precisely what she means to say...
...Arlington House $8.95 Sun, inherited in his office a splintery old filing cabinet once used by Mencken himself, and some spiritual vibration therefrom moved the young man to present us with this convenient collection...
...The proliferation of primaries has weakened the role of party leaders, and contributed to a breakdown of party discipline...
...the author takes an eminently ignorable subject and establishes only that feminist graffiti are as dreary as their male counterparts...
...In addition, as Midge Decter has shown in her brilliant The New Chastity, Women's Movement radicals are involved in a desperate war against nature itself...
...Slavery is Liberation, in other words...
...The "Women's Movement" has frightened morepoliticians (into voting for the ERA, for example) than the combined lobbyists of the Fortune 500 top companies...
...takes it all off...
...The people in Ms...
...To a considerable extent, Rusher and Phillips still view the Left-Right split in American politics from the perspective of the late sixties...
...also opposes (in its "Gazette" of September 1975) state laws "which require measures to save a viable fetus...
...My own hunch is that we will probably be seeing more political figures like California's Governor Jerry Brown who combine liberal and conservative impulses in strange new ways...
...compete for clients...
...Up against the wall, father figure...
...What a timely good fortune...
...ban the sale of handgun ammunition...
...If for reasons of budget escalation the deans want to accept all corners including even those who cannot read, they might well impose as an alternate test attendance at the movie Jaws, instructing the neophytes to study carefully the shark...
...Whatever else he was —man of letters, magazine editor, historian of the American languageH.L...
...Finally, one for the Ms...
...The causes thereof lie deep The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 25...
...can get away with using the more fashionable varieties of racial putdowns...
...To its credit, American business looks uncomfortable in Ms., something like the Chairman of the Board in his undershirt when the police break down the door at the massage parlor...
...Down in the trenches, the classifieds, the key word is liberated...
...An editorial conference at Ms., one speculates, deserves nothing less than the talents of Hieronymus Bosch to memorialize it...
...readers can be wrong, but that would be news to Walter Cronkite and his brethren...
...Young America is about to be set atwittering by the movie version of the Washington Post's young tyros, Bernstein and Woodward, reincarnated and beatified by that matinee beauty Robert Redford and by counter-hero Dustin Hoffman, slaying Richard the Terrible and his White House horribles...
...Responding to some hate-America clatter in Ms...
...has inaugurated a new series, the "Celestial Suggestion Box...
...But there is a peculiarly contemporary problem here, as novelist-poet Marion Montgomery has pointed out in another context: "Satire is scarcely possible in literary mode in an age where absurdity is so vast as to prevent enlargement...
...all these will make it possible for both the mother and the father to work...
...One turns the pages of Ms...
...has decided this deplorable condition (the human condition, that is) is the fault of men...
...Which may be one of the subtler aims of Ms...
...of the sex distinction itself...
...In any case, one of those aptly-named Women's Libbers named Shulamith Firestone has, in The Dialectics of Sex, rendered Gloria's proposals almost, well, modest...
...And this from the Magna Mater of the Movement, Gloria Steinem: "In Women's Lib Utopia, there will be free access to good jobs—and decent pay for bad ones...
...we all do...
...Yet in some respects the New Left has already been decisively defeated, while in other respects the attitudes it promoted have been incorporated into the American mainstream...
...There's something for the disorganized leftists to rally 'round...
...And so it does in Ms...
...Citizens for Stevenson, 1956" in her Who's Who sketch) can write in 1975 of "our [i.e., women's] strong support for Eisenhower...
...all seem to have attended the chic girls' school in Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, the college whose suggested motto was: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you feel guilty...
...Of the Liberationist designation of motherhood as a condition of victimization, Dec-ter says: "For women to claim that they are victims when they are so clearly not is merely an expression of their terror in the face of the harshnesses and burdens of a new and as yet not fully discovered freedom...
...We can, and assuredly should, laugh at Ms., but the triumph of, for instance, Bella Abzug, should warn us that mere ludicrousness cannot always provoke contempt from the multitudes...
...One wishes more Ms...
...What kind of women edit Ms...
...when does life begin...
...All those "chairpersons" and "spokespersons," to say nothing of delights such as "penwomanship" and "personkind...
...This is the lesson the world learns with sorrow as it watches the list of nuclear nations grow...
...Mon Dieu...
...Whenever two or three feminists are gathered together, they organize, with "Dignity"—e.g...
...This witches' brew of egotism (we-gotism...
...The good deans would do well to greet all aspirants at the door, hand each a copy of this work, and see which can read a book written in American English...
...In fact, when writing about women, Ms...
...wants not so much to pass the ERA as to repeal the laws of nature...
...Feminists italicize their graffiti...
