Mary A. Lane of Seattle, Washington, swats with a large paddle:
Writers of European travel books who warn their readers not to be Ugly Americans
An anonymous well-wisher of no fixed address turns hungry Rottweilers loose upon:
Any spondaic, dactylic, or anapestic feminist book titles:
(1) Men Who Love Women and the Children They Bear
(2) Fat Is a Feminist Issue
(3) Women Who Love Too Much
(4) Smart Women, Foolish Choices
Hedrick Smith, who consistently uses liberal doublespeak and calls hardcore Soviet Communist gerontocrats “The Right”
“The American Agenda” segments on ABC News: The producers should be a little disingenuous and call them “The Liberal Agenda.”
Republicans who feel it’s time to “govern”
Reporters and commentators who use the words “courage,” “wisdom,” or “making tough choices” as disguised synonyms for “willingness to tax” *
Nick Renton and John Schroeder or Los Angeles, California, give a poke in the eye, Moe Stooge-style, to anybody who:
uses the word “diversity” and isn’t referring to a stock portfolio
says “herstory” (she should be given an immediate herstorectomy)
capitalizes the word “green”
worships goddesses
thinks Egyptians were black
is still whining about the Willie Horton ad
Debbie Melman, also from out California way, will be backing her car in and out of handicapped parking spaces, hoping to run over:
Differently Abled Dykes
Anybody who is “thinking globally and acting locally”
Any man who hasn’t chuckled at least once over the Zeke Mowatt affair
Gary Malmberg of St. Paul, Minnesota, wishes a Michael Milken-led hostile takeover would descend on:
Sharp Electronics: They ran anti-Reagan ads in the U.K.
Toyota: Their spokesman is Martin Sheen.
Jennifer and Mike Durham of Raleigh, North Carolina, have in their crosshair sights:
Anyone claiming membership in an organization whose name contains one or more of the following: “against,” “coalition,” “social,” “peace,” “offensive,” “ethical,” “world,” “action,” “friends of,” “environment,” “unity”
Charity begins at home, not on Mars, says C. K. Taylor of Washington, D.C., who would like to see the Combined Federal Campaign permanently deducted from life, “for attempting to wrest donations from federal workers at the same time they were threatened with furlough, but more importantly for including the following as charities”:
Shoe and Rubber Fund, D.C. Congress of Parents and Teachers: “provides tennis, leather shoes and boots to District of Columbia public school children.” (I’ll bet you thought we were talking condoms.)
The Divine Universal Sisterhood, Inc.
Bonabond, Inc.: “provides supervision for persons who cannot afford or qualify for personal recognizance release”
Feminist Institute, Inc.: “promotes social justice and feminist social change through national clearinghouse, research, education, and change projects; violence prevention, feminist tours, feminist camp; aging, and other projects”
Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League (SMYAL), Inc.: “SMYAL is a youth social services and advocacy agency that seeks to prevent the abuse, neglect, and self-hatred of gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth.”
Burning books is wrong, but there’s nothing the matter with setting fire to an occasional librarian. Keith Coffman of Westminster, Colorado, has his Zippo ready and is waiting outside:
The Boulder, Colorado, public library: for banning the Hardy Boys detective series from its shelves
From C. H. Ross of Nashville, Tennessee, one apple (with Ninja worm) to:
The National Education Association: If you can read this, don’t thank one of these teachers.
Adrian H. Krieg of Acworth, New York, wishes all manner of natural ills upon:
Rachel Carson: She published The Silent Spring in 1962, predicting the end of the world in twenty years.
Paul Ehrlich: He published The Population Bomb in 1967, predicting starvation and overpopulation by 1980.
George Wald: In 1975 he predicted the end of the world by 1985 due to political problems.
Rene Dubos: In 1972 he predicted the end of the world by 1997 due to overindustrialization.
And Paul H. Liben of Yonkers, New York, sends us a big, big, big Linda Ellerbee of a letter, all handwritten. Frankly, Mr. Liben, your handwriting is almost as incomprehensible as the political beliefs of the people you are indicting. But we did manage to pick this item from among your 158 Enemies List nominations:
Liberal clergymen who wear traditional wool suits from Brooks Brothers
This brings us to a huge and amazing pile of stuff that has been accumulating in our office for nearly a year. An anonymous correspondent in the San Francisco area has been collecting all the posters, handbills, flyers, and so forth that appear in such profusion in Berkeley, Oakland, and the other captive nations of the East Bay region. Thus our correspondent shows him or herself to be a committed environmentalist—providing us with a rich compost of enemy listings and fighting litter at the same time. Here are just a few of the organizations that have been killing trees and wasting recycled paper to make themselves ridiculous in print:
500 Years of Resistance Committee
Church of Peace and Plenty
Earth Drama Lab
Pesticide Action Network
San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners
Sea Turtle Restoration Project
Friends of American Medical Relief Comm. in the West Bank and Gaza
Food Not Bombs
Middle East Children’s Alliance
Roots Against War
Samoans for Samoans of California
San Francisco Mime Troupe
Santa Cruz Christic Action Team
Students Against U.S. Intervention in the Gulf at San Francisco State University
National Association of Black and White Men Together
Tenderloin Self-Help Center
U.S.-Vietnam Friendship Association
Women Against Imperialism
Alliance for Philippine Concerns
Patrice Lumumba Coalition
Bring the Frigates Home Coalition, Sydney, Australia
Committee for Peace and Reunification in Korea
Dominican Workers Party
Committee vs. Repression in Haiti
Tyne Daly
Spike Lee
Committee for Puerto Rican Affirmation
Mozambique Support Network
National Coalition vs. English Only
Nipmuc Indian Nation Warriors Society, Boston
Palm Beach Coalition for World Peace
Daughters of Mother Jones
Art Against the War
Hands Off Cuba [Yes, the very same for which Lee Harvey Oswald toiled so long and hard.]
