Fair Game

...Let us liberate Alger Hiss from the shadow under which he has lived...

...It is not inaccurate to describe the present political mood as a shift to the Right...

...Their restraint, given their auspices and their line of work, is commendable...

...when every man might become a preacher, and almost every preacher could collect a congregation...

...One must participate in, or at least cheer on, the New Morality even when one fails to see the novelty of it...

...My qualifications for inclusion, I suppose, have to do with my enthusiastic support of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and tempered support of George McGovern in 1972, as well as my having found Richard Nixon, in all his manifestations, unrelievedly unworthy...

...Okay...

...How is one to say no to any proposal or individual that comes so inspirationally labeled...

...Although I would prefer to have nothing to do with several of my co-listees, others are friends...

...But, then, I am also on reasonably good terms with several people around the Voice, and even wrote an article for it once...

...Who can forget those congressional committees whose main contribution to the public weal was to compile and distribute lists of people the congressmen feared, or said they feared, were influencing the nation in subversive directions...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Getting Listed A few weeks ago, I found my name on a Village Voice list of journalists who belong to the Right-Center Establishment, also known as the Military-Intellectual Complex...

...Things can get a bit complicated...

...where public affairs is a category of entertainment and heroes and villains are produced almost as fast as they are forgotten...

...Today the paper laments that "Radical chic is dead...

...Insurgency...

...This turn is complicated, troubling to those who identify with the Left yet do not find the Village Voice companionable...

...That's the ticket...

...Any kid can learn the litany, and quite a number have...

...One must read and enjoy and perhaps pass periodic quizzes on the doctrines advanced by publications whose names contain the word New, such as New York and the New York Review of Books—but not the New York Times, the New Republic or the New Leader...

...If people like me can be located on the Right-Center these days, the socialist millenium is at hand...

...For writers in the Voice to put down "middlebrow ideas" is not without its charming side...

...Indeed, they seem to hold out a promise of forgiveness, redemption even, if we mend our ways...

...Much of the counter-politics of the '60s adopted this masturbatory mode...

...The preachers who clog the columns of the Voice, perhaps upset by the shrinkage of their congregation, are thrashing about in the only way they know, in hopes of getting somebody to pay attention...

...and third, because even if it was pretty bad, he did it with good intentions...

...In the prison where all Villagers evidently exist, how can one oppose Liberation, no matter to what group or demands that word or a quarter of it is attached, especially when one is notified that they all manifest an Egalitarian Insurgency...

...and anyway, Whittaker Chambers was no saint...

...Not only are his ideas peculiar, but having never been charged with passing secrets or killing a policeman and never having been confined in Attica, his credentials are suspect...

...The preparation of such a list usually implies that its makers have been stung...

...List Left...

...To my mind, it has been taking an unbecomingly harsh, frivolously aggressive tone...

...So, fellow listees, why be stiff-necked and stuffy...

...Around the Voice, all isms are bad except the neologism...

...It is scarcely possible, he wrote, to imagine "the tumult of absurdity and clamour of contradiction, which perplexed doctrine, disordered practice, and disturbed both public and private quiet in that age when any unsettled innovator who could hatch a half-formed notion produced it to the public...

...And if these listmakers were not fastidious—lumping together people who feel about each other much as many of them feel about the Village Voice—that, too, is in the nature of the enterprise as well as in the nature of the medium...

...Everyone understands that writers have ungratifiable egos, and any sign of somebody out there having actually read something one has written, not to mention having taken the trouble to acknowledge it, is nourishment for an hour or two of a gray afternoon...

...second, because even if he did it, it wasn't so bad...

...For we are in the world of weekly journalism of a certain sort, where the cardinal sin is not being with-it, or not being with-it early enough...

...One must, to begin with, support what is New...

...The Voice owes that much of a debt to the shade of Martin Dies...

...Be that as it may, it would be Pecksniffian to pretend I don't get a spurt of pleasure from being listed pen by quill with such famous people as Howard K. Smith...

