A DISSENTING VOTE
McCarthy, Abigail
A DISSENTING VOTE ABIGAIL McCARTHY Those of us who accept change, but who remember the virtues of another era, must, once in a while, dissent from the pieties of new morality and the age of...
...But all three (Continued on page 415...
...Manners are hypocrisy, responsibility means you've sold out, adolescence lasts into the seventies, or will...
...I can read the future in that direction without cards or tea leaves...
...I do not think it is...
...As is so often the case our perceptions are sharpened best by the creative writer-in this case by Wallace Stegner, in his brilliant recent novel, The Spectator Bird, a sad, funny, absorbing story of the search for meaning in old age...
...He can see it, but he doesn't have to like it...
...Then a partial plate...
...And he doesn't have to like what has been happening to the language in the television he has been watching daily: "O brave new world that hath such Februaries in it...
...All these are paraded as the sweet, necessary, and inevitable fruits of liberty...
...Finally, I would like to cast my own vote against the current effort to confuse the catering to prurient interest with the satisfaction of the public's right to know...
...In fact, not much of what is recorded is even new to those who listened to LBJ over the years...
...A DISSENTING VOTE ABIGAIL McCARTHY Those of us who accept change, but who remember the virtues of another era, must, once in a while, dissent from the pieties of new morality and the age of openness...
...There will be a morning when I look in the mirror and see an old sunken-cheeked stranger with scared eyes and a mouth like a sea urchin's...
...Another such threat is the rise of vulgarity disguised as freedom, a perception very like Stegner's: "I refer here to intellectual and aesthetic vulgarity, to aggressive coarseness in speech and manners, to contempt for grammar and indifference to logic, to sloganeering as a substitute for thought, to hatred of culture, antipathy to history and release into fashionable nihilism...
...It doesn't...
...And then there is Dr...
...Finally, a complete cleaning out of old snags in preparation for false teeth, on television called dentures...
...I don't think it can...
...There is the endless pseudo-solemn discussion of whether Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days is journalism...
...Junk everything good along with the bad...
...Still another threat is the worship of "relevance disguised as realism...
...I have come across some felicitous expressions of this kind of dissent recently, and think they are worth sharing- and would like to add to them one of my own...
...John Bunzel, president of California State at San Jose, who tells us that maledictions are currently designed as benedictions-and that these maledictions are the new threats to academic freedom...
...One can, I think, fault his metaphor, but not his concern or his realization that the less good and the transitory have been sold to us as new absolutes for our time...
...History is an exploded science, civility is a dirty word, self-restraint is not only unhealthy, it's a laugh...
...and there is the question whether Judith Exner's story contributes to an historical evaluation of the Kennedy years...
...He has emphatic distaste for the counter-culture which he has been watching for twenty years-that counter-culture to which he lost his son : "In twenty years everything he stood for has taken over...
...Thus, perhaps, to all freedom...
...Or Febuaries, as Cronkite and half his tribe would say...
...The pleasure principle...
...Instantly irritable, I compose a letter to the press instructing news commentators that those who use the language publicly and professionally should be advised that there are two r's in February, that ing is not pronounced een, and that verbs enjoy other possibilities than the present participle...
...There is the debate over whether Doris Kearns's recording of the ramblings of a sick and aged president can be rated serious scholarship...
...The admittedly crabbed protagonist, a literary agent who has retired with his wife to California as to a happy anteroom to senility and death, is all too explicit about what the anticipation means: "Like last week, when the dentist told me that the molar he has been trying to save by root canal work will have to go...
...But, all in all, a dissenting vote...
...One such threat he sees, he says, is communalism disguised as pluralism: "It is a movement sustained by the argument that tribalism is really indistinguishable from pluralism, and that affirmations of the democratic desire for diversity means acceptance of a group mentality indifferent to recognition based on personal merit...
...The White House announceen today that it has called a meeteen of business leaders for early Feb-uary...
...First a bridge, if he can find anything to hitch to it...
...All these things are nuggets to be turned up in pursuit of a gripping gothic narrative and a harrowing search for self...
...I will spare the reader here his graphic description of sex in the seventies and the novels which celebrate it, except to say that it is terse and apt...
...In sum, another dissenting vote...
Vol. 103 • June 1976 • No. 13