And here’s one that is just about impossible to top:
Lesbians in Solidarity with the Palestinian People
Among the riper examples of literature from the above ilk, we have an ad that reads: “Censored Video: See Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s Recent Trip Through the Iraq War Zone.” (How smart can our smart bombs be if they missed him?) And a dreary, tendentious newspaper called Street Sheet, which sells for a dollar and says of itself: “We are presently providing 50 papers a weekday to over 30 [homeless] people at absolutely no cost to them.” (You may have wondered how the homeless could revel every night midst the glitter of downtown while the rest of us can barely afford to go out once a week.)
We also have a screed from Women Organizing for Social and Economic Justice, touting their “Movements for Justice Panel Series.” The heck with the Easter ski trip, this is a definite must-see:
WOMEN OF COLOR AND
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
&nbs
p; Saturday, March 23,1:00-2:30
How do women of color develop strategic
plans around AIDS, the health care delivery system,
sex/health education programs, teen pregnancy,
reproductive safety in the workplace, abortion,
and other reproductive issues particular to us? How
can we put our struggles for reproductive rights both
on the agendas of the larger reproductive rights
movement and on the agendas of labor and
community-based organizations of color?
Then there’s the End French Testing in Tahiti poster, and another poster depicting the adventures of a superhero named BleachMan. This caped crusader urges drug addicts to rinse their syringes in his namesake and avoid AIDS. A great Halloween outfit for the kids.
It’s hard to pick the best-of-show here. Certainly the handbill for the Gay and Lesbian Leather Community’s benefit beer blast with “Leather Erotica Raffle” is a contender. As is the mailer for the gay bar that offers, on alternate Saturdays, “Basement Bondage Party” and “Green Party,” where one can “Meet the Rainforest Action Network.” Then there’s the Office Workers United’s printed plea to “shut down the Pacific Stock Exchange”:
On Monday the 29th ...
1. Join us (in costume if you like) in actually shutting down the stock exchange itself (301 Pine Street at Sansome).
2. Use the general disruption as an excuse to arrive (very) late at work.
3. Call in sick (of capitalist exploitation and environmental destruction).
DEFEND THE EARTH! DEFEND YOUR RIGHTS!
EARTH AND PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS!
And a flyer advertising Pasta for Peace in El Salvador pushes the envelope of human silliness. Or you think it does until you read this astonishing statement from the People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement:
Representing the interests of the African working class movement inside the borders of the U.S., the People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement is the only voice raising up the fact that the land and the oil belong to the Arab people!... The PDUM calls for Victory to Iraq and solidarity with the Arab people. But we must go farther than this.
For African and colonized people in this country a full-scale U.S. war is already aimed at us! We already live in bombed out, burned out communities and experience the brunt of total martial law which comes down on us currently under the guise of the so-called “war on drugs.” While we stand up against U.S. aggression on Iraq, we have to stand up against the all-out counterinsurgency being waged against African people.
Everybody knows that “The White House is the Rock House” and “Uncle Sam is the Pusherman.” ...
But, in the end, we must award the grand prize shut-up kudos to the campaign literature of one Gloria La Riva, who is running for mayor of San Francisco on the idiot ticket. Ms. Riva—earnest, pudgy, and gaping in her photograph—is introduced to the voters thus:
You may know Gloria as one of the spokespersons and a tireless activist in the Emergency Committee to Stop the U.S. War in the Middle East. Or as an initiator of the Farmworkers Emergency Relief effort. Or as a candidate for Mayor in 1983, when she finished third, and in second place in many working class neighborhoods; including the Mission, Fillmore, Castro, and Haight.
You may be familiar with Gloria as a leader of the All People’s Congress, fighting the proposed baseball stadium or the MUNI fare increases, fighting for expanded aid to victims of the earthquake or supporting the fight of Black firefighters for affirmative action. Perhaps you have met her in solidarity work for South Africa, Palestine, or Central America.
Whew! First wife from hell.
Now let us complete this Enemies List with a few acts of Christian Charity. C. H. Ross, who earlier in this chapter condemned the NEA, has decided to let the Pope off with a warning:
Pope John Paul II is hereby reprieved on account of the encyclical Centesimus Annus. I have notified him, however, that he remains on strict probation.
