A Call for a New McCarthyism
O'Rourke, P. J.
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 22, NO. 7 / JULY 1989 P. J. O'Rourke A CALL FOR A NEW McCARTHYISM Why should the likes of Alexander Cockburn be allowed to remain in America? O ur era is supposed to...
...NY) Rep Gus Savage (D...
...I was in South Africa myself a few years ago, and I'm almost certain that was Jessica Mitford singing back-up for Frank Sinatra at Sun City...
...And fellow travelers in the State Department...
...Put some Sandalista on your blacklist and you probably guarantee him a MacArthur Genius Grant and a seat on the ACLU national board of directors...
...O ur era is supposed to be the 1950s all over again...
...Or maybe we can't...
...The Order of Maryknoll Nuns Amy Carter Susan Sarandon The Redgrave family Patty Duke Casey Kasem Daniel and Philip Berrigan (Yes, they're still alive, too...
...There are more fuzzy-minded one-worlders, pasty-faced peace creeps, and bleeding-heart bed-wetters in America now than there ever were in 1954...
...Who's our Tailgunner Joe...
...Instead, we hang on their every word, beg them to work, drag them onto all available TV and radio chat shows, and write hundreds of fawning newspaper and magazine articles about their wonderful swellness...
...Box 10448, Arlington, VA 22210...
...Martin Sheen Charlie Sheen The rest of the Sheen family plus Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, and all the other Brat Pack members (Which brings to mind another idea for a modified blacklist—this list would require left-wingers to write movie scripts, but only for Brat Pack movies...
...As a matter of fact, it's your patriotic duty to do so...
...Ralph Nader Anthony Lewis William "The Client Is Obviously Guilty" Kunstler Jackson BrowneAllen Ginsberg Norman Lear Meryl Streep Peter, Paul and Mary (Yes, they're still alive...
...And the next Tracy Chapman album will get an "SML" with oak leaf cluster...
...Let's make this a bloodbath—well, a phlegm and bile bath anyway...
...The English Department at Duke The Law School at Harvard The Liberal Arts Faculty at Stanford Any educator using the term "Eurocentric" (While we're at it, let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools—and use it on the teachers...
...MA) Rep Gerry Studds (D...
...Good luck to the Patrice Lumumba University Class of '89...
...Indeed, we are experiencing anew many of the pleasures and benefits of that excellent decade: a salubrious prudery, a sensible avariciousness, a healthy dose of social conformity, a much-needed narrowing of minds, and a return to common-sense American political troglodytism...
...And let's not forget that most subversive of all organizations in America, the American government: Sen...
...Academia, too, is a veritable compost heap of Bolshie brain-mulch...
...IL) And from Michigan—an improbable place to find a nest of jacobin nogoodniks—these Not-The-Reagan-Democrats: Rep George Crockett Rep David Bonior Rep John Conyers And that's just a beginning...
...We elected him to Congress...
...IA) Sen...
...But maybe we can tear a page from the Tres Riches Heures of Tipper Gore and insist upon a rating system for music, film, television, and the Boston Globe editorial page...
...Beardo the Weirdo may have been laughed out of real life during the 1970s, but he found a home in our nation's colleges where he whiles away the wait for Woodstock Nation II by pestering undergraduates with collectivist twaddle when they should be thinking about better car stereos...
...But there's one delightful and entertaining feature of the Eisenhower years which is wholly absent from the contemporary scene—old-fashioned redbaiting...
...If we hope to wreck careers, destroy reputations, and drive holistic Ortega fans into exile in Sausalito and Amherst, we're going to need tactics very different from those used by Roy Cohn, Bobby Kennedy, and the distinguished senator from the great state famous for its La Follette and cheese...
...The Christic Institute Common Cause Center for Constitutional Rights Anybody whose last name is Cockburn Anybody who inherited so much money and so little sense that her last name might become Cockburn Cockburn Wannabe Christopher Hitchens (Who's checking the Green Cards around here...
...For one thing, it's no use going after real, card-carrying Communists anymore...
...We don't prevent them from writing, speaking, performing, and otherwise being their usual nuisance selves...
...As for the animal rights activists, we can turn some animals loose on them later...
...And come to think of it, there are other problems with an up-to-date nineties-style witch-hunt...
...Mike Farrell Tikkun The Progressive Paul Weyrich Kevin Phillips Barbara Walters Richard Cohen Bryant Gumbel Al Hunt David Broder The New York Review of Books The New York Times Book Review That poor man's Walt Kelly, Garry Trudeau That poor man's Garry Trudeau, Berke Breathed Herblock Managua's Herblock, Paul Conrad Manhattan's Borough President, David Dinkins The National Resource Defense Council Lawyers Guild The D.C...
...Even Margaret Thatcher says she sympathizes with Ole Splotch Top...
...CA) Rep...
...P 1 O'Rourke, investigative humorist for Rolling Stone, is author of Republican Party Reptile and Holidays in Hell, both published by Atlantic Monthly Press...
...nyway, I'm sure we'll find some way to chastise these buggers of sense, to bully, torment, harry them, and generally make a workers' paradise of their lives...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 15...
...N o, a modern McCarthyism is go- ing to have to concentrate on other things besides the Big Lie and the Red Menace...
...The distinguishing feature of this cluster of dunces is not subversion but silliness...
