Brave New Dogma

...Crane has been out to get the journalists and restore strict Libertarian orthodoxy for a long time...

...Other public entities that could be cashiered include public parks, public water works, public beaches, the Great Lakes, of course public schools, and even the molecules of air and ocean if ever one could figure out how to write a title claim...

...Contributing editor and columnist Hentoff was especially upset...

...Yes, the Libes agreed...

...It was about eleven o'clock one morning in December when I arrived at the office to discover the latest editorial crisis, occasioned by Inquiry's star columnist, Nat Hentoff...

...By far the strangest of all the fringe political magazines in this age of public confusion, Inquiry was militantly hostile to the CIA, the draft, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, yet equally nasty to environmentalists, anti-nukers, and Medicare...

...surely even serious left-wing writers try to break a profit each year, I allowed...

...Hentoff had written a civil liberties essay since the magazine's inception, and of course was unrelenting in his campaigns for free expression and the First Amendment...

...I had written for it earlier and thought I had no illusions about the Libertarian disease...

...That is what led me—as well as such crypto-commies as Thomas Szasz, Nick von Hoffman, Alex Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Penny Lernoux, and Nat Hen-toff, among others—to publish alongside an equal number of irreverent tribunes from the radical Right...

...Now, however, the unseen hand of dogma is abandoning all that as former editor Glenn Garvin, a journalist with credentials from both The Austin American-Statesman and The Miami Herald, is replaced by Douglas Ban-dow, until recently an aide to famed Libertarian Edwin Meese, known to others as top cop in the White House and Ronald Reagan's chief political adviser...

...All in all, it might seem good sport for liberals and leftists to watch the crypto-right casting its best seed upon the sands of incompetence...

...Its documentation of the excesses of the murderous, trigger-happy cops in Los Angeles...

...one could seldom find simpletons' shibboleths...

...This spring...

...Even when I was interviewed for the job by the outgoing interim editor—a plump little fellow who had reportedly been given an overdose of growth suppressant medication in childhood and who spoke with immense pomposity about the virtues of "kiddy sex"—I knew I had to speak gingerly about my "pink" tendencies...

...Yet despite the medievalist turn of mind that tended to pop up in the magazine, Inquiry remained a frequently refreshing forum even for an old Komintern agent like myself...

...Q.E.D., shut down the public library, the agent of oppression, and thereby avoid censorship...

...If there is no library, there will be nothing to censor and less taxation...

...Those who would like to share books collectively among themselves could start their own private voluntary library—just as Andrew Carnegie did...

...I simply don't see Inquiry as a magazine of investigative journalism," he added...

...It was genuinely intellectually challenging and unpredictable...

...But that is a cheap and easy shot...

...Censorship is bad...

...For all its multifarious peculiarities, Inquiry tried steadfastly to avoid just such editorial sin...

...he wanted to know...

...Was I hostile to Exxon profits, to profits in general...

...Two weeks later Garvin and journalism were given notice...

...Dow leaned heavily on the magazine...

...My way of judging a publication is whether when it comes in the mail I feel expectant—and that was true of Inquiry...

...I understood that the Libertarian social imagination had been stunted midway through the Nineteenth Century, back when men were men, markets (as in free) were markets, and charity Frank Browning is a contributing editor of The Progressive and was a contributing editor of Inquiry...

...But then so are taxes, and it constitutes nothing less .than forced labor for the good citizens of Abingdon to have their property confiscated (i.e., their income taken through taxes) and spent on books they do not want...

...In August 1980, when journalist Garvin became editor, circulation hovered between 8,000 and 9,000 and was falling...

...Scandal...

...It's tough running a magazine with "facts and quotes," especially one that consistently casts a jaundiced eye at the institutions of power and influence...

...When I said I supported publishing the editorial, the Libertarian Fathers fell silent—until I explained that publishing such pishposh would surely be the most effective tactic I could imagine for pointing up the idiocy of the Libertarian delusion...

...A true Free Marketeer might well suggest to Crane that such stories not only reflect the truth, but that they had the additional virtue of slowly transforming the magazine from an ideological oddity into a promising competitor...

