Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial/R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Thug as Rotarian • As with so many things, there is in art a synergism, a collaboration between the artist and the fragrances, the wails, the rhythms of his...
...How peculiar that a nation whose upper classes are currently enthralled in a dither of goody-goodyism should be so obviously fascinated with the doings of swindlers, butchers, and other such ambidextrous rogues...
...Let us eschew the pap about his repressed creativity or individuality or any of the other nonsense about his sophisticated qualities, and let us get to the real injustice...
...During the 1930s Steinbeck often wrote as though d paisano wino, moonlighting as a thug, were one of the higher forms of Homo sapiens...
...Perhaps our present fascination with the louse element is no greater than inyears past, but I know for a certitude that it deals with even more wicked varieties of criminals and that it is even more ill-conceived...
...Huey Newton's tastes fall in somewhere between those of Elton John and our present Vice President, he of the $35,000 bed...
...it is a hankering shared by their audiences...
...The tax bite is the lowest of all professions, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration makes no demands nor does the Consumer Products Safety Commission...
...Humbug on it If the truth be known, the averag American criminal is actually no more figure of romance than the average men ber of the Chamber of Commerce...
...Deadbeats came off as prelectors of moral philosophy, and ladies of the night were so often likened to the Little Sisters of Charity that by the 1950s many college boys believed that the remuneration received by the ladies went directly to the United Fund...
...He is a go-getter of the top chop and he sounds and acts like one, yet nowhere is there a place for him in the Chamber of Commerce...
...Crime is a field with vast opportunities for the young men or women who really want to get ahead, and it is apparent that they are flocking to it...
...Friedrich Nietzsche put it just so when he observed that writers "are in the habit of taking the side of criminals...
...Nowadays the literary set from Queens to Needles, California is regularly set atwitter by tales of murderers, sadistic pederasts, kidnappers, and other such species of desperadoes...
...Some have managed to mimic the flummeries of left-liberal enlightenment, but this only leaves them sounding like editorialists from the Nation or the Progressive, and whoever found those neurotic sheets interesting...
...The literary set might romanticize them as heroic dissidents from the bourgeois sludge but can you imagine a clod of tawdrier tastes than, say, Joey Gallo, the subject of innumerable columns, a book, and now a Hollywood movie...
...Succinctly stated, there is in the works of most artists a curious hankering for the louse element...
...It cries out for government action...
...Perhaps even the villainous Nixon will some day become the stuff of literature, though I doubt that this particular breakthrough will come in our lifetimes...
...How redolent of the Bern-steins and their Black Panther soirees...
...Often their treatise: wholly depart from the statistits and as sume the nature of poetry...
...Ramsey Clark dout that "we achieve one conviction for eve (continued on page 37) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 19 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) fifty serious crimes...
...The American criminal is one of the most profit-minded members of his community...
...America, are you listening...
...Dillinger were indistinguishable from those of millions of Babbitts...
...The statistics a clear...
...Members of the lit set reflexively hold their noses when Jerry Ford comes to mind, but I doubt there is an inhabitant of one penitentiary in the land whose aesthetic sense is any higher...
...Many of thes learned men actually impair their healt ranting at college students about hos rapists and muggers are really very nio if sorely oppressed people...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 37...
...I cite the above not out of any moral prissiness or philistinism, but rather because I find it all ironic and nonsensical...
...how reminiscent of our popular fascination with the Mansonites...
...This is bigotry, pristine and unadorned...
...All this is common knowledge and demands no further commentary...
...but as the years have passed and as the lout motif has become more brazen, its significance has become increasingly meretricious...
...Truth to tell, the run-of-the-mill scoundrel is not in and of himself any more interesting than a midwestern professor of sociology or a male hairdresser...
...We are faced with a army of ignorant or malign intellectual playing on the average man's nature fascination with the criminal and foistin a vast fraud upon us all...
...Until then we shall have to settle for the touching stories of John Dean and Jeb Stuart Magruder...
...As a result, for many year' giddy social scientists have been earnini tenure by actively promoting the most in solent rogues as victims of a cruel am corrupt system...
...So let us forget all of this tomfoolery about the romantic character of the criminal...
...What might be worth a few moments of meditation is how often the artist has collaborated with the criminal inhabitants of this orb and how absurd this collaboration has become during this glorious epoch in the American saga...
