bdp (02/03/83)
A short while ago, some folks were lauding the American Spectator
as a great journal. Having been a subscriber for almost a year,
I can only attest to the fact that it is trying desperately to pick up
the same folks who subscribe(d) to the National Lampoon.
An appropriate example, from the Editor-in-chief's column
"The Continuing Crisis," for Feb 1983:
Jakarta, Indonesia, and from this booming metropolis comes word
that three hundred dogs will be done in to solemnize the arrival of
the new year in the West Java capital of Bandung. Jogging claimed
the life of Mr. David Blues, 41, the renowned Greenwich Village folk
singer who keeled over in New York City. Memorial services were held
at the Chinese Chance restaurant, reflecting Mr. Blue's long interest
in food and cats. ... A clandestine group calling itself the Animal
Liberation Front raided Washington, D.C.'s Howard University Medical
School laboratory and cabbaged two or three dozen cats, some of which
were being used to study the effects of drugs on nerve transmission.
A spokeswomen for the group, who insisted that she had not been party
to the heist, declared in a telephone interview that Howard University
had been singled out because Washington contains "a number of radical
groups willing to risk jail for their fellow creatures." An obvious
point that, yet Miss Holly Jensen went on to explain, "I have a passion
and conviction about the rights of my fellow creatures," leading
some officials to the hypothesis that Miss Jensen's group is actually
in the business of supplying the staples for local Chinese restaurants--
"passion and conviction," come off it, Holly.
Of course, the NL has been making a staple of ethnic, racial, and sexual
prejudice for years. If this is the Great Big Voice of the New Right,
it is little wonder why Tom Stoppard and Woody Allen subscribe to it.
Bruce Parker
BTL Pissthataway