Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Horrors It is with more than mild astonishment that one comes across a rave review of Andrea Dworkin's latest ravings in The American Spectator (January 1990), of all places. Having...
...Let the socialists claim him...
...He also thought that Hitler and Stalin had the same thing for brains, but he is still not absolved...
...Let me assure Mr...
...King fails to point out that there is a crucial difference in the reasons for feminist and conservative opposition to pornography...
...Far from professing such an untruth, I have been called "Fascist Flossie" and "Ku Klux King" by former employees of the late and unlamented Ms...
...Dworkin, in Ms...
...King's encomium, "rises to Boudicean heights of dignity and fighting spirit...
...The secret is knowing which to keep and which to throw away...
...A better approach, of course, would be to relegate the Spectator's resident feminist to the back page, where she can enjoy the company of her idol, and which has momentarily invaded the rest of the magazine...
...Not content with this perfidy, however, Mr...
...My only other contribution was a three-inch squib in the Christmas book recommendations last December...
...George" Orwell (TAS, December 1989...
...But the dichotomy between idealism and realism that Robert Stowe England (in "Coming to Terms With Campaign Reform," TAS, November 1989) uses to make us seem like impractical dreamers is a false one...
...Hatch has endorsed, would hand over more of our hard-earned money to America's premier abortion provider (Planned Parenthood), provide funds for developing and marketing RU-486 (the (continued on page 41) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 7 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) abortion pill), require Title X recipients to treat abortion as just another birth control option, and fund more school-based sex clinics (where minor children can get free contraceptives, pregnancy tests, and abortion referrals without parental knowledge or consent...
...Were there an Anti-Defamation League for men, Andrea Dworkin would keep it busy single-handed...
...Nicholas Davidson Author...
...Why stop at showering fulsome encomiums on the delectable Ms...
...Marty Jezer Study Group on Electoral Democracy Deerfield, Massachusetts Robert Stowe England replies: When I divided the non-partisan views on campaign finance into idealists and realists, I was not attempting to make one side appear to be all right and the other all wrong, or even one naive and the other one wise...
...But for him to leap to the conclusion that all opponents of the CFR (including Barry Goldwater) are morons is equally childish and unbecoming...
...Time makes more converts than reason...
...Well, the guy was a socialist...
...but an absence of idealism does not then make them into realists...
...Is Mr...
...There is a very good reason why publications, including left-liberal ones, should refuse to publish Dworkin: her stock-intrade is to describe the male sex in terms that make Hitler's characterizations of Jews look respectable and rational...
...Congress, of course, is not likely to legislate meaningful reform without the heat of grassroots pressure...
...In which case the Spectator's editors will undergo the politically maturing experience of seeing their country's name spelled "Amerika" (Ms...
...magazine, and I am the only woman in America to have been called a necrophiliac by NOW...
...Felix Unger thinks it's fun to be neat...
...There's no way around it...
...It all goes far beyond the New York Times Book Review's nominally favorable but rather disgusted review of the same book, whose author was content to praise Ms...
...The resulting crisis—a crisis because more than half of the electorate no longer believes it worthwhile to vote—cannot be addressed by partial (and usually partisan) piece-meal reform...
...But the tumult soon subsides...
...And who, presumably, deserves that of the Spectator's readers as well...
...Both have something to bring to the public debate...
...But Ms...
...Caldwell's plaintive tone...
...Tinkering with the system creates new loopholes as old ones are plugged, as most tinkerers cynically know...
...Dworkin's invariable orthography) in the Spectator's own pages...
...Davidson's letter sounds so much like the.hysterical polemic of a typical Women's Libber that I lost the thread of his argument somewhere around the middle...
...is dead, but The American Spectator is ready to take up the slack...
...But there is absolutely no contradiction contained therein...
...People can be educated to understand how moneyed interests dominate the electoral process and, by doing so, impinge on their own opportunities for political influence and a better life...
...Hatch—as if striving to prove to skeptics on the left how genuine are his new-found compassion and enlightenment—has joined forces with Teddy Kennedy in an attempt to throw more taxpayer money at Title X, the federal "family planning" program that has proved to be such a spectacular failure at curbing teenage pregnancy, abortion, and illegitimacy...
...If you read hi§ essays and letters, instead of other people's books about him, it's obvious...
...that is, our system of democratic representation in Congress is being destroyed by the present financing scheme...
...I think it's fun to be fair...
...King be the only feminist to write for a conservative publication...
