WHO'S AFRAID OF 19847: The Case for Optimism

This attack on ""the Doomsday International"" sights some important targets but abstains from drawing blood. A spokesman for the Libertarian Party, Tuccille finds genuine blackguards in his pie -- Paul Kurtz of The Humanist, who suggests that urban Negroes are superfluous: the Paddock brothers, who call for massive triage in the Third World; and, further back, Adolf Bede, the New Republic, and others who ""openly admired Mussolini's fascist plan."" However, Tuccille's rebuttal of the cupboard-is-bare Club of Rome austerity advocates amounts to a merely manic defense of technology (all brought to us by Jeffersonian ideals and private enterprise). Tuccille states that the earth can double its arable land and vastly increase agricultural yields, that nuclear fusion power can bring necessary energy within ten years -- but he makes no serious proposals how. Instead he submits a fleeting fantasy about cities in the ocean, and ends with rhetoric worthy of his corporatist opponents about how ""World peace now seems assured. Universal freedom is all but inevitable."" Tuccille's Panglossing discredits his own views and confirms the impression that the Right is a bunch of irredeemable nuts. For the conservative readership, he provides enough slams against Margaret Mead, Noam Chomsky, et al., to make the book credible as a partisan contribution. But depth is avoided and many bedcovers remain unturned. A pseudo-philippic.