Truth and H; s

The American Tradition: A Gallery of Rogues By John Greenway Mason/Charter, 210 pp., $8.95 John Greenway needs no introduction here, I hope. He would probably object to being called a black reactionary because, well, he doesn’t really take to blacks. True, he confesses to a “strange tolerance of Jews.” But he makes up for that when he discusses the American Indian and his paleface press agents. In 1867, he notes, “a force of five or six hundred Cheyenne warriors girded their courage and their loins and, heedless of danger, fiercely attacked a party of 25 civilians and soldiers gathering hay in a meadow.” He calls a current political movement “women’s lip.” He says that “ ‘sexual preference’ for faggotry is as antiseptic

a term as deviousness ever produced for buggery, and quite in [the] tradition of the lawyer who plea-dealt a charge of sodomy down to ‘following too closely.’ ” There are moments when Timon of Athens, by comparison, would seem to be giving humanity the benefit of the doubt. He quotes a teacher of his who said that no matter how black hell was, it became still darker when England’s King John entered it. Black reaction is the blacker for John Greenway.

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

Featured Tags

The American Tradition: A Gallery of Rogues By John Greenway Mason/Charter, 210 pp., $8.95 John Greenway needs no introduction here, I hope. He would probably object to being called a black reactionary because, well, he doesn’t really take to blacks. True, he confesses to a “strange tolerance of Jews.” But he makes up for that when he discusses the American Indian and his paleface press agents. In 1867, he notes, “a force of five or six hundred Cheyenne warriors girded their courage and their loins and, heedless of danger, fiercely attacked a party of 25 civilians and soldiers gathering hay in a meadow.” He calls a current political movement “women’s lip.” He says that “ ‘sexual preference’ for faggotry is as antiseptic

a term as deviousness ever produced for buggery, and quite in [the] tradition of the lawyer who plea-dealt a charge of sodomy down to ‘following too closely.’ ” There are moments when Timon of Athens, by comparison, would seem to be giving humanity the benefit of the doubt. He quotes a teacher of his who said that no matter how black hell was, it became still darker when England’s King John entered it. Black reaction is the blacker for John Greenway.