Chapter 63 of 168 · Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) by Murray N. Rothbard

Vol. 4.11, January 1973

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME IV, NO. 11	JANUARY, 1973	75¢

The Apotheosis Of Harry

The American postal authorities used to boast that neither rain nor sleet, etc. shall stay those intrepid couriers on their vital rounds. But as 1972 drew to its end, the mail was suddenly stopped by federal order. In a way, I suppose that this gesture was an appropriate one: a final kick in the teeth of the American public by the shade of Harry S. Truman.

Surely the scale and grandeur of the apotheosis of Harry Truman was unprecedented, even for a media that fawns abjectly upon all Presidents, past and present. When Ike Eisenhower — surely the best President in the past half-century, though this is scarcely a fulsome compliment — died, there was little of the media hysteria lavished upon Truman: at least I do not remember that every network lavished continuing attention for days upon every detail of the President’s life as well as his funeral arrangements. And I’m certain that the mail wasn’t stopped.

But there is method in the madness. For it was the role of the little “populist” from Kansas City’s Pendergast machine to bring this country into the full-scale system that has characterized us since World War II: into our modern role as Corporate State at home and Emperor and Global Crusader abroad. If Franklin D. Roosevelt was the Moses who brought America toward the Promised Land of Corporate Monopoly Empire, with the President as all-powerful Emperor at home and abroad, then Harry Truman was the Joshua who completed the Rooseveltian task. In paying tribute to Harry Truman with the utmost sycophancy, the media are celebrating the present and seemingly permanent status quo. It is in this light, too, that we must consider the fulsome tribute paid to Truman by his one-time supposed “enemy”, Richard Nixon.

In point of fact, there was scarcely a single act committed by President Truman that was not the quintessence of evil; the Truman administration was an unmitigated disaster for freedom, both at home and abroad. It was Harry Truman who launched and then institutionalized the Cold War; it was Harry Truman who fastened the military-industrial complex and the garrison state upon America. It was Harry Truman who institutionalized government budgets that were gigantic by any peacetime criteria in the history of the country. It was Truman who carved out the policy of permanent counter-revolutionary suppression of radical movements in the Third World: from Greece to Iran to the Middle East. It was Truman who put America permanently in Asia as the world “policeman” by his unconstitutional act of entering the Korean civil conflict. It was Truman who, in short, first boldly took us into war without so much as requesting a declaration of war from Congress (in Korea), and thereby cemented the absolute despotism of the Chief Executive in foreign affairs in an act far beyond anything which Franklin Roosevelt had ever contemplated. It was Truman who induced the United Nations to seize Arab lands on behalf of the new state of Israel.

It was Truman, furthermore, who took us in a giant leap toward domestic collectivism and bureaucratic socialism, with his Fair Deal program, a program that later bore fruit in federal aid to education, Medicare, and compulsory integration. It was Truman who instituted price and wage controls during the Korean conflict, and whose “state of emergency” has continued ever since, to account for a raft of domestic despotism. It was Truman, moreover, who severely repressed civil liberties with his loyalty and security programs; not Joe McCarthy but Harry Truman was the real and effective opponent of civil liberties during-the late 1940’s and early fifties. Consider the unfortunate hacks whom Truman appointed to the Supreme Court: every one a defender of government prerogatives in every area as against the liberty of the individual. Look around at the Truman record, and there is scarcely a single area that one can observe without indignation; his administration was truly a cornucopia of horrors.

Last but not least, there was the Truman act of mass murder of innocent civilians at Hiroshima, compounded by Nagasaki. His decision to drop the atomic bomb for the first and let us hope the last times, was done for “reasons of State” as a counter in the emerging Cold War. Not only was it totally unnecessary as a measure to defeat Japan, but what is more Truman knew full well that it was unnecessary. In the long and bloody record of shame in American foreign policy, there is no single act of degradation that can compare with this.

In face of the ghastly Truman record, we cannot remain silent in obedience to the polite canon that one must not speak ill of the dead. If we cannot speak ill of the dead, where is the justice that only the historian can bring to the record of the past? The great classical liberal historian Lord Acton once wrote that the muse of the historian must not be Clio, as generally thought, but Rhadamanthus, the legendary avenger of innocent blood. And in the case of Harry S. Truman, there is O so much blood to avenge.

Sex Breaks Up A Cult

Many Americans have gone in for Indian swami cults. In the swami cult, the Swami is the absolute leader whose every word and act is venerated by his adoring followers. One of the most popular and charismatic swamis has been the Swami Satchidananda, who came to the U.S. from Ceylon in the mid-60’s, and who amassed, under the aegis of his Integral Yoga Institute: 25 centers, 5000 initiates, and 20,000 serious students. From the revenue from these followers, the Swami has gained a luxurious pad in Connecticut, as well as a jet-set life style and famous show biz luminaries as his disciples.

But then a serpent came to Eden. The Swami had always preached strict celibacy for his cult members, a celibacy which seemed to fit the holiness and wisdom exuded by the Swami’s message. But, this summer, it turned out that the Swami may have believed himself to be above the moral law he had preached. For one of his leading disciples broke with the Master and charged in some detail that she and the Swami had been having sexual relations for some time.

Grave crisis struck the cult. As Howard Smith writes in the Village Voice (Dec. 14): “All that inner peace trembled. Coast-to-coast wild rumors and racy stories swirled through the incense smoke. Emergency meetings were held, accusations flew, counter-plots and counter-coups were rampant. General confusion led to schisms and disgust. For a while it was like Peyton Place among the Karma Cadre.”

