Three Tales of a City
Steinfels, Peter
and talk. In the movie, the touring car comes around the comer as Eddie walks up the steps of the church: the familiar rat-a-tat-tat, Eddie sprawls dead on the steps and there's a flat cut to...
...That's probably coming up, if not in the final broadcasts, certainly in The Book...
...Let Congress, when the next crook moves himself toward impeachment, carry forward the process: resignation is not enough: impeach him, convict him in the Senate and throw him in the slammer, at least overnight...
...The thought staggered his chosen few then...
...This does not provide Mr...
...An American police state has evolved," says Wise, "operating in the shadows side by side wi~h the legitimate system of government...
...A man may alter his opinion on proper grounds, as William Hazlitt wrote about the conservative reaction to the French Revolution...
...flower petals before the glittering monstrance carried by a visiting priest before whom our pastor walked backward swinging a censer from which floated drifts of incense...
...In northeast metropolitan poverty areas, the unemployment rate for black sixteen-tonineteen year olds is now 44 percent, for whites 21 percent...
...To do this he needs _9 $1,S00 fooddryer...
...His latest offering is The American Police State...
...Again, possibly...
...He speaks of "feeling so guilty . . . I can't even cope with the usurpation of a stoop...
...At the same time, throw the crook vice president in the cooler for a bit...
...Pre.regldrefloo eecesNty...
...Nowadays crooks lack honor and have to be held for downs...
...Leonard's stoop, or the teenagers who menace, both in fact and fancy, subway riders like Ms...
...Aside from the baffling assumption that if watching Patton might lead him to invade a neutral country, watching Julie Andrews as the Baroness yon Trapp might make him a writerbhe evidently thinks writing is a form of singing, another gangster conclusion, since the mobster who sings to the police is asked to sign a written confessionmaside from that, it is staggering to hear the movie Patton compared, even remotely, to War and Peace...
...The second problem is serious, even more so because it is typical of writers in the field...
...Is it possible that among these tens of thousands were some of the defilers of Mr...
...Potts's grave...
...Or did this liberalism admit of such harsh reality while softly denying that it should ever confront them...
...But let us begin, as I promised, the third ~[~d last time...
...on 12706, Albuquerque, NM $710S...
...That we ever expected differently is the problem...
...there is much that we might have accomplished but didn't...
...It is not, however, the analysis of the individuals and institutions that benefited from intelligence "business as usual" that we so desperately need...
...SARA C. CHARLES is a psychiatrist in Chicago and a medical school professor...
...and fostered by weekly Benediction when even our irascible Father John seemed transformed in his golden cope as he presented the Sacrament for our adoration...
...If so many middle-class liberals chafe at their own convictions, bark at their own selves, under the pressures of our metropolises, isn't that because these convictions have so little to say about the immediate problems they face...
...As she walks from the train to her Brooklyn home, two scrawny fourteen-year-olds make obscene remarks to her -and she wants to smash their heads together...
...So, too, is the match between two Nixonian favorites in the White House screening room: Patton and The Sound o/Music: militaristic rigor and vigor on the one hand, sentimental claptrap on the other...
...But burglary, breaking and entering, wiretapping and mail-opening, all the dements of the infamous Huston plan approved by Nixon, these were indeed rights inherent in the presidency, please pass the pry-bar and get ready with the nitro, Bugsy...
...Private measures...
...The American Police State is far from a mere compilation of horror stories...
...What Mr...
...No reason to have left the material out, but it does add some intellectual drag to an otherwise wellcrafted narrative...
...Whether you conceive of the activities o f U.S...
...Not a castle-in-the-air hovering over his typewriter but a thirteen-and-a-half T]WREE TALES OF A CITY PETER STEINFELS foot-wide Westside Manhattan house, complete with a stoop and a flowerbox and attached to a Westside Man-" hattan street, a sidewalk and (here the trouble begins) some slobs...
...Is it unreasonable to assume, as liberals, conservatives, and socialists have for a century and a half, that the availability of employment has a major impact on the habits of us all...
...But the comparison is instructive...
...B~E HOGARTI~ art/st and author, was for many years the illustrator of the Tarzan comic strip...
...C l a s s i f i e d RATES: i0c a word...
