The Week

Senator Eugene McCarthy came to New York last week to introduce the Greek poet and Nobel laureate, Giorgios Seferis, at a poetry-reading. The Senator divulged that Mr. Seferis’s verse had comforted him during his campaign for the Presidential nomination. He mentioned especially the poem, “Three Mules,” which has to do with 1) a queen who is in a 2) cart drawn by 3) three (3) mules. Item #2 collapses. Senator McCarthy’s exegesis contends that the McCarthy Queen came to grief in the Primary Campaign Cart because, well, the cart was carrying the will of God, which is a crushing burden etaoin etaoin. So here’s Senator McCarthy confusing himself with a queen, or the will of God, or three asses. The whole damn poem probably loses something in translation.

George F. Kennan made the mistake of speaking seriously to the gaggle of global intellectuals brought together, courtesy of the Ford Foundation, by the International Association for Cultural Freedom. (See On the Right.) (“His audience did not seem particularly receptive to his diagnoses,” underplayed the New York Times reporter, noting that said audience “to which he spoke after dinner at the Princeton Inn was,” in a word, “liberal.”) Two samples will suggest the credibility gap between speaker and listener that evening: 1) “The great conceptual gap between the established outlooks of our great society and the hopeful approach to the solution of some of our greatest problems… is a gap which is not likely to be filled either by the traditional postulates of American liberalism or by the angry, flamboyant demands of students mobs and black militants.” 2) “I personally am satisfied that there will have to be, for the great majority of black people, a stage of voluntary separate development and local self-government to be lived through before we can hope to achieve a satisfactory relationship of the American Negro to the rest of the body politic. Until he finds his identity collectively, he will not, I fear, find it individually, and until he finds it he will not be able to relate to the rest of us on what he feels to be terms of equality.” ‘‘Separate development!” Imagine if Spiro Agnew had said that!

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Senator Eugene McCarthy came to New York last week to introduce the Greek poet and Nobel laureate, Giorgios Seferis, at a poetry-reading. The Senator divulged that Mr. Seferis’s verse had comforted him during his campaign for the Presidential nomination. He mentioned especially the poem, “Three Mules,” which has to do with 1) a queen who is in a 2) cart drawn by 3) three (3) mules. Item #2 collapses. Senator McCarthy’s exegesis contends that the McCarthy Queen came to grief in the Primary Campaign Cart because, well, the cart was carrying the will of God, which is a crushing burden etaoin etaoin. So here’s Senator McCarthy confusing himself with a queen, or the will of God, or three asses. The whole damn poem probably loses something in translation.

George F. Kennan made the mistake of speaking seriously to the gaggle of global intellectuals brought together, courtesy of the Ford Foundation, by the International Association for Cultural Freedom. (See On the Right.) (“His audience did not seem particularly receptive to his diagnoses,” underplayed the New York Times reporter, noting that said audience “to which he spoke after dinner at the Princeton Inn was,” in a word, “liberal.”) Two samples will suggest the credibility gap between speaker and listener that evening: 1) “The great conceptual gap between the established outlooks of our great society and the hopeful approach to the solution of some of our greatest problems… is a gap which is not likely to be filled either by the traditional postulates of American liberalism or by the angry, flamboyant demands of students mobs and black militants.” 2) “I personally am satisfied that there will have to be, for the great majority of black people, a stage of voluntary separate development and local self-government to be lived through before we can hope to achieve a satisfactory relationship of the American Negro to the rest of the body politic. Until he finds his identity collectively, he will not, I fear, find it individually, and until he finds it he will not be able to relate to the rest of us on what he feels to be terms of equality.” ‘‘Separate development!” Imagine if Spiro Agnew had said that!