Nicholas Stix, Uncensored: Classic Sobran: Good Night, Sweet Prince

Friday, June 28, 2019

Classic Sobran: Good Night, Sweet Prince

-----Original Message-----
From: Fran Griffin of Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation <publishing@fgfbooks.com>
To: add1dda <add1dda@aol.com>
Sent: Thu, Jun 27, 2019 4:15 pm
Subject: Sobran op-ed: Good Night, Sweet Prince

N.S.: Philip Nicolaides died on June 25, 1994. Joe Sobran wrote this column immediately following Nicolaides' death.

I crossed paths with Joe Sobran once. He graciously shared a tiny bar table with me in D.C.'s National Press Building in January 2007, during a one-day conference celebrating the life and work of Sam Francis. (Although from 1992-1998 I was a freelance contributor to Chronicles magazine, where Francis was a regular contributor, I never had any dealings with him.)

I didn't recognize Sobran from his pictures, because his hair had gone from dark to a dusty gray, and only half of him appeared. (One of the speakers made the same quip about Francis who, near the end, had lost over 100 pounds on the Atkins Diet.)

Sobran told me he'd lost the weight through a cereal diet--he ate cereal all day long. I tried the diet, but didn't lose a pound. Cereal with pork chops, cereal with hamburgers, cereal with steak. Cereal, cereal, cereal!

He died on September 30, 2010. The sugar got him.

Ann Coulter and Joe were very close friends.

Phil Nicolaides, a tribute:

Publisher's Note: Philip Nicolaides, the former deputy director of Voice of America, was instrumental in the founding of the newsletter Sobran's: The Real News of the Month; and of the 1990 Committee to Avert a Mideast Holocaust. He was a colleague and close friend of Joe Sobran's. Here is Joe's tribute to him.

Good Night, Sweet Prince

by Joe Sobran

Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation

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Subtracting Christianity: Essays on American Culture and Society (FGF Books, 2015) -- Phil Nicolaides made national headlines only once. In 1981, as Ronald Reagan's deputy director of the Voice of America, he urged the VOA to push pro-American and anti-Soviet propaganda. He used the word "propaganda," too, because, knowing Latin as he did, he knew what it meant: things to be propagated. But the word scandalized the media, and there was a big uproar, and Phil was forced to resign.

Was he bitter? I'll tell you how hard he took it. During the talk radio debate on whether he should resign, Phil called a local station anonymously, using one of his dozens of fake foreign accents, and vocally disguised as a Russian refugee from Communism, vigorously defended himself in the third person. He and his friends thought it was a howl.

If there was humor in any situation, Phil was the man not only to find it but to magnify it to hilarious dimensions. I can't really describe him, but he was, to put it very pedantically, the functional equivalent of Sir John Falstaff. Think of a Falstaff who had gone straight, studied Aquinas, and retained his sense of humor and imagination, giving a wonderful twinkle to every occasion, and you've got at least the faint idea of Phil.

Phil shocked us all last week by dying. It wasn't like him. True, he'd had heart surgery years ago, hadn't taken care of himself, had resumed his Falstaffian dimensions, and then got cancer and went into surgery Friday. But that hardly seemed sufficient to extinguish such a merry flame as Phil's.

I went to see him, for what turned out to be the last time, a couple of hours before the operation, with my seven-year-old. Phil was already groggy from the drugs they'd pumped into him, but even on his back he couldn't resist clowning for Joey, contorting his athletic eyebrows, crossing his eyes, and sticking his tongue out sideways. A few hours later I got the bad news.

I keep hoping this is just one of his pranks, like the time he collected a debt for a friend by phoning the delinquent in an ominously raspy voice and, affecting to struggle with big words a la Luca Brasi, mumbled: "A man oughta meet his, whaddya call 'em, business obligations, know what I'm sayin'?" Next day, debt paid.

Mimicry was one of Phil's roughly forty talents. At one time he'd been an actor, understudying George C. Scott's Richard III and occasionally stepping into the part himself. He was a splendid singer, a gifted artist, a pianist, a linguist, a wit, all in all the most charming, entertaining, talented man most of his friends (including me) had ever met.

And even that doesn't begin to do justice to him. He was a brilliant thinker and teacher. And just a sweet man. He'd been voted teacher of the year once by the students at Fordham University, where he'd taught philosophy and psychology. He and children warmed to each other right away, and he had a way of explaining things to them vividly, tenderly, amusingly, at their own level, whether they were small children or adolescents.

Gee, he was fun. Every minute. His mind was like an otter, always enjoying its own vast energy and savoring its freedom of movement, finding humor even in abstract ideas. A typical witticism was his quip about a pro-abortion Catholic politician of loose morals: "His religion is so private he won't even impose it on himself."

Phil had courage, too, though he never called attention to it. He broke with other conservatives over the Gulf War and, probably as a result, lost his current job soon afterward.