...Story two...
...she writes...
...Leonard's stoop...
...Kraft's telephone...
...Nixon, in fact, went on to compare the movie to "any Toistoyan novel," specifically to Anna Karenina in addition to War and Peace...
...Ellsberg, whose psychiatrist's office the Nixon hit men, Hunt and Liddy, burglarized in the hope of finding and peddling material discrediting to the man who had released the Pentagon Papers...
...The slobs did not come with the house...
...What is happening to me...
...Precisely: I am the state and the law and the Constitution...
...It was like trying to reason with the sullen pips on a stack of dominoes...
...A logical extension of Nixon as Louis XIV: we stop government crimes against citizens by declaring such crimes not to be crimes anymore...
...He meant his flesh to be eaten and his blood to be drunk...
...I Banned the Bomb...
...Haven't I paid my dues, stood up for the underdogs...
...Possibly, but I doubt it...
...S4c, seven times...
...Complaining of the slobs, Mr...
...Nixon even used the gangster movie word, "punk," to describe Ellsberg...
...Along the way, Wise chronicles the civil liberties violations of the FBI, CIA and IRS, among others...
...That is what some of our ex-liberals seem to be doing...
...David Frost, the interviewer, brought up the question of whether the Monster's having just had two screenings of Patton influenced him in making the secret, un-Constitutional and, in the event, utterly disastrous invasion--or "incursion"---of Cambodia...
...FRAN~ GETLEI-bI' nard feels pressed to mention that he is a "middle-class liberal...
...It has been hard for those who feel themselves charged with authority to see that the incarnate Christ cannot be protected from himself, from his own intention...
...The intelligence establishment did not "just grow" like Topsy...
...He pointed out what a risky enterprise i t was--with one exception...
...Liberalism as a determinist, even if humanitarian, weltanschauung substituting social forces for individual responsibility is a desperate and barren denial of what we experience...
...intelligence agencies as reflections of a "rogue elephant" or a "rogue Presidency," The American Police State is a compilation of the excesses...
...And Janet Stuart writes of those who first received it, 'Whey were dull, heavy-witted, jealous, petty as children, having nothing but their blunt goodwill, obedience and half-selfish love...
...Ford's solution...
...Commonweal: 38.3...
...In the movie, the touring car comes around the comer as Eddie walks up the steps of the church: the familiar rat-a-tat-tat, Eddie sprawls dead on the steps and there's a flat cut to Eddie's very elaborate funeral, presided over by Robinson: the mob admires the flowers, the "Good Luck, Pal," horseshoe of roses and the rest...
...They represent a turning of the times, a million small rages against public disorder, crime, pornography...
...Gifts for this vital program should be semt to Father Honnefln, c/o Columban Mlssloos, St...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Abigail MeEarthg (Cont...
...but he need not "pass an act of attainder on all his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards, to offer them at the shrine of matured servility . . . a living and ignominious satire on himself...
...Sic, thlrteen times, Twelve words minimum...
...In 1964, he and Thomas B. Ross gave us The Invisible Government, a first shot in the revisionist interpretation of U.S...
...She is remembering the peace and warmth of her home and her rage at news reports of mothers murdered before their children's eyes...
...One of its brighter citizens, Mr...
...Your child gets mugged in the park: suddenly it's mute...
...dial4...
...Then he mentions it again...
...Freed from the necessity to listen to lawyers arguing about the tapes due to his statesmanlike delivery of the pardon on schedule, the great government problem that Ford put his giant brain to work on was the problem of government agents in the FBI, the CIA and elsewhere committing burglary, interfering with the U.S...
...Again, the New York ~imes, page one, another week later...
...Brown, Collies, MacKenzie, Mowry, Pritcherd...
...Begin again...
...Their resentment was made of bone...
...And, "Well, I've seen The Sound o/Music twice and it hasn't made me a writer, either...
...Robinson puffs on his one-dollar Havana and says, "Yea_h, too bad Eddie couldn't be here, he always liked a good funeral...
...A picture of young people, crushdd together behind a police barricade, dominates the page...
...In the old days, people like Nixon and Agnew took what was called "the honorable way out" by shooting themselves...
...It grew despite, or perhaps because of, its excesses...