And Gary Osen and Thomas Propson of Washington, D.C., seem to be conducting a regular love-in. But, gosh, we’re only on this planet once, so let’s heed Gary and Tom’s example and try to make it a little nicer place. “Last year we made our contribution to freedom by naming some of its chronic abusers. This year we would like to suggest that a place be set aside amongst the ‘Guilty by Suspicion’ for those recidivists who, in the great liberal tradition, deserve a one-year furlough”:
Saddam Hussein: Ordinarily, bloodthirsty despots do not ingratiate themselves by using poison gas on defenseless civilians, invading weak neighbors, and setting fire to our precious bubbly. However, some credit has to be given to a world leader willing to stand up to the environmental movement.
The Republican Guard: Inept, murderous, and mostly dead—but aptly named. They have done a hell of a lot more to guard Republicans in ’92 than either Messrs. Darman or Sununu.
Saudi Arabia: It may be a barren, desolate hellhole kept afloat by American technology, Bangladeshi workers, and German automobiles, but if it makes Molly Yard indignant it’s sure as heck worth dying for!
ACT UP: While we are not normally fond of militant homosexual groups that harass the Catholic Church and, even more sacrilegiously, disrupt the stock market, we feel that amnesty must be granted to anyone who manages to get Dan Rather off the air—even for five minutes.
The National Enquirer: They fabricate, defame, slander and publicize the perversions, depravity, and moral decadence of half-wit, substance-abusing entertainers—but now they’re doing it to the Kennedy clan!
VI
Commies—Dead but Too Dumb to Lie Down
The American Spectator, November 1992
This year: dirty-money groups and individuals who fund neo-, proto-, crypto-, demi-, semi-, and plain Ben & Jerry’s vanilla Communism in the United States—plus the special “Peter Ueberroth Gold Medal for 100-Meter-Dash-Carrying-a-VCR” awards to those who did the most to provide L.A. murderers and thieves with moral, political, and philosophic justification for all the fun they had.
Let us commence without preamble what that unmourned sixties radical Danny the (Now Better Than) Red called “The Long March Through the Institutions.”
We have two Supercontributors to this Enemies List. First, there is the lovely (ah, the joys of being a middle-aged Republican and thus allowed to compliment the ladies with a clear conscience and, even, a twinkling eye) Kimberly O. Dennis. Ms. Dennis is the executive director of the Philanthropy Roundtable, an organization that promotes the astonishing idea that charity ought to help people (320 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis, IN 46204, in case you’d like to make a donation). Ms. Dennis directs our attention to the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts. Founded by the owners of Sun Oil and once a model group of charities giving money to churches, schools, museums, homes for the retarded, and other such worthy causes, the Pew Trusts have come down with Ford Foundation Syndrome. A diseased itch for social engineering has replaced a healthy instinct for social service. According to the April 26, 1992, edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Instead of continuing to fund neighborhood centers to help poor people with their heating bills, Pew gave $5 million in a joint effort with three other big foundations to set up an Energy Foundation to provide grants to promote energy efficiency.
Instead of expanding local child-welfare programs, Pew gave $2.5 million to a New York research corporation to develop a demonstration project “to improve the earnings of absent fathers, the effectiveness of the child-support enforcement system and the financial well-being of poor children.”
You get the picture.
Foundation News, one of the hand-out industry’s professional journals, crowed that the Pew Charitable Trusts “eliminated almost all of their right-wing grantmaking and embraced a broad range of projects, including some that manifestly oppose the business interests the old Pews held inviolable.” In other words, the Pew trustees haven’t actually killed the golden goose but the
y are chasing it around the yard with an axe.
Of course, no one suffers from Ford Foundation Syndrome like the Ford Foundation, which has in the past done the nation such favors as underwriting public television, creating pilot programs for LBJ’s “War on Poverty,” and providing post-assassination grants to Robert F. Kennedy’s staff to help them overcome their grief.
Ms. Dennis sends us a package of information on the Ford Foundation’s current activities. Ford is paying to create “advocacy centers” for children in Nigeria—not giving them food or health care, mind you, but giving them a place to make complaints about the lack thereof. Ford is “explor[ing] the obstacles to settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict”—expecting a few New York double domes to accomplish with one study grant what God Himself has not been able to do in five thousand years. And Ford is testing Norplant birth-control devices on Bangladeshi women. Which sounds not only genocidal but also counterproductive: What’s the Ford Foundation going to do with itself if it doesn’t have lots of impoverished Third Worlders to pester and bully?
Ms. Dennis also re-alerts us to the activities of the damnable MacArthur Foundation (vivisected by our own Joshua Muravchik in the January 1992 American Spectator). There’s been another Big Mac Attack, with so-called genius grants being punted to the likes of:
Janet Benshoof, 45, New York, president of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy and a litigator and educator in the areas of abortion rights and contraception, awarded $280,000
Evelyn Fox Keller, professor at University of California, Berkeley, [who] analyzed the social construction of science and the role of sex in how science is conducted, $335,000
Paule Marshall, 63, Richmond, Va., professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, writer whose fiction explores healing divided selves, divided cultures, and a divided world, $369,000
John Terborgh, 56, Durham, N.C., director of Duke University Center for Tropical Conservation, biologist working in ecology, biogeography, biological conservation and training Peruvian conservation biologists, $335,000