Tom Lauria of Arlington, Virginia, notes that our first chapter “overlooked some major, A-list comsymp redheads. But, hey,” he continues, “now that the Right has its own ‘Names Project’...”:
Those scarlet-beaked birdbrains at National Public Radio, especially the staff of All Things Considered
Cat Stevens
Darryl Hannah
Bob Barker
Flora Lewis
Joan Baez
And that true red tool, City Paper editor Jack Shafer
Just a minute here, Tom, Jack Shafer isn’t a “red tool,” he’s a Libertarian—similar to a conservative except he believes we should all have private Polaris missiles in our backyard pools. As for Darryl Hannah, you may be right about her politics, but I’m sure somebody can talk some sense into her. I volunteer.
James J. Griffitts of Dunnellon, Florida, protests my plan for media overexposure. He thinks some people should be banned from television entirely:
Old Nixon, Johnson, and Carter experts who hover in covens along the Potomac
Robert McNamara
CIA’s Colby: an obvious security risk
Griffitts also suggests that subcommittees made up of blacks, Episcopalians, Jews, journalists, and Republicans should be set up to select numbers of their own to be banished from the media, e.g.:
Andrew Young
Barbara Jordan
Desmond Tutu
Headman Browning
Alan Dershowitz
Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Paul Sarbanes
And maybe Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon? You’ve gone too far, James. We’ll have to make one more addition to the Enemies List here and now:
James J. Griffitts
Marion E. Mahony of Roanoke, Virginia, forwards a list “compiled with much phlegm, bile, and—and barf!!!”:
Ex-Gov. Douglas Wilder of Virginia
Ex-Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York
Sen. Chuck Robb of Virginia
Ex-Sen. Paul Trible (R-VA), quitter and turncoat!
Numerous Roman Catholic bishops, clergy, and dissident nuns: I am a Roman Catholic—but am no leftist or libertarian
Columnist William Raspberry, an ordinarily sensible man who supports Jesse Jackson for PRESIDENT!!!
Louis Farrakhan
Paxton Davis, a radical leftist columnist in our local paper
PLOWSHARES
Armand Hammer
Gloria Steinem
Larry Flynt
Hugh and Christie Hefner
Paul Newman: He’s beautiful and talented and I love him—but I HATE HIS POLITICS!!!
Well put, Marion, but Gloria Steinem is from my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, and, believe me, she’s got a reason to be crazy.
Jeff Kock and Ken Pitts of Nashville, Tennessee, say:
Mary McGrory
and add, “We propose legislation mandating that all newspapers carrying both ‘Doonesbury’ and Miss McGrory’s column drop ‘Doonesbury’ and put Mary’s dribble on the comics page.”
Marjorie G. James of Austin, Texas, tells us, “I get a lot of mail from celebrities, and they want to hear from me, too. In fact they even send me addressed envelopes and sometimes postage. So—please”:
Joanne Woodward, who wants to keep back-alley abortionists at bay
Jimmy Carter, who wants to keep on hammering
Lily Tomlin, who helped to make Ann Richards governor of Texas
Ann Richards
Ann Lewis
Plus:
Massachusetts
New York City
Dan Rather
Walter Cronkite
Cathy Cronkite: Walter’s daughter who has a radio talk show here and gets downright testy with callers who show just a speck of good sense
Dr. Alfred M. Beyer of Garden City, New York, would like to add:
National Geographic
“This may raise some eyebrows,” says Dr. Al, “but I have long considered it a left-leaning mag. Every two or three months they show us a ‘People’s Republic’ country with smiling peasants and citizens.”
Steve J. Adamek of San Diego, California, calls us timid. “The nation requires a complete perestroika,” he claims. “We must say bon voyage to”:
Ex-gang members and ex-drug addicts who have become drug counselors and youth activists
“This will open the job market for current addicts and gang members. Thus we will be left with only one problem, the sagging domestic assault rifle industry. This can be solved by the time-honored trade practice of government-subsidized dumping. The outskirts of Nicaragua and the interior of China seem good places to test this policy.”
Mark Sheffield, Jr., of Escondido, California, decries:
Paul Duke
Frederick Allen
Cokie Roberts
Judy Woodruff
Cher
Sally Quinn
William Hurt
Maxine Waters
MacNeil-Lehrer and Company
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA)
Dave Wilson of Denver, Colorado, recommends for animadversion:
Helen Caldicott
Sam Donaldson
John Chancellor: He actually suggested in a commentary that the U.S. government subsidize an American book tour by Salman Rushdie.
The Massachusetts congressional delegation: Send in the clowns.
Rep. James Traficant, Jr. (D-OH)
Actor John Cusack: He claims that because of his anti-Reagan statements, a government agent is probably monitoring his phone calls—talk about a lousy civil service job.
Elayne Boosler: the comedy club answer to Mme. Defarge, although Defarge was better at keeping people in stitches
Dayton, Ohio: Hometown of the acting Lowe brothers, Rob and Chad. What a comedown from being the hometown of the flying Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur.