...It ought to provide them with reasons for not abandoning their allegiances...
...Potts have experienced has become for too many others the occasion for recantation, and one cannot help feeling that this, too, is something of a response manufactured by the mood of the decade...
...Another aspect of Nixon's defense of gangsterism in the cause of Nixonism is its throwback to The Pardoner during his head days as successor...
...Whether liberalism has a remedy for this situation is another question...
...On the record of the Big Broadcasts now concluding, a couple of easy things, no Amendment to the Constitution required...
...But that, too, seems too easy...
...Healt]k OVERCOMING MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS How-To Book, Diet, Recipes...
...she is recalling the beating heart and unwanted hatred with which she reads of "hideous crimes day in and day out...
...Potts fantasizes "castration for rapists, speedy trials for quick executions, an end to protection for kid punks...
...They incrust it with whatever cardboard they do not eat for lunch...
...Moreover, if the crook president has selected a crook vice-president--like calls to like---when the crook vice-president is forced to resign, don't let the crook president appoint the successor vice-president: make advise and consent really work and get in the office someone indebted to Congress for the job, not to the crook president, let alone to a military climber like AI Haig...
...also credentles service...
...The police...
...in this respect, labor-force data are the most solid of all facts available...
...in 1965 Daniel Bell wrote an article on predicting the future...
...Marjory Potts, it should be noted, is director of public information for the Legal Aid Society...
...The slobs came with a nearby junior high school...
...COMMONWEAL, Madison Ave., New York...
...mails--has anyone ever studied the relation between the mucking up of the mails by those two agencies and the overall deterioration of the mail service...
...It ends, I believe, at one point...
...In this and the next decade, for example, we face a tremendous influx of youngsters into the labor force . . . . This data leads us to plan for increased needs . . . . " Except that we failed...
...A million small rages, for "middle-class liberals," against themselves and their political beliefs...
...Leonard decides on the latter-- a garden hose with which he will douse the slobs...
...There are the usual recourses...
...It is staggering now...
...They bombard his sidewalk with pop bottles...
...Ms...
...At last the Master Criminal let it all hang out: "When the president does it (illegal acts), it's not illegal...
...It alerts us to the complexity ot social issues...
...He speaks of "apologizing" to the slobs and he reminds himself of his motley of mortgages, his hard work and debts, his immigrant forebears...
...My direction was always very clear . . . . I believe in the nobility of man . . . . At various times in my life, I was a member of the S.D.S., the A.D.A., the N.A.A.C.P., CORE, the A.C.L.U...
...Did it romanticize the demoralization of the disadvantaged and rationalize the cruelty of the criminal...
...Write: NC~, 334 W. kardsley Ave., Elkhart, Ind...
...But even liberalism in a more genuine form is of little help often enough...
...Once individuals are born, we know that they will be available for work in about twenty years at some reasonable ratio...
...JOHN DRUSKA THE AMERICAN POLICE STATE, by David Wise, Random House, $12.95...
...Leonard with a means, right now, of protecting his stoop, nor Ms...
...one time: b'Tc, three times...
...There is much that we cannot accomplish with liberal remedies...
...Can Nixon have read "any Tolstoyan novel...
...Potts still anguishes over the victim of legal injustice, but she is shaken and torn...
...The American Police State suffers from two problems----one timing and one potentially terminal...
...Potts too experienced...
...There is a political dimension, however, to this sidewalk drama...
...Leonard revealed that he has not only a psyche and a family and a cat and a television set but a house...
...I begin (the first time) in that special land so many of us inhabit so much...
...School officials...
...Why should 1 be threatened, gutted with fear, spittled, with their resentment...
...She is fantasizing about the pearl-handled pistol she imagines holding ready for any attackers...
...Leonard's account, on the face of it, is trivial...
...COHEN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Stetnteh (Cost...
...And their successors have continued to call him among us whether they were ascetics and saints or venal, political, skeptical clerics---it made no difference to him because his intention was unequivocal...
...Common sense, an insistence on dignity and decency, to the point if necessary of force, and finally an abiding of the ambiguity which inevitably will mark our every effort to resolve conflicts---no political philosophy can substitute for these...