...It inheres through all classes, but it seems to be especially rampant amongst the upper classes and the better educated, that is to say amongst those least exposed to the unpleasantness of squalor and iniquity...
...How moronic that writers should romanticize them...
...He inhales life in voluptuous gulps...
...In Beyond Good and Evil the indelicate Mr...
...Today the pursuit of crime is a profession for which one need no advanced degree, no period of apprenticeship, and no special insurance...
...T1: average criminal is just a shrewd go+ge ter who has discovered what James ( Wilson has been admonishing against f years: to wit, crime pays...
...Dillinger and Mr...
...Some thug are portrayed as romantics possessed of joie de vivre that would leave Hubei Humphrey looking like a sourpuss Others are nascent geniuses of surpass ing creativity who in another world woul dwarf the achievements of Shakespear and of Beethoven...
...Often the art was genuine, and the insights could even be edifying...
...The asseverations of Clifford Irving, the poor fish caught flagrante delicto peddling a bogus autobiography, are regularly served up on the idiot hour on National Public Radio, yet I have never heard one that was more challenging than the maunderings of William 0. Douglas, and when it comes to taste Douglas is averitable aristocrat beside the trashy Irving...
...In that grand play a wretched youth walks into a strange Irish village, allows as how he has killed his father, and becomes a figure of awe...
...Even Edward Kennedy has noted in the December 6, 1975 New York Times that "crime does pay...
...Let me state it here and now: notwithstanding the celebrity and commiseration sloshed on them by the educated classes and the literati, I would be willing to bet my antique toothbrush with the genuine mahogany handle that the louse element consumes more nauseating cologne, more mod or double-knit rubbish, and more trendy gadgetry than any other element in our society...
...Many tipped the girls handsomely, and doubtless there was always a gullible businessman inquiring as to whether or not his payments were tax deductible...
...Now if the literati have rhapsodized the louse element it has been left to the socia scientists to marshal the statistics and the syllogisms...
...Ti crime rate from 1960 to 1970 went t 144%, yet fewer persons served prise terms in 1970 than in 1960...
...If the trend continues I have no doubt that soon one of our mass murderers will be costumed as a modern Faust, adorned with the rarest percipience...
...In fact, the experience is ten more comfortable for the allege felon than for the doctor, especially if tl presiding judge is one of those who b lieves criminals are "sick" or victimize The eminent Mr...
...Long hours in the archives have convinced me that the consumer preferences of the late Mr...
...What he exhales, he palms off to the highest bidder...
...The artist, if he is worth his salt, has one ear cocked towards the chatter and bustle of the living...
...In this they are even more blatant than the dozens of Presidential candidates at large in America today...
...There is today a widespread enchantment with what is squalid and iniquitous...
...The lives of most criminals are vulgar beyond belief...
...Enterprising Americans are taking advantage of the opportunities this field affords...
...There is no evidence that these criminals are significantly different from individuals in any other walk of life, a point convincingly made by Ernest van den Haag in his excellent book Punishing Criminals...
...All are served up as tortured, sensitive, creative souls—the ideal companions for one's literary teas or for TV chatter shows...
...One may I inconvenienced by some red tape au perhaps even the bother of an appearan in court, but how does that differ from tl daily experience of a small business= or a doctor confronted by a local regul tory agency...
...The hours are generally discretionary and one is subject to no foremen or bosses of any kind unless one joins one of the more organized branches of criminality...
...Capone, -and when suave degenerates began to wander into the works of the O'Neills and the Hemingways...
...Most have little to say that is not arrantly self-serving and stupid...
...If one commits a felonious crime America today one is almost 98 perce certain of avoiding the slammer...
...One could see it all emerging earlier in the century when vox populi glamorized swine like Mr...
...What piquant thoughts has Elmer Wayne Henley or Richard Speck ever recorded...
...The Thug as Rotarian • As with so many things, there is in art a synergism, a collaboration between the artist and the fragrances, the wails, the rhythms of his environment...
...The crime rate has soared, even during periods of high employment and affluence, even during recessions...
...He might have added that so are readers and even non-readers, a point tellingly demonstrated by John Millington Synge in his masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World...
Vol. 9 • February 1976 • No. 5
