Briefly Recommended
Briefly Recommended • • "Godfrey Daniels!" by.Richard J J. Anobile Crown $8.95 W.C. Fields by Nicholas Yanni Pyramid $1.75 W.C. Fields once promised not to offer us any such "empty panaceas...
...Rather they talk of a regional settlement guaranteed by the great powers after a new war, the very policy the U.S...
...Whalen is a little short on "specific solutions," but given his analyses, they suggest themselves...
...In other circumstances—without, for example, Whalen's closely-reasoned arguments as a backdrop—this would indeed seem a simple-minded answer, a cliche...
...While they lament the likelihood that leaders will dawdle until through desperation the public comes to support interventionism, they urge a series of preliminary efforts that would entail the very delay whose effects they deplore...
...32 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 Where Whalen does step from analysis to advocacy, he asks for leadership...
...and it is not the thief...
...Theactual sound is close to "Pfssht" but of course no one would quite know how to pronounce such a concoction...
...Taking Sides is, however, a collection of essays—little windows on the world—and does not have the sustaining force of a "real" book...
...Anobile's book uses the actual movie frame blow-ups coupled with the accompanying dialogue from four of Fields' most famous short films, The Dentist, The Fatal Glass of Beer, The Barbershop, and The Pharmacist...
...Together with "Mother of Pearl," "Romulus and Remus," and "suffering Siatica," these colorful cuss-like words were the favorites that Fields used to flummox the censors...
...These are LaVelle's political passions, and they suggest that without a catalyst like radical violence, we are not likely to see a Grand Coalition this year—at least not in the way Buchanan and Rusher see it...
...And the authors curiously resist considering alternative scenarios in relation to Israel...
...After Nixon's nomination in 1968, Whalen left the candidate in disgust and later described his experience in a fine, prophetic book, Catch the Falling F lag—a book that deserved the weekly best-seller status of today's raft of Watergate tomes, but didn't get it...
...To be sure, there are problems with using Israel to ensure the flow of oil, not the least of which might be Israel's reluctance to take on the role, and the authors could have discussed these, but there is no reason in a book of this kind to be content with such limited alternative scenarios...
...Alfred Sloan remarked more than once that a problem defined is a problem half-solved...
...Can economic conservatives live with expensive job-training programs...
...If this should be accompanied by an Arab oil embargo, the authors feel the United States will have an opportunity to move directly into seThe Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 33 lected oil fields while Israel perhaps moved into others...
...William H. Kelly Northport, New York A Rehabilitation of Say's Law by W.H...
...Like that book, Taking Sides is primarily analysis—but Whalen is a Cassandra...
...Here he writes about Say's Law and its relationship to our current economic conditions...
...is that it shows the risque sequence from The Dentist which was so often suppressed...
...Happily, the situation is slowly changing...
...But if a war offers the only opportunity for American intervention, there are obvious advantages in having Israel in as strong a position as possible and in giving up efforts to postpone or prevent the next round...
...Sometimes however, the Mrs...
...Most of these books were error-laden and full of apocryphal anecdotes...
...Labor columnist" conjures up the image of a ham-fisted jock huddled about the keys of a typewriter, struggling with the disagreeable rules of an alien language—English...
...LaVelle makes a persuasive case for prolonged and pervasive federal intervention in the occupational health field...
...the two fit together, being repetitive only on Nixon and "Who Owns America...
...Grundys got the upper hand...
...The title of "Godfrey Daniels...
...He is very good at peering into the immediate future, portraying where, how, and why things are going wrong, and what will come of it all...
...and that force has not disappeared as an alternative for Western countries...
...Read it with Catch the Falling Flag...
...The creation of a massive national state has fostered a giant playpen for the oligarchic —be they oil barons, union bosses, or the buttoned-down professors of the education-poverty complex...
...The book argues that there are two fundamental alternative scenarios according to which the United States can shape its role...
...that the problems posed by the behavior of the oil cartel are basic ("systemic" in the authors' terminology) and so disruption of Western economies cannot be prevented through monetary measures...
...A sample: "Suppose a man puts a gun in your back and cries 'Your money or your life!' and being a prudent person, you give up your money...
...Ottawa, Illinois Red, White and Blue-Collar Views: A Steelworker Speaks His Mind about America by Michael LaVelle Saturday Review Press/Dutton $7.95 For the past few months some leading conservatives have been talking about a new political coalition—perhaps culminating in a major new party—that could sweep a conservative into the White House...
...The exquisite moment of pain, followed by the healthy release of laughter, doesn't come through to the reader...
