Nov 28, 2019 4 min read

WASHINGTON – Vice President Spiro (Ted) Agnew has arrived. He has caused adrenaline to flow in tired bodies by forcefully employing man’s gift of speech on such vulnerable targets as radicalized youth, weakening parents, wishy-washy college officials, and assorted cliques, claques and bands (snobbish, effete, intellectual and arrogant). Agnew is now a certified polemicist and wordmonger.

It is startling to hear all this from Agnew, but our high strung society has been inundated with printed, spoken and electronically delivered utterances in recent years. We wallow fretfully in words. Consider these recent specimens of criticism, which seem to be right up Agnew’s alley:

A: “An extraordinary amount of bigotry on the part of the elite, liberal students goes unexamined at Yale and elsewhere. Directed at the lower middle-class, it feeds on the unexamined biases of class perspective, the personality predilections of elite radicals and academic disciplines that support their views … The hidden, liberal radical bigotry toward the lower middle-class in stinking and covered … “

B. “The nation’s leading universities have shown themselves slow learners of a fundamental lesson: Reforms accomplished through surrender by the majority to force and unreason invite the continued exercise of control over campus government by those who know how to coerce and bully … The much-debated endeavors at institutional restructuring are now being jeopardized by spineless response en the part of administrations and faculties by radical students who have become masters at exploiting just grievances and at distorting idealistic causes …

C. “Students might well bear in mind the fine distinctions between reasoned dissent and raw intolerance, between knowledge and wisdom, between compromise and copping out … “

D “… I think it unquestionable that on our campuses and off them, something very like delirium has overtaken us. Indeed, as in a delirium, we have begun to battle. Scholars who are usually careful, reporters who are normally judicious, have fallen into a use of language that systematically distorts the facts and makes it impossible to deal with them. If the teachers and administrators of the country do not talk straight, what can we expect from our students? To be fuzzy and equivocal about basic principals because the people who are challenging them are young, and, as the saying goes, need our understanding, is the worst kind of condescension …”‘

E. “Unfortunately, the press, radio, and television do tend to exaggerate campus problems and issues. Students will continue to take advantage of the mass communications media to promote their causes. Many students, normally quiet and uninvolved, will turn on like tigers during a protest in the hope of somehow ‘making’ the Huntley-Brinkley Report …

F. “Your irrationality makes me wonder how you were ever admitted into Columbia. You confuse rhetoric with reasoning – Assertions are not facts – Passion is no substitute for knowledge. Slogans are not solutions. Your idealism takes no brains – And where you dismiss our differences with contempt, you become contemptible.”

G. “… In place of self possession, we have screaming tantrums and brawling in the streets. In place of the ‘thorough way of talk,’ that Wilson envisaged, we have banners and epithets and obscenities and virtually meaningless slogans. And in place of bright eyes ‘looking to heaven for confirmation of their hope,’ we have eyes glazed with anger and passion, too often dimmed as well by artificial abuse of the psychic structure that lies behind them … “

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Is this Spiro Agnew uttering repressive complaints for the silent majority? No, these are extracts from thoughtful articles by liberals of the very subjects Agnew ponders.

“A” is by Yale graduate student Michael Lerner in the AMERICAN SCHOLAR, the journal of Phi Beta Kappa. “B” is from an editorial in the NEW YORK TIMES which usually sneers at Agnew. “C” came from TIME magazine which takes a haughty, provincial view of the vice president. “D” is by Charles Frankel, Columbia University Professor of Philosophy. “E” was written by Prof. William R. Butler of the University of Miami. “F” is part of an open letter by liberal writer Leo Rosten to a student activist. And “G” is by George F. Kennan, former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

The vice president says about the same things, with equal vigor, but catches hell from liberals who are horrified when the “other side” speaks up. Most liberal rhetoric these days is so boring that Americans, including rebellious and radicalized youth, turn themselves off to it.

The “kids” are listening to, but not liking, Agnew. The old liberals, whom the “kids” pay scant attention to, are greatly irritated by Agnew and are putting flabby intellects to work again. The vice president is doing everybody a service.