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Living on Long Island, if you’re a newspaper buff as I am, means being
confined to one newspaper for your local news. Our other papers here cover the
Island casually, if at all, and are much more oriented to New York City, the place
we left behind to come out here For finding out who got killed in the daily
fatal accident and where it happened, Newsday is the only game in town.
Since they believe in diversity, when they cover politics they never forget
to include the Republicans. It’s, ah, diversity with a difference though. For
instance the paper is heavy on columnists. They metastasize. They’re
concentrated in the center section of the paper, but they have outposts elsewhere.
They exemplify a wide range of opinion. For instance, Writer A hates Bush,
but Writer B only despises him. Writer C abominates him while Writer D simply
loathes him. Writer E detests him, and Writer F, well, you see how it is.
The hate is so thick you could cut it up in pieces and sell it for rat poison.
No rat would survive.
Most of the writers are professional journalists, but there’s a kind of a
bullpen behind them, consisting mostly of college professors who contribute
articles in their areas of expertise. What this means is that they attack Bush from
a different angle than the regulars. They go after him sociologically or
historically or psychologically or geologically (yes) or even religiously (he hasn
’t really got any; he’s faking it) or philosophically (Socrates would never
have taken hemlock if he could have slipped it to Bush instead). They don’t
leave him a leg to stand on.
Most of these happy warriors come from the faculty of Rutgers University in
New Jersey. A lot of others seem to come from Northwestern in Chicago. What
the common denominator or link between them is I don’t know, but one thing is
clear: Bush couldn’t get into either place without a search warrant and a SWAT
team.
Oh yes, another feature of the paper is the daily collection of one-liners
and wisecracks from the late-night TV shows and other such sources. A news
service of some kind provides these and it seems that no political joke ever gets
included unless guess who? is the target.
Diversity, diversity, how sweet it is. However, if you can’t have diversity,
you can at least have consistency. Newsday has this to overflowing.
All this unanimity, though, bothers me a little. It’s not quite human. How
can two professions, journalism and education, produce such an identity of
opinions without hardly a single deviation? Does everybody in them really think
so exactly alike? Did they all come to the same conclusions using the same
thought processes applied to the same kind of reality leading inevitably to the
same result in every case? It defies belief.
At least it does if you act on the assumption that these folks take nothing
into account when adopting their opinions except the merits of the case under
consideration. In other words they hold honest opinions arrived at in an
honest way. But do they? Does Newsday?
Newsday was founded by a rich heir who had liberal views. Oddly enough, he
was able to staff the paper with writers and editors who had -- what do you
know -- the same views. Some people today call this symbiosis. Others, like
myself, say symbiosis is another name for opportunism. We can be sure that
everyone at Newsday and everyone at Rutgers and everyone at Northwestern would
deny loudly that they are opportunists, and would probably believe what they
say. Still it’s funny how they all have managed to wind up on the same side
-- the side that pays.
It’s not popular to say this kind of thing. We’re supposed to assume
integrity in everyone we come across until the assumption can be disproved. Fair
enough. In this piece I’m not going to impugn anyone’s character without
naming him or her. As far as classes of people go, like the three I’ve written
about, I say nothing except that people need to remember a useful term once
employed by labor unionists. The word is "porkchop" and it was applied to labor
racketeers to distinguish them from honest leaders. What I say here is that
there are such things as porkchop liberals and no one should assume that they don’
t exist even with a Ph. D. after their name or their picture on a newspaper
column.
How can we tell who is a porkchopper and who holds honest opinions? Well, on
some of them the evidence has been in for a long time. My favorite whipping
boy, the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas comes to mind. A known
fact about him is that he was on the pad with a Las Vegas outfit, the
so-called Parvin Foundation, whose shady background was exposed by Gerald Ford when
he was the Republican leader in the House of Representatives. Ford didn’t
succeed however in dislodging Douglas either from the Court or the foundation.
Douglas continued his career of drinking on duty, molesting women wholesale, and
cadging money from any source available. All the while he remained the
"outstanding liberal" on the Court. This got him a lot of protection from the
media -- the New York Times defended him with heat -- but it only confirms my
opinion of him as one of the great porkchoppers of our time.
When we observe politicians and others preying on women, cheating on taxes
and expense accounts, chiseling money from suspect sources, and otherwise
misbehaving, we are entitled to conclude that their liberal views are nothing but a
smokescreen to conceal their real priorities, which are self-gratification and
self-aggrandizement. I find this encouraging, in a perverse sort of way. I
open the newspaper, and let the flood of progressive opinion wash over me
until I seem to be going under for good at last. Then the word "porkchop" comes
to mind and I start to wonder how long these opinions would last if the
paychecks were to originate from a different source than the present one. I am
saved. I’ve found the antidote, aka the BS detector.
I recommend it to anyone with a tendency to idealize "idealists" even if they
take a side opposed to his. The real idealists are not those who go with the
flow but those who buck the trend, i.e., the conservatives. How do we know
they’re pure and free from sin? Easy: they don’t make any money, they don’t
get any handouts from foundations, they don’t make commencement addresses, they
can’t get a date, they get lousy tables in restaurants, their mail goes
astray, their taxes are audited, their own dogs bite them, bees sting them, people
avoid them, and life is a living hell. They’re outlaws. And that’s the fun
of it.
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