Two factions, a pro- and anti-Swami faction, developed. The pros cleverly pointed out that the Swami “had never actually come right out in plain words and said he was celibate. It was they who tricked themselves.” The anti-wing left the whole movement in despair, maintaining that “he is a phony therefore it is all phony.” The pros were also shaken, but they tried in vain to hush the whole thing up. Finally, even the pros gave the Swami two alternatives: (1) either stay as the Swami but play down the emphasis on celibacy; or (2) get out as the Swami.

After a display of much “righteous anger”, the Swami Satchidananda “took a kind of guru-ish Fifth Amendment — I am your master and therefore I shouldn’t be questioned.” Finally, the Swami wrote a letter to his disciples admitting nothing and telling them it was time for them to take their spiritual enlightenment in their own hands.

Once again, as so many times in history (e.g. the Saint-Simonians, the Comtean movement), Sex had broken up a cult. Do libertarians see any parallels?

The Pimp As Hero

By Walter Block

The honest, hard working, long suffering pimp has been demeaned unjustly long enough. It is time, it is past time, that this ancient wrong be set right. In this day and age, pimps have been singled out for ridicule because of their pinky rings, their flashy custom-made Cadillacs, their fur coats. From time immemorial, pimps have everywhere been treated as parasites who prey upon prostitutes. Even revolutionary groups, who might have been thought to be able to empathize with other downtrodden minority groups, have viciously turned on pimps.

If we are ever to make a fair assessment of this harassed minority group, we must endeavor to calmly and dispassionately take stock of what in actuality the pimp does. We can no longer depend upon old wives tales or “folk wisdom”. But before we begin our analysis, we must clear up one point: the claim that pimps use coercion and the threat of violence (to gather and keep a stable of prostitutes on their payrolls). Of course some pimps do! This, however, in no way contradicts our view of the pimp as an honest and productive workingman. Is there any profession where not one practitioner is guilty of foul play? Of course not. There are bricklayers, plumbers, musicians, priests, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs who have gone berserk and violated the rights of their fellow creatures. Are these professions, then, qua professions to be castigated in their entirety? Of course not. And so should it be with the ancient and honorable profession of pimping: the actions of any one, or even of all pimps together, cannot legitimately be used to condemn the profession qua profession, unless the action is a necessary part of the profession. It is in this way that we know, for instance, that the profession of kidnapping small children for ransom is an evil profession, qua profession. The action is evil and is a necessary part of the profession.

In this case, if some of the practitioners perform good deeds like contributing a part of the “take” to charity, or are “good family men”, or even if all of them do so, the profession is still an abomination. It is an abomination because by its very nature evil acts are committed in its name. In this article then, we shall try to evaluate the profession of pimping, ignoring the evil acts performed by some pimps which have nothing to do with their profession.

The function that the pimping profession serves is that of a broker. Just like brokers of real estate, insurance, stock market shares, investments or commodity futures, the pimp-broker serves the function of bringing two parties to a transaction together at less cost than it would take to bring them together without his good offices. We know that each party to a transaction served by a broker gains from the brokerage. Each party to the transaction is just as free to look for the other party without the aid of the broker, as he (or she) is to make use of the brokerage services for the brokering fee. From the fact that people voluntarily patronize brokers we know that, at least in their own minds, they are benefiting from the existence of the brokers.

And so in the case of the pimps. The customers gain from the use of pimps in that they are spared useless or wasteful waiting and searching time. Many customers would rather phone a pimp whom they trust for an assignation with a prostitute than spend time and effort searching one out. For one thing, the customers can gain the security of knowing that the prostitute comes recommended by the pimp. For another, all the customer need do is pick up the phone; he need not even venture outside to find a prostitute. And on rainy days, this can be of inestimable benefit. As for the prostitute, she (or he) also gains — or else, as we have seen, she would not work through a pimp. The prostitute gains the time that would otherwise be spent in searching for customers. And as every good businessman knows, time is money. The prostitute can also gain the security of knowing that there is some modicum of protection supplied by the pimp; in this profession, the customers that one deals with sometimes leave something to be desired. More important than protection against unruly customers, as important as that may be, is the problem of protection against policemen, whose profession, qua profession, it might be added, consists of harassing prostitutes who are engaged in voluntary trade with consenting adults. The pimp is of inestimable aid to the prostitute in this regard, in that assignations by phone are much less dangerous than streetwalking or bar hopping.

Then there is the problem of wear and tear on sometimes very expensive clothing. The prostitute working without benefit of a pimp must constantly dress and undress between customers. With a pimp setting up appointments one right after the other, there is little or no need for engaging in such costly and uneconomical activity. Thus, far from raising the costs of the service the pimp, like any other broker worth his salt, will actually lower the costs.

The prostitute is no more exploited by the pimp than is the manufacturer exploited by the salesman whom he hires to go out and drum up business for him. The prostitute is no more exploited by the pimp than is the actress who pays an agent a percentage of her earnings to go out and get jobs for her. In all these cases, the prostitute-employer earns more than the cost to her of the employee-pimp, otherwise the employer-employee relationship would not take place. And this is a precise way to look at the relationship that the prostitute bears with respect to the pimp: employer to employee.

We have defended the professional pimp on the grounds that he performs the important and even necessary function of brokering. Actually, however, the pimp’s profession is more honorable than many of the other brokering professions because several of them, such as banking, insurance or the stock market in many respects rely on restrictive state laws to discourage their competition. Whatever may be said of pimps, it cannot be said that they have stooped that low.

The High Priests Of Waste

By A. Ernest Fitzgerald

(398 pages. Norton. $8.95.)

Reviewed By Robert Sherrill

(Editor’s Note: Robert Sherrill, a distinguished journalist, is Washington editor of The Nation and author of many books and articles. This book is available from Books for Libertarians, 422 First St., S. E., Washington, D.C. 20003).

