At 07:34 AM 2/12/98 -0800, Anders wrote:
>At 03:41 PM 2/11/98 -0800, Michael wrote:
>>David Horowitz has a new piece in Salon
>>http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/horo/1998/02/nc_09horo2.html
>>called the loafing class, supposedly attacking Marxist professors, but
>>just directed at S. Aronowitz.
>
>I thought it was a wonderful example of how a Maoist (or whatever wacko
>group DH belonged to) leopard can't change their spots. Horowitz complains
>that Marxist professors like Aronowitz waste the precious dollars of
>students by sitting around, loafing off, and babbling pinko nonsense.
>You'd think that by now, Horowitz have gotten over the Sixties. In this
>day and age, spending time carping about how a handful of lefty profs are
>wasting precious resources and corrupting youthful minds is pretty tired.
David Horowitz was never a Maoist -- and I knew him personally during one
phase of his rightward lunge (and in fact attended one of his weddings). He
was sort of a Trotskyist of the Isaac Deutscher type, writing a revisionist
critique of US foreign policy (THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS) and a Marxist book
on imperialism (I've fogotten the title) that had some interesting ideas.
He was an editor of RAMPARTS magazine, a leftish mag more exciting that but
akin to MOTHER JONES. He has a reputation for being a total ass, doing
things like assigning topics to journalists and then stealing their
research for his own articles.
Though his sexism and elitism might have tagged him as rightist even in the
1960s, he started his rightward shift in earnest when he started supporting
the Black Panther Party at a time when most of the Left in the San
Francisco Bay Area was moving away from them as they slowly returned to
their thuggish ways. A friend of DH's did their accounting -- and ended up
at the bottom of SF Bay, presumably because she found that the Panthers
were engaging in hanky-panky.
The "god" then failed DH. In the L.A. TIMES forum on the COMMUNIST
MANIFESTO that was led by the Eric Hobsbawm article I mentioned, DH had a
short piece that basically said that the CM should be seen as equivalent to
MEIN KAMPF. He also worked hard to get a right-wing Black radio personality
(Larry Elder) back on the radio. I saw one of his TV commercials for
reinstating Elder: it seemed like an inversion of 1960s New Left rhetoric.
(DH succeeded in that task, so Mr. Elder can go back to blaming Blacks for
their own poverty and the like.)
When I first met him, at a picnic in Berkeley in the early 1980s, I
mentioned to him that the beer he was drinking was made by Coors. His
response was to say that Coors was better than the Teamsters. He later told
me that I'd need to have something like a personality change to understand
his point of view, as if he'd had such a change. No: his personality
doesn't seem to have changed at all. DH was a leftist ass, now he's a
rightist ass.
DH isn't reacting simply to the 1960s. He's reacting to his mother, who was
an important organizer for the Communist Party in New York.
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html
"It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