...A reexamination of detente and the American foreign policy of which it is a part is overdue: this book offers a promising and most welcome beginning, but, frankly, only that...
...All three could benefit from a close reading of LaVelle's book...
...you lose money but keep your integrity...
...LaVelle's gadfly labor columns for the Chicago Tribune reflect the resentments and frustrations of the blue-collar world...
...While the triple authorship has resulted in some repetition, the writing is vigorous, enlivened by the use of analogies ranging from dual-control electric blankets to the illegal drug market to holdup men...
...Libya, as a glance at the map would have shown, is the country whose oil fields would be least likely to be taken over by Israel in any future Arab-Israeli war...
...They point out that one difficulty with American intervention is that the public is likely to support only short-term "hit, run and take it" operations, whereas ensuring the supply of oil at reasonable prices would require a long-term commitment of forces...
...is the one and universal cause which creates a market for the commodities produced...
...Hutt, in this book, includes a wide variety of articles on the market mechanism, yet he is careful to relate them to questions about the pricing mechanism...
...Two good examples of this trend are W.C...
...In speaking about recessions, he says that they have been "self-perpetuating or self-aggravating" not because of cost and price reductions, but, "It has been due to the opposite—(a) resistance to co-ordinative cost and price reductions and (b) entrepreneurial recognition of the unwillingness of governments to perform their `classical' task...
...The critical appraisals are excellent and these, plus the almost one hundred photographs, make amends for the occasional jumblings of movie titles and quotations...
...Previously, many people had thought that a society's economic well-being depended on its quantity of money...
...Say showed, however, that money was instead a halfway point, a conveniency between production and consumption...
...For years now, Fields buffs have been getting their own "false shuffle" in the form of books about the great grog-blossomed comedian...
...Nonetheless, we need more Fieldsian material, flawed or not, and Yanni's W.C...
...And to the extent that this surfacing of good old greed gives the lie to a few of the pretensions of the Utopia-builders, it is healthy, and hastens the day when through politics the whole bloated bag can be punctured...
...But if you then turned to the robber and said that this encounter had brought you closer together, that his new wealth would, by reducing his sense of inferiority, increase communication, and that, anyway, it was good for your children to learn to live without money, one of you is sick...
...In one the United States pursues an internationalist foreign policy which involves bringing down the cost of oil by whatever means are necessary, and in the other she retreats into what the authors call "iso-populism," where self-sufficiency is the goal and the fate of other countries is of minimal concern...
...Patrick J. Buchanan talks about it in Liberal Votes, Conservative Victories...
...Administration pursues now with minimal possibility of success...
...Rusher's theorizing seems far removed from the realities of political psychology...
...Fields by Nicholas Yanni and "Godfrey Daniels...
...by Richard Anobile...
...Are they prepared to live with a virtually unqualified "right to strike"—even, under most circumstances, for public service employees—and would they be willing to abolish- state right-to-work laws...
...Jameson G. Campaigne, Jr...
...cannot convey the moviegoers' empathy with the customer in The Barbershop who has just been scalded with hot towels...
...like that of Anobile's earlier work Drat!, comes from the extensive repertoire of Fieldsian epithets...
...Fields and Anobile's "Godfrey Daniels...
...Fields once promised not to offer us any such "empty panaceas as a New Deal, or an Old Deal, or even a Re-Deal," because "the reliable old False Shuffle was good enough for my father and it's good enough for me...
...Jean-Baptiste Say was a French economist, most famous for his Treatise on Political Economy published in 1803...
...one virtue of "Godfrey Daniels...
...The authors urge convincingly that the first course is the desirable one...
...But where is such a man to be found...
...Will the new New Frontiersman please stand up...
...The authors seem afraid of their own conclusions...
...Rae/Jean Isaac Irvington, New York 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 197...
...Therefore, his "law of markets" was that "supplies constitute the source of demands," that production creates its own market...
...If these do not work, and the authors believe they will not, then they advocate the use of force...
...Consider: Are economic conservatives prepared to live with OSHA, with its detailed and contradictory regulations that are the bane of business, in order to protect the health of American workers...
...Other economists came to this belief independently, among them James Mill, who wrote in Commerce Defended, "The production of commodities...
...And Buchanan seems determined to surmount the breach between the "social" and "economic" conservatives through sheer rhetorical energy...
...and it is here that Whalen shines...
...Yanni's book is part of Pyramid's paperback series on the History of the Movies...
...He is author of such classic and informative texts as The Theory of Collective Bargaining (1930), Keynesianism: Retrospect and Prospects (1963), and Strike Threat System (1974), issued by Arlington House...