Ernie Fitzgerald is like a film critic who is smart enough to know that Bob Hope is a wretched peddler of wahoo humor but who is too kind hearted, or something, to hate Paramount for foisting him off on the public. In other words, Fitzgerald is an insider with an insider’s shortcomings as well as an insider’s strengths. He is inside Arms, which under certain circumstances, can be almost as entertaining an industry as Hollywood; and having been “a part of the arms-buying process for most of twenty years,” he says he hopes that the criticisms written into The High Priests of Waste will result in our tidying up the Pentagon — that is to say, “will encourage critics to try to create conditions in which the good guys may thrive rather than damning the whole Pentagonal crew.”

If one considers the chronic mismanagement of the military affairs of our government ever since the days of Forrestal (at least), one will conclude quickly enough that Fitzgerald’s wish falls far short of our need, which is that Jehovah should rouse himself from his drunkenness long enough to see to it that, in Old Testament style, not one Pentagon stone is left standing upon another and that all its shredded secrets are scattered to the four winds. That’s the kind of tidying up we need. Then we can build anew.

Meanwhile — a word that in these days signifies preliminary despair — we do at least have Fitzgerald, and despite his kind heartedness, he is quite wonderful.

First of all there is the matter of the Fitzgerald style, the titillating and refreshing effect of which is, like a bubble bath, hard to convey in small doses in this review. Quite a few books in the general category of military-industrial expose have come my way in recent years and without exception I have had to keep reminding myself, as I read them, that life is indeed a grim and unpleasant thing and that these writers were quite justified in their own deadly seriousness. Until Fitzgerald came along, I don’t recall ever reading anything on the topic that provoked more than an occasional smile. Fitzgerald, on the contrary, is good for a great many laughs: “. . .for the first principle of the expediting art is to stride purposefully from hide-out to resting place. In addition, of course, the accomplished aerospace expediter never leaves a place of refuge without carrying something — a part, a clipboard, or a sheaf of papers.”

And then there is the matter of the Autonetics Division of North American Aviation, from whence (as Adelaide would say) Fitzgerald and his fellow consultants were summarily kicked because they uncovered a melange of costly stupidities, one of which Fitzgerald describes:

“For a number of reasons, it is important that Minutemen missiles point more or less straight up. One of the functions of the airmen manning the missile launching sites was to go to the missile silo periodically and check to make sure the missile was standing straight up. The airmen got cold doing this chore, so Autonetics was commissioned to solve the problem. Autonetics’ brilliant engineers correctly concluded that a tent would be a good shelter from the bitter northern wind, confirming the decision of countless generations of Indians who inhabited the region in times past. Unhappily, even though the ignorant savage had solved the problem after a fashion, missile gap technology was not equal to the task. All the Autonetics tents blew away, computers and wind tunnels notwithstanding.”

But Fitzgerald’s banishment by Autonetics was back in the days when he was a private consultant and could be kicked out by aerospace companies. Later he went to the Pentagon as Deputy for Management Systems in the Air Force, and after that the military-industrialists didn’t use their feet on him; they and their allies in the Pentagon used invisible accounting trapdoors and VuGraphs. A VuGraph is a large screen on which Colonels draw intricate charts and from which they deliver interminable lectures to explain why it is absolutely impossible to spend fewer “megabucks” (Pentagonese for one million dollars) on a particular system, and to explain further why waste helps attain the “social goals” of (1) equal employment opportunity, (2) seniority clauses in union agreements, (3) programs for hiring the handicapped, (4) apprentice programs, (5) aid to small business, (6) aid to distressed labor areas, and (7) encouragement of improvements to plant layouts and facilities. That is the summation of an actual lecture which Fitzgerald received.

I won’t use the word genius, but it certainly takes a profound talent to explain the complex financial juggling of the Pentagon via both real and simulated case histories in such a way as not to provoke drowsiness in the reader. Fitzgerald is a master of the simulated case history, using Dickensian characters like “General Palmy” and “Colonel Clapsaddle” and “Secretary Crumley Quillpen” to fill out one of the neatest dramas of hokum/fraud — better known as “The Aardvark Missile Case” — that I have read. Aside from being a deft method of instruction, this light comedy is pure subversion. One could read a hundred stories about Pentagon cheating in the Washington Post (that is, if the Post were still reporting such things) and still come away with some middling hope that the Pentagon might yet reform itself. After laughing through the Aardvark Missile Case, all hope is gone — and yet, for the first time one feels that perhaps the billions spent at the Pentagon may be worth it for the sheer diversionary perversionary fun they provide, something worthy of Nero behind the sofa with a goat. When “Major Buck” succeeds in tricking “Assistant Secretary Doe” into thinking he has caught the key mistake in the Aardvark program — a mistake that was, in fact, planted to give Doe that delusion — and when Major Buck “discovers” that the cost error can be traced back to PIGA, or as he explains to the increasingly baffled Doe, “the pendular integrating gryoscopic accelerometer,” then we come to suspect that Samuel Clemens is alive, even if unemployed at the moment, in Washington.

Okay, enough of levity. Back to grimness. As you must already know, Fitzgerald was fired from the Pentagon a few years ago because when he was called before Senator Proxmire’s Joint Economic Committee and asked if the C-5A was going to suffer from a cost overrun, he answered factually: yes, a couple billion dollars worth — an overrun that had been covered up by both Lockheed and the Army in such a way that if the same trick had been pulled in a bank all officials would have wound up in the penitentiary.

