Irving Krystol - Conservative Blowhard

                                                                                                      Irving Krystol
                                                                                              Conservative Blowhard
                                                                                                           1920-2009

Neo-conservative Irving Krystol passed away last week, and not nearly soon enough to please this writer. If anyone exemplified an era of vacuous poseurs who have achieved notable status by blowing off a load of rubbishy old bollocks, it is Krystol, who never held a job in his life and based all his shopworn, middle-brow conclusions on a couple of unpleasant years he spent as an army inductee, where he came face-to-face with a reality of illiterate hillbilly conscripts whom he could not stand.

It takes a big man to develop an affection for the peasant classes. Count Leo Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Victor Hugo were all able to overlook their all-too-obvious defects and plumb the realities of their underlying nobility. It takes all kinds of people to build a world, not least those for whom tilling the soil, descending into a coal mine or manning our industrial complexes are ennobling acts. Because of their labor we enjoy an abundant cornucopia of exquisite comestibles on our tables and the power to generate our useless gadgets.

Closer to home, in America, we have had writers who were able to portray our working classes with the affection they so obviously merit. New York writer Mac Hyman was also drafted into the army, but he was able to transcend class and racial differences and write a hilarious novel based on his experiences called “No Time For Sergeants”, which became a hit Broadway play and one of the most hysterical movies ever made, starring Andy Griffith. This movie, which my mother dragged me to repeatedly as a kid, had both of us crying with laughter at every screening.

Mac Hyman, Victor Hugo and John Steinbeck will all live forever as long as humanity exists because they embraced the laboring classes with affection. Unlike the above, the only books Krystol ever produced were four collections of his homegrown neo-bloviations that should go down in history as notable doorstoppers or bathroom tissue surrogates.

My personal experiences with rural Southerners and Appalachians, for which I am grateful, stem from my adolescence, part of which I spent in Chicago. Forsaking the usual summer employment choices of working at McDonald’s or in retail stores, I sought industrial work in the factories located in the suburban industrial parks. The work was unpleasant and the conditions distressful, but it paid 2-3 times what I could make if I had stayed closer to home. Plus which, it was sort of daring.

One summer I obtained a job in a plastics factory that made celanoid alternators, which reverse the electrical current and perform functions like making windshield wipers go back-and-forth. The work was hot and repetitive, but at the end of the week I emerged rich, compared to other teenagers. The companionship was not exactly scintillating. The workers were migrants from rural Kentucky and Tennessee, and the conversation revolved strictly around stock car racing (this was when NASCAR was still an apple in Junior Johnson’s eye). When the other workers found out I was Jewish, they did not exactly embrace me like a long-lost relation. In a lot of cases they addressed me as “Hey, Jew!” So what! This is Chicago we are discussing. I don’t know what it is now, but back then there was no concept of political correctness. How do you think my father made his money, by sending out floral bouquets?

Anyway, now that these yahoos had a real Yankee Jew for an interlocutor, they exploited the occasion to air long-held grievances. “We hate your longhair music!” they informed me. I first thought they were talking about freakin Arturo Rubenstein and the Philharmonic, but they meant the Beatles, whose hair I considered not even long enough to discuss. What of it?

These guys had some peculiar dietary habits. One of them, Red, would eat a whole jar of jalapeño peppers for lunch and then, just to show he could take it, would chase them down with the scathingly hot pickle juice straight from the jar. He must have had an industrial-strength sphincter to go with his ventilator shaft of an esophagus. Sometimes we were allowed a five-minute bathroom break, during which the foreman, Blackie, would take our turn at the baking ovens. A lot of these guys used the break to buy cold hamburgers and hot dogs from the canteen vending machines and then eat them without first heating them in the microwave because time would not allow.

In order to economize, instead of using Brylcreem to slick back their elaborate pompadours or duck’s ass hairstyles, these guys would just grab a handful of the hot machine grease that lubricated the pneumatic heat presses and comb it into their locks.

And don’t bend over! A lot of them, even though they all had nasty wives and a whole passel of kids to support, were not immune to the charms of each other’s backsides. There were a couple of flagrantly gay men in the place, but not the stereotypical guys that you meet on Saturday night in the Jackhammer Bar in Chelsea. These guys were hugely muscular and tough, and their brute force and strength commanded respect even in the homophobic environment of the factory floor, hypocritically so, as I pointed out, where guys would gladly cornhole each other for lack of any alternative romantic interest.

Their attitude toward military service was just as basic and hard-bitten. To a man, they expressed a preference for serving in the infantry. “My daddy was in the infantry and his daddy before him, all the way back to the War Between the States”, was the unanimous mantra. This was a big eye-opener for me because the guys in my neighborhood all wanted to become big shots in the Navy or Air Force jet pilots. This willingness to gladly absorb all the hard work and punishment of a ground campaign, I considered their most noble characteristic.

Not too charming, OK? These experiences, combined with a couple of unfortunate military schools I was forced to attend as a kid from a dysfunctional family background, alerted me to the hazards of military service, not so much from a fear of combat but from what I could expect from my own side! This was an era when there was too much fun to be had in the world, wild women and abundant drugs, and I wasn’t inclined to consign myself to military service, so I didn’t.

Unlike Irving Krystol, however, I didn’t allow these brushes with the sub proletariat to color my lifelong attitudes toward the laboring classes. Far from it. I developed a love of country music and car racing which later on, when I went to university, informed my love of folk music, blues and gospel. Even today, after seeing a fair part of the world, if I meet people from the red states, politics aside, I am able to touch on common points of conversation and humor. Unfortunately, my wrath is reserved for the arriviste, social climbing attitudes of the urban middle class, which I find ghastly.

And Irving Krystol’s relentlessly petty bourgeois disdain for the working class, which he developed from being pushed around in the army, spread to middle class elements that were sympathetic to them. He basically hated any kind of social reformers. He teamed up with the unfortunately named Gertrude Himmelfarb (it sound like Dr. Ruth, only without the sex), who wanted to drag society back into the abject misery of the Victorian era, and together they formed a kind of Marvel Comics team of reactionary superheros whose goal was to stymie any kind of social evolutionary progress in America. And they succeeded not only in that, but between the two of them they seduced enough wealthy suckers that nobody in their family has ever had to lift a hand to produce a single day’s productive labor.

Opinions he never lacked. While his wife was studying at Cambridge on (what else?) a grant, Krystol teamed up with the CIA to produce the reactionary journals Commentary and Encounter. When later confronted about his CIA financing his response was, “So what?”

Look, if the CIA were to offer me funding for one of my pet projects, like a journal on bestiality practices in the French Republic, don’t you think I would accept the money? Of course I would! But it’s doubtful they would advance me such a proposition. Fortunately for Krystol, his agenda and that of the CIA coincided perfectly.

Later on Krystal established other such useless organs with names like The Public Interest and The National Interest, and he became an editorial opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal. A bunch of crap if you ask me.

The abysmal aspect of the whole thing is that Krystol claimed to be a reformed Marxist based on the fact that he called himself a Trotskyite when he was a juvenile student in college. Purges or a civil war he never experienced. He turned on the left because some hillbilly probably knocked him on his ass in a fistfight behind an army barracks.

Anyway, now he’s gone and good riddance, only he’s left behind a plague in the form of a son, William Krystol, who has taken over the family business of expounding useless, unintelligible neo-conservative positions that don’t have any grounding in real experience, and whose only realistic result would seem to be to keep the funding rolling in.

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Posted on 9/27/2009 ( Permanent Link )
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