...A warning would have to be prominently displayed: "OH-OH, A PERSON INVOLVED WITH THIS UNAPPEALING ITEM OF MASS COMMUNICATION HOLDS SILLY OPINIONS ON MATTERS ABOUT WHICH HE OR SHE IS LARGELY OR ABYSMALLY UNINFORMED...
...Salman Rushdie (Kick 'em when they're down is what I say...
...If it's stupidity, we're really in trouble...
...Barbara Mikulski (D...
...MA) Sen...
...The police have been having a rough time lately, what with crack and Miranda rights...
...If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert, and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography...
...he was on God's list...
...Where's our McCarthyism...
...Or perhaps we can direct the wrath of the remarkably terrifying animal rights activists against them...
...Nobody is ever going to accuse us of being thoughtpolice for going after the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Phil Donahue, Mario Thomas, Dr...
...In the meantime, the fun part of McCarthyism is, as it always was, writing out the enemies list...
...At the very least, "Red Scare—The Sequel" will rile the lefties and get them out demonstrating again so policemen can hit them on the head...
...God knows the problem is not a lack of Commies...
...A "blacklist" will never work...
...The redskis have infiltrated the all-important exercise video industry, not to mention movies and TV...
...If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert, and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography...
...Besides, I'm sure he'd much rather have a reputation for evil than the reputation he's got now...
...They need some fun...
...We have to come up with more clever ways to ruin these people...
...MD) Rep...
...John Kerry (D...
...And one other great good will have been accomplished...
...Still, it's worth a try...
...Who's keeping I Led Three Lives from being remade starring Tom Selleck and Arnold Schwarzenegger...
...Why don't we get to look for Communists under our beds or—considering the social changes of the past thirty-five years—in them...
...What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity...
...So how come the HUAC staff isn't returning my phone calls...
...And if McCarthyism isn't good for settling grudges, what is it good for...
...In other words, we subject them to the monstrous, gross, and irreversible late twentieth-century phenomenon of Media Over-Exposure so that a surfeited public rebels in disgust...
...Heh-heh: Sting Gore Vidal The Institute for Policy Studies Tom Hayden (Hope you don't give Jane your ideals in the divorce settlement, Tom...
...Barbara Boxer (D...
...No, this isn't going to work either...
...Good night, Honey, and are you now or have you ever been a member of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador...
...Any public pronouncement by a member of the innumerable Phoenix family, such as River, Leaf, Summer, Stump, Ditch, or Pond Scum Phoenix, would get a "VS" rating...
...I'm going to write a letter to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals about how Susan Sontag allows her ideas to be tried on innocent laboratory rabbits before humans are exposed to them...
...In fact, if we examine even a brief selection of people who should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail (or, to be more contemporary, oat branned and goose downed and jogged out of the condominium complex on an exercise track), we see that they are not necessarily Marxist or even socialist in their thinking because that would presuppose thinking in the first place...
...We will have found a job for J. Danforth Quayle...
...There'd be three ratings: S = Silly VS = Very Silly SML = Shirley MacLaine Thus a rerun of "M*A*S*H" featuring Alan Alda would get an "S" rating...
...Jeez, the situation is so bad at Foggy Bottom that we'd better hope it's caused by spies...
...And when it comes to the International Communist Conspiracy to Enslave Europe, Asia, and the Third World—well, somebody's got to do something with those people...
...You can't shame or humiliate modern 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 celebrities...
...Whoops, we already did that...
...Perhaps we can spread rumors that they performed in South Africa...
...Maybe we can reconquer our body politic...
...Statehood Party Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Peter Clavelle The Berkeley City Council Berkeley Mother Jones The Nation The Village Voice Any organization with "Peace" in its name Donald Trump (Okay, so he's not a real pinko, but I don't like him...
...Victor Navasky Angela Davis William Sloane Coffin Noam Chomsky Abbie Hoffman (I guess we can cross him off...
...The address: The New Enemies List, clo TAS, P.O...
...Hard-core party apparatchiks are already being persecuted by organizations more brutally efficient than anything we've got in the U.S., organizations such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China...
...It might all backfire the way the splendid fifties backfired and led to the wretched and unspeakable sixties...
...MA)Rep Ted Weiss (D...
...Pete Stark (D...
...Benjamin Spock, Yoko Ono, Dave Dellinger, Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, the World Council of Churches, Ed Asner, Michelle Shocked, Lenora Fulani, Robert Redford, and people who think quartz crystals cure herpes...
...Maybe we can sweep the ideologically homeless from the streets of our Shining City on a Hill...
...Tom Harkin (D...
...This is the Burt Reynolds/Loni Anderson treatment, and, for condemning people to obscurity, it beats the Smith Act hollow...
...He's the perfect point man for Nouvelle McCarthyism, a Senator Joe Lite if ever there was one...
...But the worst punishment for dupes, pink-wieners, and dialectical immaterialists might be a kind of reverse blacklist...
...TAS readers are invited to submit their own suggestions—and lots of them...
...Plus, accusing somebody of being a "comsymp" just isn't the same since Gorbachev began his three-hankie perestroika performance...
...CA) Rep Ed Markey (D...
...And why aren't we making sure that that Fidel-snuggler Ron Dellums never works again...
...And forget traditional character assassination...
Vol. 22 • July 1989 • No. 7