Larry King: He hangs up on callers who disagree with him within eight seconds.
Callers who agree with Larry King: He hangs up on them within twelve seconds.
Personally, Dave, I think Larry King redeems himself for the former by the latter. Besides, he once gave me an even better book plug than Garrick Utley.
James R. Stevenson, address unknown, reproves:
George Steinbrenner: Anyone who can destroy baseball so thoroughly has got to be a pinko.
C. Everett Koop
E.T.: Is anybody on this list truly human?
The American Roman Catholic Bishops: Heretics all!
David Rockefeller: Hey, this is an enemies list! It has to have a Rockefeller. Otherwise, we’ll give paranoia a bad name.
And James signs his letter with a rather strict “OFF THE PINKS!”
III
The Readers Keep Responding
The American Spectator, November 1989
Those of you who took President Bush’s “kinder, gentler” suggestion too literally and, therefore, haven’t been reading the American Spectator may wonder what’s going on here. Well, in the July 1989 issue I first proposed a “New McCarthyism” (of the Strike-a-Blow-for-Joe, not the Clean-for-Gene type). This would be fair recompense to the left, I thought, for their incessant use of the Mc-word to describe every conservative criticism of anybody.
At the end of my “Proscription for a Better America” I asked readers to send in the names of additional goats to scape. Send they did—postcards, letters, telegrams, and computer printouts thick as a Democrat’s skull. This despite the fact that American Spectator readers have jobs, marriages, intellects, and other things which keep them busier than, say, members of the Community for Creative Nonviolence. So many parlor pinks, bull slingers, dweebs, wonks, bluestockings, nincompoops, hopheads, muck spouts, hog callers, dopes, simps, chumps, wets, sob sisters, egg suckers, and pencil-necked geeks were named that the Readers’ List had to be divided into two parts.
We now have a lovely file on the ideologically sinister, a fine, big matricula of scum. The only problem is, no one has come up with a fit
suggestion for what to do with the people on it. We conservatives don’t have gulags because they aren’t tax deductible. You can’t leverage gulag assets, and gulag merchandising rights are worth zilch. I mean, who wants a Leonid Brezhnev lunch box? Drug therapy isn’t going to work on these folks. Most of the lefties already tried it on themselves in the sixties. And prefrontal lobotomies are out. How can doctors sever the nerves connecting the frontal lobes with the thalamus when the entire brain is absent? Maybe we can crate up the nitwits and sell them in Eastern Europe. I hear they’re running out of Commies over there.
THE LIST CONTINUES
Anyway, as I have noted, the Readers’ Enemies List has been edited only to remove duplications, and the comments appearing after the italicized names are the readers’ own, although there is an occasional bracketed note from me when I thought somebody was calling in an air strike on his own position.
Paul J. Beck of Morocco, Indiana, begins the back nine play, teeing off on:
Studs Terkel
Joseph Campbell
Forrest Church
Sondra Gehr, local Chicago public radio host, a feminine Terkel
Presidents of Dartmouth and Stanford
Maureen Reagan, who gives freeloading off a famous father a bad name
Mortimer Adler
Little Stevie
David Lange
The ACLU attorneys who tried to send Walter Polovchak to the gulag
That rheumy-eyed guy from Harvard who writes those weepy books about children. Whatsisname.
Richard Lamm: This man is scary.
Judith Evans Hanhisalo of Duxbury, Massachusetts, wants to add to the list:
Lawrence Walsh and his entire secret police organization
Judge Gerhard Gesell
Adm. Gene La Rocque
But she wants to subtract from our previous list:
Paul Weyrich
Not until he buys John Tower a drink.
William Rockwood of Canoga Park, California, reproaches:
Michael J. Fox and the entire cast of Family Ties
Rosanna Arquette
Marlon Brando
The makers of nonalcoholic wine
“I’ve tried,” says Doug Rivers of Warner Robbins, Georgia, “to group my candidates for the New Enemies List by certain common characteristics to facilitate future classification at re-education camps”:
Alice Walker: All on the final list should be forced to read one of her novels cover to cover.
Mick and Bianca Jagger
Gregory Peck
The ol’ Cos, Tawana Brawley patron
Gene Upshaw
Right Reverend Sharpton
Attorneys Mason and Maddox
Presbyterians
Vegetarians
Presbyterians?
Kenneth M. Potter of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, indicts the following:
Paul Warnke
Sen. Patrick “Leaker” Leahy
“Preacher” Scotty Reston
Sammy Thompson III of Washington, D.C., writes on behalf of himself and his associates to say, “As junior staff peons at two neoconservative organizations, we join together to form the Mortals & Divine Society, whose mission is to take every occasion to publicly and privately denounce and harangue those listed below”:
Elizabeth Drew
Jane Pauley
Sojourners magazine
Jim Wallis
John Lofton
The Other Side magazine
John Keker
Bishop John Shelby Spong
I. F. Stone, also on God’s list
Gus Hall
Timothy Leary
Jim Hightower
Pat Sajak
Morton Downey, Jr.