That, however, was not the first outburst of honesty that had got Fitzgerald in trouble. He had also been gauche enough to complain when he found that factory labor efficiency on one Minuteman contract ranged from 3.2 percent to 7 percent of what those workers would have been expected to produce if they had been on a civilian, commercial contract. At the same time, their rate of pay was increasing five times faster than commercial contract workers.

Fitzgerald figured that if all the obvious padding were taken out of the contract — and he had itemized the soft areas for his superiors to look over — the Pentagon could save $500,000,000. McNamara’s cost-estimating experts refused to even consider Fitzgerald’s reform proposals. The reason was that he was defying the principle of “historical costs,” the principle that guides the financing of all Pentagon programs. It is such an insane principle that a normal person will inevitably find it hard to follow. It comes to this: The right cost is what the contractor charges.

No, it’s not a joke. This is a sacred principle. Costs are not judged by what the weapons could be manufactured for. Costs are judged by what the contractor charges: this, then, becomes history, and thereupon it is elevated to the dogma of Historical Cost, and thereafter all further cost adjustments are built upon it. No looking back is allowed, no turning again to measure the cost of that program by what it would cost if civilians out in the world were doing it.

Contracting between the giant corporations and the Pentagon, explained with precision in this book, makes up in ardor what it lacks in grace; it is experience which Fitzgerald likens to “a track meet with participation limited to middle-aged ladies, each weighing in excess of 300 pounds” and which one of the more candid generals at the Pentagon likened to “contention among bullmoose for the privilege of servicing the government cow.”

It is very rewarding love-making, however. General Dynamics, for example, humped the cow so poorly that the milk doubled. It earned twice as much money as originally contracted for by building an F-111 that is not yet safe to fly (at last count, something like 24 had crashed.)

Within the Pentagon and the aerospace industry, serious criticism of such things is not permitted. Revenge is certain and swift. When a small cost control consultant company, Performance Technology Corporation, first broke the code by pointing out how Pratt & Whitney could save federal money and then compounded its sin by showing how the Pentagon could require other economies from other companies, PTC was assassinated by the Air Force. It was done very cleverly. The Air Force hired PTC for a complicated job but kept withholding payment; PTC borrowed heavily to stay in business while it waited for the Air Force payment. After the Air Force owed PTC about 170 percent of the company’s net worth, part of the contract was abruptly cancelled retroactively and the company was wiped out.

A Navy contracting officer who tried to affect thrift in the building of the Mark 48 torpedo program was eased out of procurement, then out of the Navy, and — like the end of an Evelyn Waugh story — wound up as an AID buyer in Ghana.

For his heresies, Fitzgerald was in the early days subjected to an endless round of coaching from colonels and GS-15s on the social value of the military-industrial partnership. When that failed to suppress him, he found his mail channeled to other offices where it was opened, and his speeches censured and lost. Finally he was fired.

Knowing the character of the Pentagon from having witnessed previous episodes of revenge, Fitzgerald should not have been surprised when its officials knifed him. I really doubt that he was, though he at least pretends to be.

It took place with unusual flagrancy even for the Pentagon. Fitzgerald went to work at the Pentagon in September 1965. When his three years probation was up in September 1968, he was officially notified that he was being converted to career tenure. This meant that, barring being caught with his hand in the till or dating Christine Jorgenson, he was secure and permanent.

But the official notification had gone out before he had testified to Lockheed’s theft of government funds. His snitching on a Georgia defense plant infuriated Senator Richard Russell, who was unfortunately still alive and running the Senate Appropriations Committee. Apparently Russell said something to the Pentagon because shortly thereafter Fitzgerald received a note to the effect that the Pentagon bosses were terribly sorry but that the notice of career status had been a computer error and that actually they had meant to tell him he was no longer needed.

What was the excuse? Civil Service records — later grudgingly opened for him to see — showed that officials had compiled a list of his sins which included driving an old Rambler automobile. This, said the bureaucratic gumshoe, indicated Fitzgerald was a “pinchpenny type of person.” Lockheed and Autonetics, among others, could have told them that without an investigation.

The C-5A overrun episode is probably recounted here with as many details as most readers would desire. But there are several omissions and several interpretations that I would quarrel with. I feel the officials of Lockheed handled our money in a criminal fashion. I think Fitzgerald should have made the back-alley quality of their thievery a more palpable thing, and I think one way to have done this would have been to point out the stock juggling that was going on behind the scene among Lockheed officials at the same time they were screwing the taxpayer. This was brought out fairly thoroughly in a quiet SEC investigation, but generally ignored by the press at the time. It was also soft-pedaled by the SEC, which said it didn’t want to single out Lockheed for rebuke but felt that stock manipulations at all defense corporations should be investigated. It promised to do so. That was how long ago — three years? four years? — and the SEC has not made a move in that direction yet.

I also think Fitzgerald was far, far too easy on the spineless liberals involved in this thing. I mean such fellows as Senator Metcalf of Montana, who has made a career of talking tough about corporations but backs down when he can strike a blow against the crooked ones. Made loquacious and expansive and generous by an overdose of grape, Metcalf came to the Senate floor blowing off about “not wanting to be responsible for unemployment” and cast the deciding vote to bail out Lockheed with a $250 million government-guaranteed loan. I also mean such fellows as Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, who has been posing around here for years as a red hot populist but with increasing frequency opts out in favor of the big corporations, perhaps partly because he is suffering the natural decay of advanced age. Chairman of the House Banking Committee, Patman perhaps could have blocked the loan if he had tried. At least he could have made it much more embarrassing for all the crooks in the deal. But when his fellow Texan, Treasury Secretary John Connally, mastermind of the loan, asked Patman to play along, he did. In fact, he even drafted the loan legislation. Fitzgerald mentions Patman’s role only offhandedly and almost sympathetically.