...its early and consistent reporting of U.S...

...Soon afterwards Crane circulated a memo to the magazine's board complaining about the un-American leftism that had begun creeping into the magazine...

...He lives in San Francisco, where he works at Pacific News Service as an associate editor...

...was a matter for the church...

...I asked, playing my usual role as pink provocateur...

...One could always find inanities (from my point of view) in Inquiry...

...its steadfast reportage of Reagan's and Carter's attempts to squelch exposes of the CIA...

...Yet it was clearly a dark omen when, during my first week, the selfsame diminutive offered up a prolix essay promoting reactor power and castigating the niggling nabobs of anti-nukedom...

...Inquiry's, writers asked unpleasant questions j and hounded after the facts to find the answers...

...Once, in an editorial attacking the witchhunt mentality of Jeremiah Denton's Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, I mentioned the depredations committed against State Department officers by Joe McCarthy a generation earlier...

...Inquiry told how one Federal agency in North Carolina exposed local people to dangerous health hazards...

...Selling the highways—not just the interstates but all public roads—is an article of Libertarian faith...

...No, no, the True Libertarians explained...

...An attack on the Moral Majority for its attempts to ban salacious literature from the shelves of the Abingdon, Virginia, library...

...A year and a half later it had risen to 19,500, not counting 6,000 subscribers inherited from Libertarian Review, the grim four-color book of dogma that folded last year...

...Inquiry was the closet queen of the Libertarian movement, a rich little journal founded in San Francisco by a handful of cantankerous graduate students from Stanford who had tapped a pipeline to a Kansas energy fortune...

...Now it sounds like they're going to turn it into the equivalent of The Watchtower...

...its investigations into how government helps the medical establishment line its own pockets at the expense of public health...

...Not until some months later, however, did I realize how bizarre the Libertarian mind could be...

...he specifically cited the Denton editorial as "inexplicably pro-bureaucrat...

...Last fall when the magazine published a detailed investigation into some of the lesser known, slimy behavior of Representative Ozzie Myers, an ABSCAM convict, Crane hit the ceiling, demanding an end to muckraking and praising the ABSCAM convicts as "heroes...

...Not that the magazine's course was ever clear...

...Hen-toffs offense...

...If it's the intention of the Libertarians to ensure that they remain a political sect instead of a serious influence on American politics, then they've gone a long way toward ensuring that fact...

...chicanery in support of repressive regimes in Central America and the Middle East, and its mockery of knee-jerk, big bucks liberalism have given it some of the best political journalism published recently in America...

...Needing the job, I hedged...

...All too often the obstreperous rags of both the Right and the Left settle into a comfortably smug recitation of received dogma...

...Once before I had suggested auctioning off the interstate highway system to private enterprises (since for the most part I regard it as an immense boondoggle for the subsidy of the auto, truck, and bus manufacturers over more efficient rail systems...

...Irony is rich at Inquiry: the Koch fortune derives not only from oil and other energy interests but also from the manufacture of environmental and pollution control equipment, which, would not have been invented were such evil agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency not in business...

...How many more pieces the magazine will run on police excesses is, in the words of one remaining staffer, "somewhat problematical...

...Crane subsequently issued a memo denouncing the piece as "inappropriate" for publication in the magazine...

...its reporting on how porkbarrel politics and Big Oil have tried to pull off the Synfuels hornswoggle...

...Presumably Crane comprehends little more about the marketplace than he does about running political campaigns...

...We're into censoring libraries, now...

...The chief architect for the Inquiry house-cleaning is Ed Crane, who has alternatively acted as publisher of the magazine and campaign manager for Libertarian Presidential candidate Ed Clark, whose running mate, David Koch, comes from the family that has bankrolled Inquiry from the start...

...Alas, in his latest column, he had fouled the party line...

...Its Libertarian overlords have fired the editor, cut the staff, and issued an edict that henceforth neither muckracking nor serious reportage nor depth interviews nor ribald humor shall blemish its pages which, they claim, have been too much muddied by the clutter of "facts and quotes...

...I came to the magazine as an editor three years and several blood lettings after its birth, in August 1980...