...It seems to me that everybody on the Voice list ought to accept his presence there in the friendly spirit of its creators...

...One must wave the placards for Radicalism...

...But of these matters the list tells us nothing, illumination not being a function of lists...

...Anyway, who at the Village Voice could stand to be thought of as being in the majority...

...The main thing is that one should not be caught asleep at the ideological switch...

...Nor was there any explicit suggestion that a blacklist of us Right-Center Military Intellectuals ought to be set up by decent persons, although such exercises cannot entirely avoid the smell of a blacklist...

...The mood is connected with busing and Israel, affirmative action and crime, drugs and abortion, pornography and detente, the frustrating history of social programs and much more...

...By the rules of list-by-association, I seem to be out of luck no matter who is doing the compiling, Left or Right, straight or eccentric...

...It complains that this "fashionable new alliance" still pretends to underdog status but has in fact come to dominate the world of middlebrow ideas...

...Let's get behind the All-New, Total-Lib, Absolutely-Egalitarian, Up-to-the Minute Insurgency Movement, and maybe next week they'll put us on a nicer list...

...So let us march for Lib—of women, of homosexuals, of Indians, of schizophrenics, of felons, of nuns, of animals, of infants, and of Socialist Syria from the yoke of militaristic Israel...

...They threaten no trial, in the nude, at the Top of the Gate, with the master of ceremonies performing an X-rated act that exposes all of one's ideological blemishes...

...it's touching, if not wholly reassuring, like a medal for mental health awarded by the inmates of the local asylum...

...The impulse to listmaking has historically been associated not so much with any particular political doctrine as with a lazy intellect and a malicious temperament...

...Egalitarian...

...there are copyright laws in this country...

...And that, Norman Podhoretz...

...Still, the Voice's list-makers are indubitably on to something, just as the compilers of lists of fellow-travellers in the '30s were on to something...

...And the mending process is right there for everyone to follow...

...There is something about that figure of speech that doesn't quite make it...

...If one wishes to oppose something, it must first be put into the form of an ism, such as Racism or Sexism...

...After all, there is nothing difficult about abiding by the correct line as developed by the higher theorists in lower Manhattan...

...To be sure, one may not use the word New promiscuously, as Richard Nixon's image-makers tried to do, and expect to get away with it...

...Take that, Patrick Moynihan...

...Looking back now on that commotion, one is reminded of Samuel Johnson's comments on the English Commonwealth, the brief Puritan interregnum of British history...

...assuredly it is not a shift to the Village Voice version of the Left...

...One must enjoy the New Journalism even when it takes the old form of list-making...

...Right-center chic is in the saddle...

...There is one former prisoner whom one does not have to boost and may even make jokes about—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn...

...As lists go, this one was fairly good humored—and different from those inventories of Left-wingers that patriots were wont to produce some decades back, in that the compilers did not recommend that anyone on it be executed or maimed...

...first, because he didn't do it...

...Who but a member of the Right-Center Establishment can fail to see the beauty and justice of these words...

...A special satisfaction in compiling lists is that it enables one to identify with Robespierre or, at any rate, Saint-Just, and dream for a moment that inscription somehow signifies proscription...

...The list-makers want it understood that they are the true unsaddled underdogs, a condition to which all the practitioners of their trade aspire, since otherwise why are they making their lists...

...List Rightl We have indeed been witnessing a drawing away from the nostrums and saviors so frenetically promoted during the '60s in the pages of the Village Voice and environs...

...Whatever their deficiencies as journalists, the people who enjoy this sort of exercise tend to have a nose for ongoing movements, especially when the movement in question has been going on under that nose for five years or more...

...Besides, who can resist being classified by the Village Voice as an "intellectual," no matter how military...

...where, in the interest of lively reading, all controversial issues are personified, and where political lists are as popular as the weekly guide to what's playing in the neighborhood movie houses...