...Why have things gone wrong...
...The problem is obvious in Anobile's attempt to transcribe the famous scene in The Fatal Glass of Beer where Fields is hit in the face with a bucketful of cornflakes (snow...
...While it may seem unkind to cavil when one is grateful the book has been written (and published), this reviewer cannot help lamenting a certain superficiality and haste...
...Kevin Phillips says as much in Mediacracy...
...If he can stay away from the tea-sipping circuit, he will be one of labor's most influential spokesmen...
...Could they live with additions to the myriad rules of the Environmental Protection Agency...
...Hutt Ohio University Press $18.00 Professor Hutt, now at the University of Dallas, is one of the major exponents and theorists of free market economics in the United States...
...But according to Whalen, the old-line liberals are not alone in the mischief...
...Although he does a masterful job of picking just the right clip to go with the film dialogue, the printed page will never exactly reflect the essence of Fields' comedy because it often depended on the precise timing of sounds and actions...
...Indeed, the American political scene appears ready for a leader who can express John Kennedy's patriotic values and at least what seemed to be his clean, heroic character...
...William Rusher's The Making of the New Majority Party presses the case for a union between the "economic" and the "social" conservatives, between the "pro-business, pro-free" enterprise" and the "temperamental" conservatives opposed to social changes, including blue-collar workers and white ethnics...
...Of course, LaVelle is better read and hence more "intellectual" than the men who used to work beside him in the mills...
...In his chapter, "John Connally and the Emerging Corporate State," Whalen does a fine job of dissecting this oligarchic nature of American politics...
...Actually, the book is more of a history of Fields, starting with his early life as a juggler and follies star, right through his film career...
...Even in the thirties it was considered an "effrontery" to try to capture the flavor of Fields on paper...
...American pluralism—great varieties of private associations, lesser units of government, ethnic and religious subcultures, neighborhoods, business enterprises, etc.—is being dissolved...
...And while they rely upon a new Arab-Israeli war to precipitate the necessary American action, they advocate no change from our present policy of pressuring Israel for territorial withdrawals to achieve a settlement...
...Recent Fieldsian outpourings, while not yet error-free, are a vast improvement over some of the earlier poppycock...
...Watch Mike LaVelle...
...are welcome additions to our knowledge of the man who called himself the "white hope of the Bull Moose Party in 1940...
...Similarly, "Godfrey Daniels...
...There are contradictions here—and some poor syntax as well—but there is also common sense and humor...
...Hutt's scholarly view is diametrically opposed to Keynesianism, and this impressive study of Say's Law will be a welcome addition to the library of those seriously concerned with the state of the market economy...
...The authors are worried about achieving a broad public consensus in support of interventionism, without which force cannot be used successfully, and their primary hopes rest upon a renewal of the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...But this is not LaVelle...
...In sum, Whalen blames the perfectibilist, collectivist, reductionist-egalitarian, positivist worldview that has captured many of the levers of power in America...
...But nowhere do the authors suggest an effort to use Israelas policemen following an oil takeover...
...A veneer of Rousseau can only thinly disguise the passion which underlies his political opinions, opinions which suggest how broad is the gulf between "economic" conservatism and the "social" conservatism of the blue-collar worker...
...But here the iconography of the Right is to be jolted, for Whalen puts forward the late John F. Kennedy as a model for leadership...
...By "whatever means are necessary" the authors mean in the first instance drastic conservation measures and means short of war to persuade OPEC to lower the price of oil voluntarily...
...Martin E. Northway Bloomington, Indiana The Great Detente Disaster: Oil and the Decline of American Foreign Policy by Edward Friedland, Paul Seabury, and Aaron Wildaysky Basic Books $7.95 This.book's value is considerable: leading members of America's professoriat depart from the conventional orthodoxies to insist that detente is a delusion...
...Phillips' hypotheses suggest a rightward drift for at least one, and perhaps both parties, but not a grand realignment...
...The sound simply cannot be described by the word "Woosh...
...But he is still not too far removed from them, despite his patronization by some of the left-liberal padrones of Chicago culture...
...David A. Williams Dallas, Texas Taking Sides: A Personal View of America from Kennedy to Nixon to Kennedy by Richard J. Whalen Houghton Mifflin $8.95 Richard Whalen is an intellectual activist whose career as a writer began with apprenticeship under James Jackson Kilpatrick and Vermont Royster and led him to a position with Time-Fortune before he cast his lot with Richard Nixon in 1966...
Vol. 9 • February 1976 • No. 5