Others may interpret such attitudes in this book in a kindlier way. They may see them as evidence that Fitzgerald came away from his harrowing experiences retaining his balance, without bitterness, slow to excess, etc. I, having none of those qualities where Congress and the Pentagon are concerned, find them a failing in an otherwise invaluable book.

The Other North American Election

By Samuel Edward Konkin III

While Richard Nixon bored everyone with his landslide on November 7, Canadians were treated to a cliff-hanger a week earlier on October 30. The pollsters confidently predicted a Trudeau return as Maritime provinces’ results swung slightly towards the Liberal Party, and Quebec cut the Progressive Conservative seats from four to two (out of 74). True, the Social Credit Rally (Ralliement Creditiste) increased their popular vote substantially, but gained only one seat. Then Ontario came in with the social democratic New Democrat Party and the Progressive Conservatives slashing into the Grit (Liberal) standings. And then the West.

In Alberta, all four Liberal seats were buried under a Tory (PC) avalanche. British Columbia moved the Tories-even with the Grits, and brought in the NDP main strength. The Northwest Territories gave the NDP their first “frontier” seat (Grit loss) and the Tories held on to the Yukon to put them one seat up, 109-108.

Canada does not allow absentee balloting, except for one special case. The Social Credit Party’s sole gain was at the expense of Jean-Luc Pepin, a Liberal Cabinet Minister involved in what Murray Rothbard called Quebec’s “White Terror” suspension of civil rights of a few years ago, and, since the Creditistes are the federal party which most free market libertarians (especially minarchists) in the U.S. would sympathize with, it seemed like divine justice. Unfortunately, the military votes Grit, and their absentee ballots reversed the 100-vote margin, knocking the Creditistes back to 14 seats. Libertarians can probably read symbolism into that as well.

The final standings of 109 seats each for the Liberals and P. C.’s, 30 for the NDP, 14 for SC, one Independent Conservative and one Independent (speaker of the House Lucien Lamoureux — non-partisan) tell the average American nothing, assuming he even heard of them. For the libertarians wanting of know who to cheer and who to boo — as Dr. Rothbard is wont — even less. I shall undertake here to give you a programme to go with your scorecard.

The Social Credit Party used to be based in the rightist West, Alberta and British Columbia, and was a free market, pro-American party with a funny money policy they could not legislate because they had only controlled provincial governments. They never had more than a minority in the national House of Commons. In 1963, they defeated John Diefen-baker’s minority Tory government because he failed to balance the budget. In 1962, Real Caouette led his Quebecers into the House in larger numbers than the Western wing, and the party eventually split. The Western wing withdrew in favor of P. C.’s to stem the Trudeau sweep of 1968, and never recovered. Caouette kept his more orthodix Social Credit position, appealing populistically to the Quebec habitants (peasant farmers) and stayed in the House. Recently he tried to expand westward, but failed to restore the party outside Quebec (although there are still a few Socred diehards lurking in rightist circles in ranch and oil country). The Alberta provincial Socreds were thrown out of office for the first time in 35 years in 1970 by Kennedyesque Tory Peter Lougheed, and their very survival as a party depends on Lougheed’s self-destruction. This year in British Columbia, W. A. C. Bennett’s 20-year Socred regime was ousted by the NDP in an even greater victory, marking a swing from far Right to far Left in the Canadian four-party spectrum. Although Caouette increased his popular vote markedly, and signs of organization were seen again throughout Canada, the recent net effect for the “good guys” (least worst guys) is down.

The Leftist bad guys, the New Democrat Party, which is labour backed and oriented, like the British Labour Party, now has three provincial governments (B. C, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) and their largest-number of seats ever in the Federal House. American investors are fleeing B. C. right now, and Canadian capitalists are screaming to the federal government to bail them out by preventing nationalization of federal regulated industries. Plus ça change, plus c’est la méme chose.

The big gains federally were reaped by Robert Stanfield’s Progressive Conservative Party, but it cannot take over the government without 25 more seats — and the Creditistes haven’t got that many. The Tories are conservative, but in the British/European sense, not (except for a small Ontario faction) in the American quasi-libertarian sense. Hence they love mercantilism and fear gradual socialism much less. Thus NDP support for the right Welfarist concessions is thinkable, and the NDP’s and PC’s both are anti-American (just as the Liberals and SC’s are pro-American). Their foreign policy might seem more appealing to a libertarian; but it manifests itself in increasing government regulation of corporations (50% of Canadian companies are American controlled) and in little which could be considered objective anti-imperialism. The NDP leader, David Lewis, will “throw his support behind whichever of the old line parties is prepared to deal adequately with unemployment, inflation, old age pensions, and a more equitable tax system.”* Coming from a socialist, that seems ominous. I doubt that libertarians could imagine a worse nightmare than a de facto socialist-traditionalist coalition.

Trudeaumania is gone, but Pierre Elliot Trudeau clings on. He has not resigned, and it looks as if he will try to keep governing, daring the Opposition to precipitate an election by defeating him on a non-confidence motion. Here, precedent is murky. There is no reason the figurehead Governor-General can’t ask the Tories to try to gain confidence for a majority — but in 1926, Governor General Lord Byng refused Liberal Mackenzie King’s request for dissolution of Parliament, and invited Conservative Arthur Meighen to govern. His bungling Progressive supporters blew a “pairing”, bringing him down only days later, and William Lyon Mackenzie King rode to victory attacking Byng’s interference. Would Roland Michener have the guts of Lord Byng? Ultimately, the Tories may be thwarted by this vestige of royal privilege. Michener was a Conservative, to add to the irony, but was appointed by a Liberal government, following a recent cross-party tradition.

