Looks at Heterodoxy

...In one of the think pieces that occasionally interrupt the stream of PC horror stories, Collier characterizes the journal as an expression of "the real counter-culture," which is to say a conservative counterculture ("The Culture, Stupid...

...Heterodoxy possesses intelligence, and it is always angry...

...Those close to the magazine say that from its inception Heterodoxy has been well subsidized by all the usual right-wing sources— Scaife, the Olin Foundation, and so on...

...The pseudo eighteenth-century diction of Heterodoxy's descriptive subtitle, "Articles and Animadversions on Political Correctness and other Follies," gives a sense of one direction its ambition takes: its editors aspire to the great Swiftian tradition of laughter and opposition to pedantry and enthusiasm...

...And tell your friends about this major financial/technological innovation at DISSENT...

...That's what appears to lie behind the editors' decision to market Heterodoxy by buying up subscription lists from leftist magazines like the Nation and sending the paper out free of charge...

...Its pages, festooned with exploding firecrackers and other crude line drawings, are full of virulent attacks on what it alternately sees as a concerted movement toward and as a realized regime of PC, particularly in humanities divisions of universities, but extending to American culture generally...

...It's funny (sometimes...

...If you ever send me any more of your garbage I will not only file a complaint with the Postmaster but also with the FBI," reads another...

...It certainly doesn't look like a magazine a conservative would want to fund...

...Horowitz, indeed, is said to think of the paper as a "journal de combat...

...Even shaky attempts to capture the ground of satire and irreverent humor by such magazines as Heterodoxy and the American Spectator do not auger well for the appeal of the left...

...Collier's remark echoes Orwell, who in his great essay on Dickens counterpoises the "smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls" to the qualities in Dickens that Orwell admires, notably his "free intelligence" and generous anger...

...if the intelligence were freer and the anger more generous, its opposition to the smelly little orthodoxies might inspire more confidence...

...Because the U.S...

...544 • DISSENT Back at the Radical Years," April 1994) or David Horowitz's own guilty memories of collaborating with the Black Panther party in the early seventies ("Black Murder Inc.," March 1993...

...The hasty, headlong quality of Heterodoxy is no doubt meant to give the impression that its editors and contributors can't be bothered with civility in argument, still less such niceties as proofreading...

...Post Office, in good social democratic fashion, is the cheapest distributor of magazines, we make money on subscriptions...

...January 1993...

...Americans are notoriously allergic to the smug and the humorless, and are likely to prefer the most meager japery to dourness and self-righteous hysteria...

...Occasionally the exposés seem needlessly overblown: the editors scrape the bottoms of some unpromising barrels for their copy, as in a piece on the louche goings on at something called More University, a cult establishment in California ("University of Sex," March 1994...

...A contributor told me cheerfully that "in the culture wars, Heterodoxy is an attack dog...

...Our circulation has gown with each issue for the last several years...

...We welcome these new readers, but each copy they buy costs us money, and money is hard to come by for a left magazine...

...The resultant flood of angry letters from outraged recipients is gleefully printed in each issue...

...Richard Grenier's sardonic piece on some fanciful attributions of postseventies environmentalist scientific wisdom to Native American populations ("The Greening of the Merciless Red Man," October 1992) has merit as intelligent debunking...

...As exhortation, this strikes me as a little odd: "mutual loathing" seems an unstable basis for association...

...It packs a wallop...

...WorkFALL • 1994 • 543 ing against this loftier notion is an undignified craving—amounting to a kind of rage—to be noticed, to be talked about at all costs...

...It seems to me that those on the academic left who reject the identification with PC cannot afford to ignore it, just because so much of it runs counter to their sympathies or because, as is undoubtedly the case, it has no liberal agenda to put in the place of the PC it despises...

...There does seem to be a near obsessive interest in gay sexual practices and a fair amount of coy invective ("sapphic," and so on...