...Take, for example, Curtis Ingham writing on feminist graffiti...
...essay (by Robin Morgan): "Today, my sexuality unfolds in ever more complex, beautiful, and self satisfying layers...
...For Bryan the Defender of Genesis, there was a modicum of admiration...
...This, as the bathroom wall might reply, is pure b*11- sh*t...
...And for the Infidel Scopes, there was positive affection, but of a low and altogether unnewsworthy amperage...
...Don't like housing complexes...
...From the very first issue, where Ann Crittenden Scott had the average housewife working 100 hours a week (hardly leaving her time to be a sex object), the magazine has manifested the "intellectual hatred" characteristic of those "hysterical women" that Yeats condemned in his poetry...
...Those who forget the (recent) past are condemned not to feel upset about it, themagazine implies...
...This well-meaning person is ms.-ing the point...
...by Angela Davis, a reader asks in the October issue whether "conservative" and other nonradical women can be feminists, so that The Movement might become something other than a splinter in the foot of the body public...
...In reading Ms...
...or (2) give up their professions...
...Miss Steinem is —one is tempted to say "luckily"—beyond child-bearing age, like the narrator's wife in Swift's "Modest Proposal...
...But with her beauty and her trendiness, Gloria is to Women's Lib what Catfish Hunter is to the New York Yankees: "The Franchise...
...Aren't you sorry you missed it...
...Increased skilled labor might lead to a four-hour workday, and higher wages would encourage further mechanization of repetitive jobs...
...The Empress now presumably slouching toward these shores to be born does not fool around But, as Gloria says, "If Women's Lib wins...
...One of my favorite Ms...
...A few examples: Jamaica Kincaid says that if Mick Jagger were black he could sing rhythm and blues, but being white he has to settle for number two, rock...
...Most of the writers who plop their leaden prose upon the pages of Ms...
...In fact, the same kind of linguistic dreck that defaces the walls debases the magazine, especially on the "It's my body" question of abortion...
...the same kind of Utopian babble that Orwell called "Wellsian" and described, in his sexist way, as "the paradise of little fat men...
...We get in Ms...
...and its Dragon-lady founder and editor-president, Gloria Steinem...
...There, 1 plus 1 equals 10...
...land, then we deserve to Of (Ms...
...And, praises be, here at long last we have an anthology of Mencken the newspaperman, pieces he wrote on the craft and state of American journalism collected and packaged together with a biographical appreciation by Theo Lippman, Jr...
...make it" cost more for third-class mail than for first...
...Feminism is...
...are old-fashioned perfectibilitarians...
...After a long session reading—and writing about—this feminist screed one sees with clarity that Ms...
...and pleonasm makes us feel that if God had been a feminist—as Ms...
...Unfortunately, it is a great deal easier to make a [nuclear] bomb than to make a car...
...Queen Victoria's imperial "we" becomes the collective "we," women uniting to cast off their chains—to say nothing of their girdles and bras...
...Obviously, a half-million Ms...
...is the reflection of both the debased politics and the corrupt language spawned by the overheated imaginations of our time...
...Today, I can affirm my mother and identify with her beyond all my intricate ambivalence...
...Much of the anguish, real and imagined, that surfaces in Ms...
...Indeed, he shows quite convincingly that the journalist, the politician, and the shark all share common arts and appetites, and perform quite similar functions in our society...
...Little wonder then, given their general hostility toward their motherhood, that they reject the doctrines of Marcus Welby...
...But we, following Murphy's Law rather than Wells', live in a world where everything that can go wrong does...
...Instead, American electoral politics will be moving into an uncertain future, with old structures and loyalties losing their hold, and no clear indication of what will replace them...
...What kind of a newspaperman was this whose shade can cause such eruptions after fifty years, yes, almost twenty after his bones have been lowered to their final roasting place...
...Now let's be reasonable: a woman who can become outraged by her baby's being weighed, cleaned, and given an identification bracelet (the better to bring your own baby home) belongs in that segment of the Johnny Carson show where the speaker makes a statement and the audience, in simulated sympathy and indignation, shouts: "Yeah...
...One gets an absurd image of a gaggle of hirsute, glazed-eyed SDSers debating whether or not to blow up the Math Building so as to gain Nixon's attention...
...The kind who can find the following statement striking enough to capsulize and italicize: "It is possible to give birth in an American hospital and feel grateful that you did so...
...Disagree...
...In the fluorescent, plasticized world of the computer, language is superfluous, save for the pseudo-language of binary mathematics...
...solves problems by ignoring or obscuring them...
...He says, hilariously, that ERA opponents use arguments that are "prima facie, which is a term in law that more or less means 'absurd.' " Prima facie means "absurd" about the way that Gloria Steinem means Olive Oil...
...We gave him a unisex name de-liberately...