Still, Trudeau has a problem if Michener doesn’t give him an issue. The electorate might decide to finish the job by giving Stanfield a majority. Diefenbaker ended 22 years of Liberal government in 1957, and dissolved his minority government early in 1958 calling for just such a majority. He won a record 208 out of 265 seats.

On the other hand, Lester Bowles Pearson won two minority governments in a row of 1963 and 1965 after a Tory minority of 1962, failing to get the majority he craved. He limped along in the Centre, depending on Social Credit support.

It is in the Grits’ interest to give the Tories the government, so that Stanfield can begin to alienate voters. But it’s not in Trudeau’s interest, as shown by Diefenbaker’s ouster after his election defeat by a particularly brutal purge which caused enough resentment in the West to give Trudeau his 1968 victory in the first place. Trudeau’s ouster would not be so regionally oriented, because half of the Liberal seats are in Quebec anyway, and his followers have nowhere to go but the Creditistes, the Tories being unthinkable and the NDP frowned on by the Catholic Church.

The French-English split is being played up by foreign papers, and the Separatists may be bolstered by the defeat of their centralist enemy Trudeau — but that is a Provincial effect, not a Federal one. Furthermore, resentment against compulsory bilingualism/biculturalism is found in the third of the population of non-WASP origin (mostly in the West) such as German, Ukrainian, Galician, Icelander, Dutch, Russian, and others who are just speaking English in the first or second generation. The only real amelioration will be found in reviving the Social Credit and Union Nationale’s (a Quebec provincial party, recently defeated by the Grits) demand for greater decentralism and provincial rights. The present trend is the other way, but Canadians are a remarkably non-revolutionary lot, pointing with pride to their “evolution” from Great Britain, as opposed to the Americans’ messy violence. Quebec independence will be gained gradually if at all, by the Parti Quebec parliamentarily (with both RIN-socialistic-and RN-Creditiste-wings) and not by the ten to fifteen FLQ**goons.

Revolution in Canada is a bigger joke than in the U.S., and rather than radical change, resulting from elimination of Trudeau’s flashy, slightly-leftist liberalism (he flirted with price controls but never implemented them, by the way) one should expect stodginess, anti-communist witchhunts from Liberal renegade Paul Hellyer, and the ominous economic changes resulting from NDP support. Canadian libertarians and their American allies should be hoping for a new election and a minority government with Creditiste swing vote power. Failing that, how about Parliamentary Chaos?

*Page 1, The Edmonton Journal, Tuesday, October 31, 1972.

**Front de Liberation Quebecois RIN = Reassemblement pour l’Independence Nationale, and RN = Ralliement Nationale. The Nationale recurring in Quebec party names has the opposite meaning of “nationwide”.

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Before becoming a well-known libertarian activist and writer, Mr. Konkin was a Socred activist, and Chairman of the University of Alberta Social Credit Party from 1966-68. He became senior participant in the Model Parliaments, and was involved in all Canadian and Alberta elections from 1962 to 1968. He is now a foreign student at New York University, a candidate for a Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

This is the time of year for movie critics to roll out their awards and their ten-best lists, and I am forced to take a long, hard look at the cinema from the fact that I cannot come up with a “ten best” list at all. For in the cinema we must wage the same struggle that we should have been fighting in the rest of the culture since the turn of the twentieth century: on behalf of the old, bourgeois values and against the morbidity and unreason of the avant-garde. Unfortunately, the avant-garde has now become “the garde”, and so it becomes more important than ever, in the movies as well as in literature, art, and music, to raise the standard of the arriere-garde — a rear-guard struggle against a diseased culture.

The carriers of the disease are of the course the intelligentsia, for the cultural instincts of the middle-class are sound, and generally they put up a lengthy resistance to the irrationalism of the cultural “elite”. We then have two cultures: the sound, if often stodgy, “commercial” culture of the bourgeoisie; and the arrogantly morbid, involuted culture of the intellectuals. This unhealthy split between the cultures did not really exist before 1900; before that, when what we might call the “classical culture” held sway, the leaders in art, fiction, music, etc. were of the same cloth, albeit on a far greater and more creative level, as the popular artists; indeed, the greatness of the leaders — of the Rembrandts, Mozarts, Verdis, etc., was cheerfully acknowledged by the mass of the bourgeoisie. “High” culture was profound, to be sure; but it was also understandable on the mass level, as well as repaying long hours of diligent study. Keats, Mozart, Rembrandt, etc. were instantly understandable to the mass as well as being profoundly intellectual leaders of the culture.

But at approximately the turn of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia began to succumb rapidly to morbidity and irrationality; cultural disease swiftly replaced cultural health. The differences between the rationalist, the romantic, etc. variants are not very important here; the vital point is that the glorious “classical” mainstream of art and culture: from the Renaissance to the magnificent Baroque to the 18th century rationalists to the 19th century romantics — that all of these form the noble heritage of Western culture and civilization. And that that heritage began to crumble rapidly into cultural degeneracy: a degeneracy that included the flight from realism, classicism, and rational space in art; from purpose and plot in fiction; from clarity in literature generally; and a flight from melody and harmony in music. It was, in classical terms, a flight from beauty in the fullest sense and the embrace of the ugly; a rush away from optimism, purpose, and life toward morbidity and death; and an escape from reason on behalf of the irrational.

While the bourgeoisie have put up a heroic resistance to this twentieth-century plague, they were bound to lose out when permanently deprived of intellectual and cultural allies. And so in fiction, where have been the great classical writers since Somerset Maughan? In the theater, where are the successors to Shaw and Wilde? In art, the Wyeths, John Koch and a few others have kept the realist tradition beautifully alive, but they have been largely ignored by the chi-chi art world which has rushed to lionize the Picassos, Mondrians, and Pollocks. In music, the barbarities of modern music, from the atonal to the electronic, have fortunately been checked by the customers, who insist on the recording and the concertizing of the classical masters. In popular music, however, both “classical” pop and “classical” jazz have lost out to the barbarities of atonal modern jazz and of acid rock.