...Dworkin as "idealistic...
...King goes on to express outrage that Dworkin has been subjected to "censorship" in the liberal media, as if this were some kind of rare event (George Gilder, please call home...
...Those who believe that we can continue to allow moneyed interests to run roughshod over our electoral system without suffering grave consequences to our political stability do not understand the inexorable processes of political change and underestimate the power of the democratic idea now sweeping the world...
...Tom Paine would have called such folk wisdom common sense...
...Lucy Rudenborg Menomonie, Wisconsin Orwell the Socialist It pains me greatly to inflict upon these pages a letter of scant humor, but I am moved to write by Christopher Caldwell's review of John Rodden's book The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of -St...
...Thanks to Women's Libbers, today's men are so pussy-whipped that if they had been on the Titanic, they would have apologized for damage to the iceberg...
...Dworkin has become "conservative" but just doesn't know it yet...
...Tyrrell, of course, is entitled to belong to any organization he wishes...
...The story is too long to go into, but you must admit I have achieved a first...
...The aspiration for democratic participation that is now invigorating the political cultures of totalitarian countries of both the left and the right draws inspiration from our own past struggles for democratic reform...
...As for sexual equality, I've had wimp and I've had macho, and macho is better...
...Like the Libbers, he seems to have a propensity for the logical fallacy known, I believe, as "post hockey, ergo propter hockey...
...King's Boudicean peroration points to no less an honor...
...According to Ms...
...These realists are by no means opposed to campaign finance reform, as Marty Jezer suggests, but they do have a healthy fear of change that makes them sound as if they oppose genuine reform...
...conservatives who oppose pornography do so because it encourages socially corrosive forms of sexuality...
...This means imposing limits in some places, and removing limits in others...
...Indeed, Orwell said many things about Communists, socialists, feminists, and National Socialists that neoconservatives could agree with, as well as some things that they shouldn't...
...It isn't only that the American political system is becoming less competitive, as England states (while the idea of political competition and diversity is growing in strength everywhere else...
...Maybe in a few years they'll be claiming Elliott Abrams...
...Tyrrell's case turns on establishing a false dichotomy (either you are serious about foreign affairs, in which case you recognize the superior wisdom of the Council on Foreign Relations, or you are not, in which case you are a reactionary peckerwood or left-wing hippie...
...And suppose I'm completely out to lunch on this and he wasn't occasionally misguided—so what...
...he is perfectly right in describing those who demand his public recantation as coercive imbeciles...
...There is much more in the same vein...
...So I don't understand Mr...
...First, he does not know the difference between a rave review and a mixed review...
...In striving for' the rebirth of the American democracy, I believe we should listen to what the hard-nosed realists are saying when we put together a reform package...
...With due respect for James Madison's political acumen, Tom Paine is a more appropriate inspiration given the crisis in our democratic system...
...Having taken pity, evidently, on writers left unemployed by the death of Ms...
...Feminists who oppose pornography do so out of antagonism to masculinity and femininity, normal heterosexuality being their actual target (Dworkin describes intercourse as a "scarring, hurting, jagged edge of pain and grief...
...Many thanks to Tom Bethell—one of the finest journalists in the English-speaking world—for alerting American Spectator readers (particularly those registered to vote in the state of Utah) to Senator Hatch's treason...
...Finn Poschmann Ottawa, Ontario Dreams and Schemes We acknowledge the idealism in our goal to root out the anti-democratic influence that Big Money exercises over the American electoral system...
...As he wrote in Common Sense, "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom...
...Dworkin's career, all this is (to put it mildly) somewhat problematic...
...So it is quite likely that Orwell would get along with Norman Podhoretz and his friends—there are many road-crossers in the neoconservative camp and they are of necessity forgiving of past transgressions...
...Nevertheless, let feminists not despair: Ms...
...Second, he identifies me as TAS's "resident feminist" and "frequent contributor...
...The Failure of Feminism New York...
...Third, he calls me a "self-professed feminist...
...King, by opposing pornography, Ms...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 41...
...Also of significance is the fact that Fat Cats, PACs, bundlers, and fund-raisers have become power brokers like the party bosses of old, pre-selecting candidates, shaping policy, and determining the ideological limits of public debate...
...Clearly, Ms...
...The downright reasonableness of Orwell is evident throughout his writing, and it is easy to imagine him being popular with a number of crowdsespecially the Radical Society, which Tom Bethell wrote about in the December number as well...
