Choosing Death

Stone and Lillian Hellman did not quite: he now studies Greek, while she displays furs and misinterprets the past.) The Gulag Archipelago had become too ineluctably public, obtruding itself even on the hysterically blind. How then to oppose “Amerika” without supporting the Soviet horror? Joseph McCarthy (an American fascist—ha, didn’t I tell you?), the civil-rights struggle, and, finally, Vietnam helped the intellectuals to rationalize the emotional opposition their psychological bent required. Vietnam in particular helped them to describe the white race as a cancer (Susan Sontag), America as the scourge of the world (Noam Chomsky), and so on. (These persons take one another seriously.) The students, finally, allowed them to support “the movement,” the counterculture, to be anti-Amerikan, without regressing to obsolete fellow-traveling.

Podhoretz candidly admits that, for a time, he fell for the latest forms of chiliasm (though never, to be sure, as hard as his then friends and later enemies). On taking over Commentary (which, incidentally, he made from a good magazine into an excellent one), he pushed it to the New, utopian Left. He published a slew of New Leftist essays, some interesting, some merely successful, and some neither. He thought highly of Norman O. Brown’s silly, psychoanalytically dressed up millenarianism, and failed to realize (he did not want to) that Norman Mailer, for all his talent, can’t think straight; or that Paul Goodman was unable to tell a good idea (he had many) from a bad one (he had many more) as long as it was his.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Stone and Lillian Hellman did not quite: he now studies Greek, while she displays furs and misinterprets the past.) The Gulag Archipelago had become too ineluctably public, obtruding itself even on the hysterically blind. How then to oppose “Amerika” without supporting the Soviet horror? Joseph McCarthy (an American fascist—ha, didn’t I tell you?), the civil-rights struggle, and, finally, Vietnam helped the intellectuals to rationalize the emotional opposition their psychological bent required. Vietnam in particular helped them to describe the white race as a cancer (Susan Sontag), America as the scourge of the world (Noam Chomsky), and so on. (These persons take one another seriously.) The students, finally, allowed them to support “the movement,” the counterculture, to be anti-Amerikan, without regressing to obsolete fellow-traveling.

Podhoretz candidly admits that, for a time, he fell for the latest forms of chiliasm (though never, to be sure, as hard as his then friends and later enemies). On taking over Commentary (which, incidentally, he made from a good magazine into an excellent one), he pushed it to the New, utopian Left. He published a slew of New Leftist essays, some interesting, some merely successful, and some neither. He thought highly of Norman O. Brown’s silly, psychoanalytically dressed up millenarianism, and failed to realize (he did not want to) that Norman Mailer, for all his talent, can’t think straight; or that Paul Goodman was unable to tell a good idea (he had many) from a bad one (he had many more) as long as it was his.