For a long time, the movies were the last stronghold of the arriere-garde. There are two good reasons for this: one, that the movies are our newest art form, and two, that since movies are dependent on a mass audience, the basically sound taste of the masses for a long while kept the intelligentsia on a short leash. But now the spread of irrationality has hit the movies in a big way, and the defense of the classical movie — the “movie movie” — must be a bitter struggle against the rising if not dominant tide of “intellectual” degeneracy.

By “degeneracy” I of course do not mean pornography, which serves as a wrong-headed focus for many conservatives. Pornography had always formed a harmonious “left wing” within the Victorian culture. The problem in the movies is not sex but unreason, an absurdism that infects both the point of view of the film and the techniques of the camera. The Enemy on the movie front is not the California porno king; our war to the metaphorical knife is not with the makers of Deep Throat but with the Bergmans, the Bunuels, the Antonionis, the Fellinis, the Godards. The truly obscene is not the happy, fun-loving School Girl, but such monstrosities as Juliet of the Spirits and Last Year At Marienbad.

Neither is “violence” the problem, as so many movie critics are maintaining. Violence is a perfectly proper dramatic tool; the real question is the point of view, is how violence is being used in the film. Once again: look to the intellectuals, to the avant-garde, and you will find precisely the wrong point of view. The intelligentsia, for example, loved A Clockwork Orange, with its random and meaningless violence, but they hated with a purple passion those films where violence is used as an instrument of justice, of defense against crime. In short, they hate Dirty Harry or such great John Wayne films as Chisum or Rio Bravo, and they have the gall to denounce the supposedly “meaningless” violence of such Sam Peckinpah masterpieces as The Wild Bunch. (It is interesting that the intellectuals preferred Peckinpah’s inferior Straw Dogs to Wild Bunch, precisely because the employment of violence, while still defensive, did not have the latter’s clarity and point.)

It is of course a standard trick of the intellectuals to take the most banal works of classical culture and to use them as straw men on behalf of the avant-garde. But classical culture is certainly not a monolith; there are varying degrees of merit in classical films as anywhere else. Of course, Mary Poppins, for example, was banal and boring; but contrast it to such fine musicals as My Fair Lady and the magnificent Gigi!

The Golden Age of the cinema was the thirties and forties. It was then that we could delight in Gone With the Wind, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and The Lady Vanishes; it was then that we could enjoy the sophisticated wit of the Cary Grant-Katherine Hepburn movies and the hilarious farce of the Marx Brothers, as well as Mr. Old Curmudgeon himself, W. C. Fields. Indeed, by far the three best movies that I saw in 1972 were revivals from that better age. Two were from GBS: Major Barbara and Pygmalion. It is instructive to compare Pygmalion with the later My Fair Lady, the musical based on the former play, when Pygmalion lacks the famous music, it has far more of the original Shavian bite; also the acting in Pygmalion is far superior: Wendy Hiller is miles ahead of Audrey Hepburn, and even that excellent actor Rex Harrison is eclipsed by the cool austerity and luminous intelligence of Leslie Howard. Major Barbara, despite Shaw’s socialist beliefs, is one of the great arguments for capitalism in the history of the film, done with high Shavian wit and intelligence; and then there is the magnificent acting of Robert Morley, in addition to Harrison and Hiller.

And finally, the incomparable English film, The Importance of Being Earnest, perhaps the greatest motion picture ever made. The marvelously witty Oscar Wilde play never flags for a moment, and the acting is high-style perfection, performed by Michael Redgrave, Michael Dennison, Dorothy Tutin, Joan Greenwood, Margaret Rutherford, and the incomparable Dame Edith Evans. There, my friends, was a movie!

But to return to the cinematic slough of 1972. Certainly the best film of 1972 was The Godfather, which we have already hailed in these pages. The Godfather is us classicists’ candidate in the award sweepstakes. Already, of course, both the masses and the intelligentsia have spoken: the masses by perceptively making The Godfather the box-office smash of all time; the intellectuals by rejecting it for avant-garde tinsel: the New York Film Critics choosing the eternally boring and morbid Bergman’s latest, Cries and Whispers, and the even more pretentious National Society of Film Critics selecting the irrationalist Bunuel’s latest offering. (In my view, the only good Bergman was one of his earliest, before he adopted the unbecoming mantle of Profound Thinker: his Smiles of a Summer Night, done as a high style Restoration-type farce. Which is just about the one Bergman movie that the critics don’t ooh and aah about.) I have faith, however, that the good old bourgeois Academy will spurn the Continental mish-mash and heap its awards on the truly great Godfather.

The other awards? Best director and best picture awards should usually run together, and so Francis Ford Coppola gets our accolade. For best actor it’s for me a tossup between Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in our favorite movie. Brando’s acting was a mighty and brilliant tour de force, by far the best Brando in that actor’s checkered career. But, on the other hand, Pacino’s was a far longer part, and it was a subtle and splendid performance, in which the character changed gradually but vitally in the course of the picture. For best supporting actor. Robert Duvall will probably get the Academy Award for his consigliori in The Godfather (even the New York Film Critics selected Duvall), but far superior are two splendid performances by British actors in Frenzy: either the subtle acting of Alec McCowen as the inspector, or Barry Foster’s suave and two-faced villain. For best actress, there is simply no one that I can choose; 1972 was a bad year for actresses. Please, Academy, not the impossibly awkward and pseudo-elfin Liza Minelli in Cabaret! I am afraid, however, that Liza will get the award, purely as a remnant of the still flourishing cult for one of Hollywood’s all-time worst singers and actresses: Liza’s mom Judy Garland. For supporting actresses, Vivien Merchant’s gourmet-loving inspector’s wife in Frenzy towers over an indifferent lot.