...There is no logic in believing that liberalism has let us down because we expected too much of it, in growing angry with it or ourselvesmand "losing the faith...
...What to do...
...It ends with the nightmare Leslie Bacon lived through after being falsely accused of bombing the Capitol...
...It grew because a generation of "decision-makers" felt that the stakes were high enough to justify its existence...
...Leonard is too smart and Ms...
...I went on Freedom Rides...
...He went on, of course, to compare himself to Lincoln and the dissent over the American war against the Indochinese to the Civil War, which, interestingly, he referred to as "The War Between the States...
...Is it possible that if the so-called "intelligence" agencies paid their own way, the mails would easily make a profit instead of losing money all the time?mand all that petty crime...
...Her work has appeared in The Critic and other journals...
...To demonstrate to IS,000 poor tenant farmere the foods to grow to wipe out malnutrition there, he needs _9 movie projector end films costing ~00 more...
...4.S0...
...This time an article by Marjory Potts...
...One could of course think about welfare reform and social deprivation--these are not, after all, irrelevant---but that is a ludicrous response...
...For box numbers add S0c per insertior Classified payable with order: monthly in advance for more then three times...
...Again, many had waited outside all night...
...It begins not once but three times...
...so naively optimistic that it denied the existence of slobs or kid punks or the perpetrators of hideous crimes...
...r Nebraska iNS...
...Did Farmer Macgregor, upon throwing Peter Rabbit out of the garden, chew over the cud of his political allegiances...
...Mr...
...Nixon is an eternal anti-verity: CL Tartuffe, Widmerpool in A Dance to the Music o/ Time, Foma Fomitch in Dostoyevski's A Friend ot the Family...
...Is it, then, not liberalism but middie-class-ness that is the issue, the root of their shock of not being exempt from the disorder and danger of city life...
...Bitter disappointment with these facts should not lead us to renounce what can be done...
...Leonard is understandably distressed...
...A liberalism that reproaches 10 June 1977:382 us for ordinary human reactions, that asks us to deny what is in front of our faces, must be amended...
...Our past indebtedness to David Wise is great...
...I ask your patience...
...As he sank into renewed fantasies about "getting" his enemies, particularly Ellsberg, he became more and more a caricature of a kind of party imitation of Robinson in the role...
...and liberals, laughing at Leonard Bernstein's portrayal of Officer Krupke or at some of the self-martyred inhabitants of Feifferdom, have long known it...
...Amended, but not abandoned...
...His plaintive column (we find out later) seems to bring respite...
...It was a revelation----a picture of the things the government does in our name...
...Potts...
...The jobs, for youth from poverty families, are half-time and pay $55 a week...
...With the Eucharist "he threw himself into the current of human affairs for all time" says one writer...
...Systematic change is impossible without such an understanding...
...For reasons not clear at all, The Monster seemed to draw the line at murder: more accurately, perhaps, he seemed to draw the line at publicly claiming the right to murder as inherent in the presidency...
...Was their liberalism (and I use the term, uneasily, for whatever vague outlook unites of S.D.S., A.D.A...
...This was exactly the spirit in which Nixon dealt with Dr...
...Perhaps onethird of Wise's case material has already been drllmmed into the consciousness of any daily newspaper reader...
...Hitler comes to mind...
...He remonstrates with the slobs...
...She speaks of "loss of faith" and clashes with her husband, who "clings to reason...
...all the time I pray...
...He tells them "of the fouling of one's nest, reciprocity, the environment, John Rawls' Theory of Justice, the social contract, and the Strategic Air Command...
...John Leonard, wrote a plaintive column there, which in itself does not distinguish this column from all his other columns, Mr...
...The war between property-owners and juvenile trespassers is ancient, but here is something distinctly new...
...When you think of it, it is astounding that he has not yet compared himself to Jesus Christ, sacrificed for the sins of the world, yet a willing victim for the cause is so important...
...and it offers few values in their place except those of scrutiny itself...
...No, of course not, said the Monster, and went on to make two points: Patton is "an interesting movie, I recommend it . . . it's like Tolstoy's War and Peace...
...Mr...
...That is what he said...
...Alas...
...Hitler comes to mind, too, of course, in the very heart of the third-Frost-Nixon freak show...
