_______________"PROGRESSIVE" EDUCATION BY DAVID HOROWITZ (12/01/97)

David Horowitz, with his typical tunnel vision, believes that the Black Panther Party is the rotten heart at the center of all leftist action and thought, and that every person who ever protested outside a nuclear plant or wrote a letter to the editor against the death penalty is somehow tainted with '60s terrorist evil and is therefore unworthy of consideration. Horowitz's inability to get past grinding his personal axes, coupled with his indulgence in glib generalizations, makes me wonder what Salon possibly thinks he has to contribute to serious political dialogue. His ability to conveniently fail to mention his own personal stake in issues he writes about, and to omit any indication that conservatives have been guilty of hypocrisy, illegality or excess in the name of their ideology, reveal him as a bargain-basement demagogue of the lowest order. If you want to feature a right-wing columnist, can't you find somebody who doesn't make conservatism look like the cruel ravings of a desperate and out-of-touch Ghost of Christmas Canceled? Horowitz serves one valuable purpose: as the unchecked id of a calculated conservatism usually clever enough to couch its backward agenda in only mildly offensive doublespeak. Coming from Horowitz we get to see just how distasteful the program actually is when the tactical "centrist" gloss is stripped away. Guess what, David? I'm a leftist and I think economic redistribution and affirmative action are good ideas! Why? Because, shock of shocks, capitalism is flawed! America is endemically racist! Horowitz would paint me as delusional, but then who would be airbrushing history? Who's choosing not to see what doesn't fit their simplistic worldview? In reams of writing about the Black Panthers, how often does Horowitz talk about the organized police conspiracy to murder them? Finally, what's scarier, a disaffected street gang with political aspirations, or an organized, sanctioned police force secretly violating the law to execute its perceived enemies? Where's the real story here? David? -- Cole Odell For a card-carrying conservative, David Horowitz spends an awful lot of time telling the left what it should and shouldn't do. His article on the romanticization of the Black Panthers naturally misses the point somewhat: Horowitz cannot see why the Panthers were and remain important. He would prefer a sanitized version of history where that nice Dr. King and his nonviolence won the day; never mind that a lot of heads were broken and a lot of blood shed in real life. For Horowitz, like most U.S. reactionaries, people and movements are either good or bad and never mind the complexities of real history. His incomprehension, and his abject slavery to the authority-approved view, for all his free-thinking credentials, is summed up neatly with the throwaway line about the left "memorializing the death anniversaries of totalitarian legends like Che Guevara, just as though the history of the last 50 years had never taken place." Now, there's only one place you're going to hear that sort of thing, and that's from right-wing U.S. commentators and their fanatical supporters and allies. No one else considers Che a totalitarian -- a misguided idealist at worst, a hero at best. Certainly no one who has read his works or knew of his life would call him a totalitarian. His memoirs are suffused with a sensitivity and anger about the conditions of the poor and dispossessed throughout Latin America. The revolution he helped to build was the greatest liberation in Latin American history -- vaulting a corrupt, brutal, racist U.S. client state to new heights of literacy, racial tolerance and prosperity. Cuba is despotic and liberties are restricted -- but far, far less so than the brutal military regimes that Horowitz's friends in successive U.S. governments have installed and supported. In any event, the responsibility for the current Cuban regime must be shared between Fidel Castro and the U.S. It certainly does not lie with Che, who rejected Cuba's bureaucratic drift and died fighting a futile guerrilla war. There's rarely anything new in Horowitz's commentary, but he is at his most banal when he's reciting by rote from the World According to Reagan. -- Ben Walsh SALON | DEC. 3, 1997

R E C E N T L Y+| JUST BECAUSE I'M HIV-POSITIVE, CAN'T I BEAR CHILDREN? BY LORI LEIBOVICH

If you'd like to submit a letter to the editor for publication,
please e-mail us at salon@salonmagazine.com.
Letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness.
If you do not wish the letter to be published, please say so.