As for the “ten best” movies, I cannot find the heart to put nine other movies of 1972 on the list. Certainly one, however, is Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy in which the Old Master returns to the fine suspense of his early English period — could it be a coincidence that he returned to England to make the film? If not for Coppola’s great achievement, I would surely pick Hitchcock as the best director of the year. Another excellent film was the best of the “caper” genre in years, Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock. A fine blend of humor and suspense, the excellent direction blended sterling acting performances from George Segal and Robert Redford, and featured a marvelously funny Zero Mostel as the crooked lawyer (Zero would place as the best supporting actor on my list below McCowen and Foster.)

When we get past The Godfather, Frenzy, and The Hot Rock, we have to reach a bit. The Hospital featured a slashing and witty attack on the large city hospital, highlighted by the typically excellent acting of George C. Scott. I haven’t seen Sleuth, but the play was splendid and subtly changing suspense: my only a priori reservation is that Sir Laurence Olivier always tends to overact and chew the scenery, especially in productions that he obviously feels are beneath him. As a result, one is supposed to applaud Olivier’s acting tricks and to forget the character he is playing. (See, for example, Olivier’s performance as the dervish leader in the forgotten Khartoum.) Even in classical films, Olivier sometimes ruins the picture by hamming it up, as he did in Richard III.

Also on the list, but not with very high marks, is Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon. Rohmer is one of the few French directors to continue in the classic tradition, and for this he is ostracized by the French film world. As the founder of the famous French journal Cahiers du Cinema, Rohmer kept insisting throughout the dark days of the avant-garde on the high merits of Hitchcock and even — perhaps going a little too far — of Jerry Lewis! Chloe is one of a fascinating set of “moral tales”, in which Rohmer single-handedly restores intelligent and subtle dialogue to its rightful place in the cinema. Unfortunately, Chloe suffers by comparison with the previous Rohmer tales released here, notably Claire’s Knee and the superb My Night at Maud’s. The problem is that in Chloe both the hero and the heroine are decidedly unappealing, so that one ends up not really giving a damn whether he succumbs to temptation and sleeps with her or not (the problem of all of the Moral Tales.) Still, Chloe in the Afternoon rates as far and away the best foreign picture of the year.

Coming to the bottom of the “eight best” list, we have Play It Again, Sam and They Only Kill Their Masters. Play It is hardly in the same league with Woody Allen’s hilarious Bananas, but this clumsy movie does center around a warm and affectionate tribute to the great Bogart, and no picture that does that can be all bad. Masters is a quiet, gentle detective drama, and would scarcely make any best list in a good movie year; but it is an engaging sleeper, and contains a fine, quietly wry performance from James Garner.

What of my fellow critics? Are there any whom I can generally recommend? Not really; there is unfortunately no one who is really aware of the great classical avant-garde struggle, much less wages a consistent battle on behalf of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Even the best are a quivering mass of ad hoc sensibility. Perhaps the soundest of the lot is Paul D. Zimmerman of Newsweek. Unquestionably the worst is the most famous: Judith Crist of New York, who can be depended upon to love the awful movies and hate the good ones. Rex Reed of the Daily News always pitches his critiques on a note of scarcely controlled hysteria. On the other hand, Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice is better than most: being saved by his being a disciple of Rohmer. John Simon of the New Leader is often good, largely because he dislikes almost everything — but not for the right reasons. Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic is often sensible. But all in all, a rum show.

“Work and earn; pay taxes and die.” — Old German Proverb.

From The Old Curmudgeon

For Closed Marriage. I see that a few libertarians, for some reason, are recommending the jejune best-seller by the O’Neills, Open Marriage. In their insipid work, the O’Neills cleverly have it both ways. By being deliberately vague and non-specific, their work can be read on two levels. On one level, it is simply another string of cliches that have come down to us ever since Shakespeare said it far far better: “To thine own self be true.” The changes have been rung on this through best-sellers like Dale Carnegie and now the O’Neills. If this is all they mean, that, e.g. each partner in a marriage should fulfill his or her self to its best potential, then the “open marriage” concept is unexceptionable but tediously banal: it would be hard to find anyone to disagree. On the other hand, the book can be read on a second level, and I suspect that it is the titillation of the authors’ never-quite-coming out-with-it that is responsible for the mass appeal: i.e. a call for sleeping around by both partners. One can hear the titters: Is that what they mean by all the hoopla about growth by each partner, about seeking independent experiences and then bringing the “new knowledge” to the partner, etc.?

If that is what they mean, then we are simply getting the old seduction shuck: “Come on, it will rejuvenate your marriage”; “you’ll bring new experiences to your (husband, wife).” If that is what they mean, then I am foursquare for the “closed marriage”, the marriage in which two partners live in trust and fidelity, in which they blend into a lifelong emotional intimacy to the glories of which the promiscuous and the seduction-shuckers are deaf, dumb, and blind.

The only good Indian is . . . (1972-style)

“The real problem confronting the American Indians in the western United States today is that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is carrying out the policy of the Department of Interior . . . and that policy is opposed to the private rights to the use of water of the American Indians. No one is recognizing that in substance and in effect the Indian rights are being communized . . . communized for the use of the non-Indian community.”

William H. Veeder, water expert, in The Indian Historian, Summer 1972

Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984)

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