...Michael S. Lofgren Alexandria, Virginia Down the Hatch Surely no one in Washington deserves a Strange New Respect Award more than Orrin Hatch (see Tom Bethell's "Communists Shoot People, Don't They...
...Tyrrell there are some of us whose domestic accoutrements include neither motorcycle parts in the drawing room nor FMLN posters in the study, who are yet dubious about the bona fides of the CFR...
...magazine, the Spectator now features self-professed feminist Florence King as a frequent contributor...
...Even if Orwell was a socialist, it's okay to like him...
...I believe in absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings, and define democracy as the crude leading the crud...
...Sure, Dworkin opposes pornography, on the grounds that it "exploitswomen" (antipornography feminists being singularly blind to the prevalence of homosexual, masochistic, and pedophilic pornography...
...I must have missed some issues because the Dworkin review was my first full-length piece in TAS...
...The realists are right on another score: reform schemes perform differently in practice than in theory...
...As for the hundreds of millions of dollars that it would cost to totally finance all congressional and presidential elections, that would represent a savings to the ordinary taxpayer when compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars in bail-outs, tax-breaks, subsidies, regulatory exemptions, and other forms of special interest legislation that the moneyed interests gain for themselves...
...Thus, feminist definitions of pornography are so sweeping that in a major decision upheld by the Supreme Court in 1986, a federal appeals court struck down the antipornography law promoted by Dworkin's organization as a form of "thought control" that would place "the government in control of all the institutions of culture, the great censor and director of which thoughts are good for us...
...Kennedy's proposed legislation, which Mr...
...This is not protected speech, but the ravings of a lunatic...
...England closes his article with an appeal for Madison-like moderation...
...They, in fact, would like a better system, too, but are afraid the reformers will make it worse, as they did in 1974...
...Corrupting patterns of campaign finance have an impact on every public policy area...
...Now, to anyone who has followed Ms...
...I am prouder of that Dworkin review than anything I've written in eight years as a reviewer...
...These points of view are fundamentally irreconcilable, and lead to strikingly different legal positions...
...According to Ms...
...Caldwell makes much of the fact that Norman Podhoretz ably staked out Orwell for the neoconservative camp...
...After all, why should Ms...
...Thus, we advocate the prohibition of financial contributions from moneyed interests in all federal election campaigns and a system of public funding to make elections more competitive and democratic...
...Even Mr...
...TAS, January 1990...
...He would have earned it even if his only act of betrayal had been his co-sponsorship of the so-called Act for Better Child Care Services, an especially pernicious and mind-bogglingly expensive social engineering/income redistribution program designed to kick mothers and babies out of their homes—the former into factory assembly lines, the latter into...
...CFR Goes Too Far Imagine my surprise upon learning that Mr...
...Nonetheless, I will try to reply to his remarks in a general way...
...That they are willing to overlook his rather woolly economics says something nice about neoconservatives—they recognize that sometimes he didn't know what he was, talking about...
...As sure as the earth is round, the democratic wind will soon be blowing over our shores...
...King, Andrea Dworkin is "a rock-em, sock-em Carrie Nation who has won my admiration and respect...
...Gentlemen, really...
...Caldwell is evidently miffed that socialists, and Irving Howe, feel comfortable claiming the Blair/Orwell persona as one of their own...
...Why not commission this heroic figure TO WRITE FOR THE SPECTATOR HERSELF...
...Caldwell calls The Lion and the Unicorn a socialist manifesto—and it is...
...It's true, Orwell held little brief for pansies, sandal-wearers, or pacifists, but this is insufficient to disqualify him from the basic charge, sad as it is...
...He says so (okay, maybe not in so many words, but it is clear...
...Opponents of reform may not be idealists...
...In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives...
...It is not censorship to refuse to print such characteristic Dworkinisms as the following, wholly typical example: "Men love death...
...Tyrrell proudly professes to be a hireling of the one-worlders ("Hill-Jack Bugaboos," TAS, January 1990...
...Florence King can scarcely find words to do justice to her admiration for Andrea Dworkin...
...New York Florence King replies' Mr...
...To acknowledge that such pressure does not now exist is not to say that it cannot be created...
...Politically, I fall somewhere to the right of Vlad the Impaler...
...Tyrrell angling for the Strange New Respect Award...
...The idealists offer perhaps the most important contribution, the correct indictment...
...government-controlled institutions...
Vol. 23 • March 1990 • No. 3