...Where have we seen that combination before in art embattled, self-pitying national leader...
...and the N.A.A.C.P...
...PldlJpphaea To meet widespread infant malnutrition in tropical San R~lue Father llll Hannafln developed I baby food from local ingredients kept fresh if reduced to powder form...
...Both are poignant and ring true...
...To them he said, "Take and eat...
...Besides this primitive chemical warfare, he also wields publicity...
...Write: Director...
...Leonard being the very soul of melancholy these days...
...That is the overwhelming lesson of the Nixon show...
...I suppose one would have to have like memories to have some compassionate understanding of those bishops who have made a last ditch stand against communion in the hand, who fear, at the least, a general lack of reverence---at the worst, desecration...
...Instead, for my penance, I'll take a Latin missal to Mass next week and think of that lovable tease Martha (an occasion of sin if ever I saw one...
...It asks us not to accept (and rightly, I believe), without scrutiny, traditional notions, like ownership and retribution...
...The gain in this admission was not the news that Nixon as president acted as a gangster: we knew that: M Y TALE this week is of young adults and unemployment and government and crime and the spirit of the times...
...intelligence agencies...
...It has emerged in spite of the Bill of Rights...
...Also from the land of the New York Times, and occurring about two days after John Leonard's plaintive column...
...just as the efforts that should, but probably won't, be made in 1977 might make a difference in the years to come...
...P o s i t i o n s Open TEACHER OPENINGS all fields, levels Iocnfiom...
...Well, they're both gone now, the Monster and the Pardoner, but, as the Highland Ballad asks plaintively, Will he no come back again...
...If we believe that those measures of social betterment that are identified with liberalism would spare us from painful choices, then we should revise our beliefs...
...STU COHEN is a free-lanee journalist living in Cambridge, Mess...
...O Sacrament most holy, O Sacrament divine . . . . " It was all attractively mysterious and very remote from our lives outside the church walls...
...Continued on page 382) Commonweal: 361 so heartily sorry for my almost-mortal error...
...It is the latter aspect that is distressing...
...Leonard and Ms...
...FATHER JOHN B. SHEERIN, C.S.P., past editor of The Catholic World, is a syndicated columnist in the Catholic press...
...They occupy Mr...
...There'll aways be a Nixon and by all odds every once in a while one of them will make it to the top...
...June/9-24...
...Leo10 June 1977:360 but that he saw himself as a gangster and saw gangsterism as not merely justified by the situation but even dictated by it: had he acted as an honest man, he would have failed in his duty to the country...
...I presume that liberals believe it does and I believe that, at least in considerable measure, they are right...
...10016...
...Efforts made five, ten years ago might have made a difference...
...I mean of course the New York Times...
...The movies, in fact, provided one more key, if one is still needed...
...Domestic economy, election reforms, international affairs: liberalism chatters on...
...After 1964, Wise followed the success of The Invisible Government with The Espionage Establishment and The Politics of Lying...
...Thousands were also in line the next day...
...The Invisible Government began a stream of information which has in recent years broadened into a river of classic muckraking journalism...
...Yes, of course, he'll come back again...
...Potts with reassurance about protecting herself...
...JOHN ~usr~ is a writer who currently teaches high school in Indiampolis...
...Twenty thousand young adults, at various schools and neighborhood anti-poverty centers, had waited in line to apply for federally-financed summer jobs...
...Potts is riding the subway and fantasizing...
...He has had two major exhibitions at the Museum of Decorative Arts of the Louvre in Paris...
...In this particular plaintive column, however, Mr...
...It begins with a "short greyhaired man atop the telephone pole" setting up the bug on columnist Joseph 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 REVIEWERS JANET GROTE[ is a member of the editorial staff of the New Yorker...
...It has been a long slow return to the concept of the eucharist as food for our needs and bond of our community...
...The weather was close to freezing...
...lm~tme BIILICAL INSTITUTE, Trinity College, hrflngt~, Vermont 0S401...
...You can take the White House away from Nixon, but you can't take Nixon out of the White House as long as it is run by his owri chosen instrument for the continuation of Nixonism by other means...
...Some had arrived the afternoon before aed waited through the night...
...Unlikely...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 12
