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American Spectator's Enemies List (1996)

The American Spectator is sadly gone now (what's left of it is called the American Prowler), a victim of its own overzealous pursuit of President Clinton and its dalliance with the loathsome David Brock. But many of the best writers on the Right once wrote in its pages, among them P. J. O'Rourke. Mr. O'Rourke is one of those writers who entertains us often enough that he can be forgiven for cashing in once in awhile, which is fortunate, because this is only barely a book. It starts with a very funny column, A Call for a New McCarthyism (American Spectator, July 1989), in which he calls for a new blacklist. Unlike the McCarthy era list though : "The distinguishing feature of this cluster of dunces is not subversion but silliness." And rather than barring these dunces from working and trying to hush up their views, he has the more diabolical idea of exposing them and their ideas to the harsh light of day :

    [T]he worst punishment for dupes, pink-wieners, and dialectical immaterialists might be a kind of reverse blacklist. We don't prevent them
    from writing, speaking, performing, and otherwise being their usual nuisance selves. Instead, we hang on their every word, beg them
    to work, drag them onto all available TV and radio chat shows, and write hundreds of fawning newspaper and magazine articles about their
    wonderful swellness. In other words, we subject them to the monstrous, gross, and irreversible late-twentieth-century phenomenon of Media
    Overexposure so that a surfeited public rebels in disgust. This is the 'Pia Zadora Treatment,' and, for condemning people to obscurity, it beats
    the Smith Act hollow.

That's pretty funny stuff, but then you read the list and realize that almost all of the folks on it--Gore Vidal, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Amy Carter, Susan Sarandon, Mike Farrell, Tikkun, Garry Trudeau, the Sheen brothers, etc.--faded into obscurity on their own; they were so awful they weren't even worthy enemies. Unfortunately though, this initial essay was followed by six more installments (the last in November 1993) and some of these consist of nothing more than nominations from readers and Mr. O'Rourke's comments on their nominations. It all gets pretty tiresome.

But then just as you're ready to toss the book on the trash heap, it's redeemed by two final pieces that were seemingly tacked on at the end just to flesh the book out to 150 pages. The first, 100 Reasons Jimmy Carter Was a Better President Than Bill Clinton (American Spectator, September 1993), is very funny. The second, Why I Am a Conservative in the First Place (Rolling Stone, July 13-27, 1995), is not only amusing but also presents as good a defense of conservatism as you'll find anywhere these days. In light of its title and the gist of the piece, it almost has to be read as a response to F. A. Hayek's famous libertarian essay, Why I Am Not a Conservative. Hayek, who seems to have understand American conservatism not at all, wrote :

    Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature
    it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down
    undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably
    been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives
    can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is a need for a "brake on the vehicle of progress,"
    I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake. What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far
    we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative.
    While the last generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose
    some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.

Mr. O'Rourke on the other hand, though often characterized as a libertarian, accepts the conservative label and his definition of conservatism :

The purpose of conservative politics is to defend the liberty of the individual and--lest individualism run riot--insist upon individual responsibility.

contains the all important corollary to liberty, that the price of our freedom must be that we each take responsibility for ourselves. Libertarianism's major fault is that it insists on the former but refuses the latter.

On balance, the first and then the last two pieces make the collection marginally worthwhile. And Mr. O'Rourke does have to earn a living, so we'll not begrudge too much the filler in between.

(Reviewed:30-Apr-02)

Grade: (B-)

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American Spectator's Enemies List (1996)

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