Zapping the Spittle Zone

Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment By Kirkpatrick Sale Random House, 362 pp., $12.95 Philosophically and aesthetically, Power Shift is a negligible book. It has none of the solidity and comprehensiveness of another Sale opus—SDS, the history of that unsavory alphabet society—and some of its defects, most particularly a crippling refusal to engage in pragmatic empathy with the unconverted, which bars its author from making sense of the great American political divides. Unhappily, what new lessons in the art of bookwriting Sale has learned since 1973, his previous pub date, turn out to have been meretricious. In tone Power Shift is at once journalistically slick and radically “authentic”; it drops many a cliché and indulges in numerous stylistic gimmickries; and it represents the fantastic simplification of an already simple proposition that is not even original to Kirkpatrick Sale. Most of what Sale has to say has been said before: the intelligent parts by Kevin Phillips, the unintelligent parts (devoted mostly to the perversions of a certain decayed golfer and friends at Rancho La Costa Country Club) by the worst people’s worst columnists and anchormen. Power Shift is another excellent indication that the recent “no-growth” philosophy is as applicable to publishing as to California: its development ought to have been terminated when it reached the rosy amplitude of a bouncing magazine article.

Simply put—there is no other way to state it—Sale’s thesis is that the Southern Rim, “the broad band of America that stretches from Southern California through the Southwest and Texas, into the Deep South and down to Florida,” has since 1945 been the principal and unfailing beneficiary of the predominant trends—demographic, economic, and political—prevailing in the United States. Nourished by the tiger’s milk of an imperial economy, the Rim has attained to power and to an influence so overweening as to allow it first to challenge and then to dominate—through the Nixon Administration, its most poisonously succulent fruit—the traditional Northeastern Establishment. Sale describes the southward shifting of the population toward a climate fit for suckling brats and cranky septuagenarians; he describes how certain favorable geographic factors (most especially, an abundance of physical space) have caused many new industries (particularly the technological, aerospace, and defense industries) to birth themselves within the Rim; he describes the (to him) Byzantine favors, mainly pecuniary, that Congress lavishes upon these industries in return for the protection of the country against the machinations of Russian polytechnic grads; the offers of encouragement to the oil and natural gas industries and “agribusiness,” all of which keep the United States supplied with things that make even socialists happy; and the gradual ascendancy of the “Rimians” on Capitol Hill, as well as the multiplying possibilities available to them for the extension of the sway of their Weltanschauung over the rest of us.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment By Kirkpatrick Sale Random House, 362 pp., $12.95 Philosophically and aesthetically, Power Shift is a negligible book. It has none of the solidity and comprehensiveness of another Sale opus—SDS, the history of that unsavory alphabet society—and some of its defects, most particularly a crippling refusal to engage in pragmatic empathy with the unconverted, which bars its author from making sense of the great American political divides. Unhappily, what new lessons in the art of bookwriting Sale has learned since 1973, his previous pub date, turn out to have been meretricious. In tone Power Shift is at once journalistically slick and radically “authentic”; it drops many a cliché and indulges in numerous stylistic gimmickries; and it represents the fantastic simplification of an already simple proposition that is not even original to Kirkpatrick Sale. Most of what Sale has to say has been said before: the intelligent parts by Kevin Phillips, the unintelligent parts (devoted mostly to the perversions of a certain decayed golfer and friends at Rancho La Costa Country Club) by the worst people’s worst columnists and anchormen. Power Shift is another excellent indication that the recent “no-growth” philosophy is as applicable to publishing as to California: its development ought to have been terminated when it reached the rosy amplitude of a bouncing magazine article.

Simply put—there is no other way to state it—Sale’s thesis is that the Southern Rim, “the broad band of America that stretches from Southern California through the Southwest and Texas, into the Deep South and down to Florida,” has since 1945 been the principal and unfailing beneficiary of the predominant trends—demographic, economic, and political—prevailing in the United States. Nourished by the tiger’s milk of an imperial economy, the Rim has attained to power and to an influence so overweening as to allow it first to challenge and then to dominate—through the Nixon Administration, its most poisonously succulent fruit—the traditional Northeastern Establishment. Sale describes the southward shifting of the population toward a climate fit for suckling brats and cranky septuagenarians; he describes how certain favorable geographic factors (most especially, an abundance of physical space) have caused many new industries (particularly the technological, aerospace, and defense industries) to birth themselves within the Rim; he describes the (to him) Byzantine favors, mainly pecuniary, that Congress lavishes upon these industries in return for the protection of the country against the machinations of Russian polytechnic grads; the offers of encouragement to the oil and natural gas industries and “agribusiness,” all of which keep the United States supplied with things that make even socialists happy; and the gradual ascendancy of the “Rimians” on Capitol Hill, as well as the multiplying possibilities available to them for the extension of the sway of their Weltanschauung over the rest of us.