...There is plenty of abuse to decry: the near universal acceptance of quotas in hiring, the racket of "sensitivity training," the assault on free speech, the official sanctioning of ethnic separatism...

...The editors of Heterodoxy, who must have once themselves harbored the hope that after the revolution they would be made commissars, are lynx-eyed in detecting that ambition in others...

...Like "racist" or "fascist" too often an all-purpose epithet, in this case it seems not far from the mark, although the paper has recently accorded the gay conservative David Brock sympathetic treatment...

...You can use your credit card...

...It can be a useful source of news...

...Heterodoxy is aimed at the young and, to a lesser extent, their professors, who, at least in the minds of its ex-radical editors, Peter Collier and David Horowitz (formerly the editors of Ramparts), might be counted on to overlook the occasional irruption of Reaganite sloganeering or mockery of homosexuals mixed in with the PC bashing...

...The most effective of the pieces in this category avoid rhetoric and stick to the dismaying facts, like the detailed account of the infiltration of the curriculum of a Maryland school district by Afrocentric hate literature ("Afro-Fascism on the Rise," September 1993...

...Those of us linked only by a mutual loathing of the smelly little orthodoxies are now the real counterculture and we had better start acting like it," he declares...

...The editors' apparent conviction that despite warnings from governmental agencies and the scientific community, middle-class heterosexuals have nothing to fear from AIDS borders on a peculiarly ugly form of "I'm all right, Jack...

...The quality of the paper's book reviews is surprisingly high...

...The articles in Heterodoxy are of several main types...

...There is the full-bore assault on big name academics like Stanley Fish or Catharine Stimpson or Houston Baker, who are inevitably called "academic commissars...

...In a different category are the autobiographical pieces, which range from the jejune reflections of young persons who have suffered through four years of attempted political indoctrination at one expensive liberal arts institution or another, to the rather more weighty recollections of former left stalwarts like Victor Comerchero ("A Professor Looks Put DISSENT on Your Credit Card...

...With its amateur, not to say wretched, editorial standards—words left out, quotations mangled, typos in practically every other piece—and its scatological references and alarmist, conspiracy-mongering headlines ("Treason of the Clerks," "Women's Studies Imperialists," "Multicultural Mafia"), the magazine gives off more than a whiff of an "underground" paper of the sixties...

...But for all its undoubted vulgarity and excesses—indeed in part because of its (deliberate) vulgarity, Heterodoxy has a certain appeal...

...The largest increase has been in bookstore and newsstand sales...

...the press has covered PC, but seldom in such uninhibited detail, with all the cant and pieties attributed and all the perpetrators named...

...given the heavy ideological obligations the reviewers labor under, some have managed to turn in lively, intelligent, and amusing notices of PC literature, such as Jendi Reiter's roundup of politically correct children's books ("The Sisters Grim," October 1992) or Barbara Rhoades-Ellis's devastating account of the flawed methodology and presuppositions of Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown's celebrated Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development ("The News From Gilligan's Island: Big Girls Don't Cry," October 1993...

...The charge of "homophobia" is the one most frequently leveled at the paper...

...There's a war on, the culture war, and they're all in the trenches...

...Now we've made subscribing easier...

...There are muckraking pieces (the majority of the articles) intended to expose specific abuses of administrative or professorial power in the service of PC ideology...

...Kindly remove my name from the mailing list of your repulsively reactionary, homophobic, bigoted publication," reads one of the milder ones...

...The sloganeering and mockery seem to be for the undergraduate crowd, who on some campuses need little encouragement to snigger at gays and their claims...

...FALL • 1994 • 545...

...Above all Heterodoxy seems alive, as gray purveyors of official reports on academic life like the Chronicle of Higher Education or even its carefully jocular supplement, Lingua Franca, cannot hope to be...

...There is the report from the fly on the wall at the lugubrious conference or seminar, in which the point is to string together the ludicrous things people say...

...So, please, subscribe now, and while you are at it, subscribe for two years: that is an even bigger help...