...For example, when Gloria Steinem talks about Women's Lib producing "a radical redefinition of sin," one suspects she means that the cathedrals are going to be turned into day-care centers...
...The slavish adherence to the ideal of mechanical progress has something to do with Ms.'s linguistic failings...
...magazine, as I have done, he finishes the task with a new respect for St...
...Nora Sayre, in a piece on Kent State, laments that the students of today don't firebomb the ROTC building with the vigor of yore...
...In an age hesitant to make any distinctions, Ms...
...is famous for its veritable jargon factory...
...Alas, her mind is something other than fine (one suspects softening of the brain from total immersion in cliches), her prose style is nothing but lumpish, her conversation only the gramophone-in-human-form jargon of the 1960s...
...has concluded that our "sexist" society causes the mass of women to lead lives of quiet desperation...
...refuses to admit that there are big questions and moral problems involved, or that abortion can be morally repugnant to many thoughtful people...
...What, after all, is a little bourgeois political freedom when male and female stonemasons and barbed-wire stringers work side by side heroically building a sturdy wall that, among other things, keeps out reactionary views about feminism...
...articles...
...Gloria...
...For men are only strawpersons in the ostensible battle of the sexes orchestrated by Steinem and her Amazonian cohort...
...This worthy, an editorial writer for the A Gang of PecksniffsAnd Other Comments on Newspaper Publishers, Editors and Publishers by H.L...
...reader's dreams (and especially, one guesses, of the numerous Lesbian subscribers' reveries...
...What is worse, Ms...
...A little language, Ms...
...The question here is who is the co-opter and who the co-optee (cooptress...
...Hall of Fame: "It's my body, and having a child is my decision...
...nevertheless, the glossy corporate spreads tell us much both about business and about a magazine which purports to hate it...
...It dreams of a world where everything is regulated—except the behavior of feminists...
...Thus, for all the talk about "new freedom" and "liberation," the real drama underlying the sound and the fury of the magazine is an old one...
...The cure for prose such as Morgan's is not literary criticism but rather the ducking stool...
...Nobody seemed to care much about the teaching of evolution anymore, one way or other...
...Linguistically, the magazine is much in need of a her-sterectomy...
...is to satirize its pretensions, its jargon, its galloping misanthropy...
...Ingham tells • us, cheerleader fashion, that "graffiti are the Voice of the People and, as such, are very often courageous, honest, and inspiring...
...Observe the verbal behavior of one Ms...
...almost expecting to find the complete speeches of Mrs...
...That was the newspaper reporter who covered the extravaganza for the Baltimore Sun—Henry Louis Mencken...
...Those nurses and physicians who refuse for moral or religious reasons to perform abortions are to be offered two choices: (1) perform abortions...
...There are to be "free nurseries" (everything is free in Women's Lib...
...Along with its rhetorical venom and sheer mindlessness, Ms...
...And' et many themes articulated by the New Left—hostility to business, suspicion of our political leaders and institutions, reservations about economic growth, etc.—are now echoed by a considerable portion of American public opinion...
...Scaling such dialectical heights, the reader almost yearns for the graffiti...
...contributors and editors easily glide into the first person plural...
...Take that, you sexist honkies...
...Mencken edited by Theo Lippman, Jr...
...The cliche is the mental spasm of the person who "sleeps like a baby," even while writing an article...
...fills, as an advertising man said of 'another product, "a much-needed void...
...and its "philosophy" do have influence...
...Although some will not agree, this is a question that divides people of good will, a problem that finds conservatives, libertarians, and liberals in various uneasy alliances...
...Ditto for men, The Enemy...
...could be chosen...
...Behold: "Truth is a commodity that the masses of undifferentiated men cannot be induced to buy...
...prospers...
...Even for Darrow the Devil's Disciple, they harbored modest respect...
...Wild generalizations blossom in her essay like warts on a rotten squash: "In the Sixties, when foreign policy grew more demented, while Nixon assured the peace movement he wasn't listening, it seemed inevitable to some of us that protest took more frantic shapes—as many became desperate to gain his attention...
...a profoundly radical and perpetually enlarging vision of what can save this planet" (Robin Morgan...
...For either exercise would prepare them equally for the low estate to which they aspire, as Mencken clearly elucidates...
...The girl of every Ms...
...Never have so many writers said so much about so little...
...Living off the daydreams and the frustrations of the housewife (real or potential) for whom the clubs, the station wagons, and the soap operas will no longer suffice, Ms...
...writers might learn the values of nonverbalism...
...wants to "raise the consciousness" (that is, fanaticize the behavior) of all those matrons and maidens who are dissatisfied in Des Moines and frustrated in French Lick...
Vol. 9 • January 1976 • No. 4
