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IDIOT
The arrogance of the pundit can be excused if s/he has something at least moderately intelligent, interesting or arguable to say. But that a grown man with enough brain cells to move on two feet should deliver himself of the following atrocity and live not to even be mocked or subjected to proper invective (not insult, for to call such a man a moron is not an insult but a description) is quite frankly more than flesh and blood can stand. So, if nobody else will take the trouble to brand Emmett Tyrrell as a mind-repelling moron for it, I will:
Will no one from a younger generation note the obvious -- to wit, in the arts and in politics, the 1960s generation was a bust?
There are no Faulkners, no Hemingways, no Fitzgeralds. There are no Aaron Coplands or Virgil Thompsons. In drama, there is David Mamet, but that is about it. In Europe, there may be a little more life in the 1960s has-beens, but not much.
Jeff Jones, the greatest painter since Picasso, the greatest American painter of all time, has just died. The grief for this terrible loss would be enough to comment on this piece of excreta excreted from the wrong orifice; but that a man should seriously claim the already-forgotten Virgil Thomson as an everlasting glory for the nation that produced Jack Kirby and Robert Altman simply beggars belief. This man has lived through one of the epochs of Western art and has learned nothing from or of it; which can only mean that he has made a conscious decision to reject it - to refuse the best and finest products of his time. Now it might be said that things like the agonizing circumstances of Jones' death - surely due in part to substance abuse in the past and possibly to his/her sex change operation - could point to a destructive and dangerous aspect among Sixties artists; after all, many of them, from Janis Joplin to Jerry Garcia, suffered similar fates. The fact is not in dispute, and a discussion on it could well be constructive. Only that is not what Tyrrell does: on the contrary, he mocks those who have lived into their seventies, from Bob Dylan to Paul McCartney. Evidently, not enough of the greatest and finest of their time have died to satisfy him. One would never have thought that anyone could possibly make Ann Coulter look good, but she, at least, likes the Grateful Dead.
Will no one from a younger generation note the obvious -- to wit, in the arts and in politics, the 1960s generation was a bust?
There are no Faulkners, no Hemingways, no Fitzgeralds. There are no Aaron Coplands or Virgil Thompsons. In drama, there is David Mamet, but that is about it. In Europe, there may be a little more life in the 1960s has-beens, but not much.
Jeff Jones, the greatest painter since Picasso, the greatest American painter of all time, has just died. The grief for this terrible loss would be enough to comment on this piece of excreta excreted from the wrong orifice; but that a man should seriously claim the already-forgotten Virgil Thomson as an everlasting glory for the nation that produced Jack Kirby and Robert Altman simply beggars belief. This man has lived through one of the epochs of Western art and has learned nothing from or of it; which can only mean that he has made a conscious decision to reject it - to refuse the best and finest products of his time. Now it might be said that things like the agonizing circumstances of Jones' death - surely due in part to substance abuse in the past and possibly to his/her sex change operation - could point to a destructive and dangerous aspect among Sixties artists; after all, many of them, from Janis Joplin to Jerry Garcia, suffered similar fates. The fact is not in dispute, and a discussion on it could well be constructive. Only that is not what Tyrrell does: on the contrary, he mocks those who have lived into their seventies, from Bob Dylan to Paul McCartney. Evidently, not enough of the greatest and finest of their time have died to satisfy him. One would never have thought that anyone could possibly make Ann Coulter look good, but she, at least, likes the Grateful Dead.
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And while what I saw red about was the insult to the great generation of sixties artists, there was another piece of crap in the same article, right at the start. The article started as one of the many anti-Newt Gingrich pieces that nearly every conservative pundit has been writing in the last week or two. (Honestly, Gingrich is so hated by his own party that if I were a Democrat I would pray for him to win the primaries; then I could just lie back and watch his own party rip him to pieces.) But where did he take his polemic? Not, as more sensible people have done, to a damning comparison with Richard Nixon; no, he linked Gingrich with Bill Clinton and Dominique Strauss-Kahn as having committed the original sin of having grown up in the sixties! It's all about the sixties, you see. In fact, not that I follow the bastard a lot - he is neither the most colourful nor the most interesting of conservatives - one thing I can tell you is that no piece of his is complete without an attack on baby boomers or hippies. He must have been scared by a hippy's beard as a child. And one could, perhaps, even make a case - after all, I said something similar about Berlusconi and Strauss-Kahn - but when you get to the enormity of denying the artistic achievement of the sixties, while suggesting that nobody like Gingrich had happened before, then, mate, you have proved and stated in letters of gold hammered in marble that you are nothing but a pathetic idiot.