John Nields
Arthur Liman
Gloria Allred
David Duke
Buz Lukens
The Kennedy Kids
Larry “Bud” Melman
Mayor Marion Barry
Leonard Nimoy
The Fairfax County “Family Life Education” program
People who use “dove” motifs
Dykes on Bikes
Eugene McCarthy
TransAfrica
The Hollywood Women’s Political Committee
The inventor of the “Visualize World Peace” bumper sticker
Joseph J. Eule, also of D.C., admonishes:
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
A. Bartlett Giamatti: A liberal as commissioner of baseball? Something pretty fishy there if you ask me. [Obviously the Big Umpire upstairs agreed.]
Rep. Sam Gejdenson
Anybody using the term “significant other”
All Yugo owners
Smith College School for Social Work
Peter Cuikas of Leominster, Massachusetts, proscribes:
Mike Dukakis
Boston Globe editorial page contributor David Nyhan
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)
The Clamshell Alliance
Jeremy Rifkin
Sally Struthers
Bill Moyers
And my brother-in-law, who is living testimony to the meaninglessness of a college degree these days
Paul Kirchner of Hamden, Connecticut, reviles:
Oliver Stone
Linda “Is anyone going to eat that last éclair?” Ellerbee
Charles Kuralt
Paul Simon: both of them
Lillian Hellman: deceased but in need of further persecution
Paul Robeson: ditto
Norman Mailer
Kurt Vonnegut
William Styron, and anyone else who would describe Mr. and Mrs. Ortega as “poets”
Anyone who uses the terms “The Third World” and “The Homeless” respectfully
Jon Voight
Everyone who sang on “We Are the World,” especially that turncoat redneck Willie Nelson
Ad agency people who write jingles for giant corporations that sound like additional stanzas to “We Are the World”
Rep. Robert Torricelli
Rep. Joe Kennedy, Jr., and every other Kennedy except maybe Caroline
Bob Geldof
David Byrne
Rock groups that take up left-wing politics under the mistaken idea that they have something to contribute to society besides a driving backbeat and three-chord progressions
Jack Lemmon
Morgan Fairchild
Actresses who take up left-wing politics under the mistaken idea that they have something to contribute to society besides a good look at their breasts
Dick Gregory
Philip Agee
Randall Robinson
Susan Stamberg
Nina Totenberg
Linda Wertheimer
Anyone who held a candle for Ted Bundy
Ben Bradlee
Bob “He sat up in his bed! He talked to me! I swear it!” Woodward
Garry Wills
Peter Ustinov
Pete Seeger
Arlo Guthrie
Folksingers
Poets
Mimes
Sydney Schanberg, wherever he is
Frank Zappa, former iconoclast, now boring knee-jerk liberal
Hunter Thompson, ditto
William Greider
Paul, I don’t mind your putting my friend and co-worker William Greider on the list, because he’d be darned upset if he were left off. But you’d better watch what you say about my pal Hunter or the next time you visit your stamp collection you may find the back of your Eisenhower memorial block has been dosed with Ibogaine.
To return to our sheep, Mary and Timothy Wheeler of Shelbyville, Indiana, fulminate at length, and somewhat peevishly, thus:
Ernest Sternglass
Amory Lovins
Barry Commoner
Andrew Greeley
E. F. Schumacher
Sidney Blumenthal
Richard J. Barnet
Madalyn Murray O’Hair
Irving Howe
&n
bsp; Robert Drinan
Norman Birnbaum
Madonna
Maria Shriver
Michael Gartner, editor of the Ames, Iowa, Daily Tribune
Eddie Murphy
Janet Cooke
One Mary Farley, who described “My Love Affair with a Sandinista” in Cosmo. Lust on a park bench, actually.
Cybill Shepherd
Msgr. Bryan Hehir
Sid and Nancy
Jack Valenti
Dr. Ruth
Kathleen Sullivan
Jean Harris
Guns N’ Roses
Betty Dodson
James Freedman
William Cole
Joyce Carol Oates
Tony Mandarich
Mike Tyson [Okay, Mary and Tim, howsabout you go tell Mike he’s on the Enemies List.]
Robin Givens
Irving R. Levine
Ted Sorensen
Bob Rafelson
Alex Cox
Arthur Penn
John Denver
Richard Pryor
Judy Collins
Charles Curran
Barry Manilow
Jack Henry Abbott
Glenn Close
Safe sex
Chuck Stone
Kim Basinger
Dustin Hoffman
Sushi
Willie Horton
Candy Crowley
Carroll O’Connor
Jack Klugman
Alice Rivlin
Muzak
Harold Stassen
Mary Worth
Martin Scorsese
Candice Bergen
#12 grade river gravel [huh?]
Gallaudet College
Union of Concerned Alchemists
Scientific American
Oregon
West 57th Street
The U.S. House of Representatives
Everyone in the Senate whose weight exceeds his IQ by a factor of two or more: Attn: Ted
Anybody on Saturday Night Live
Any given Supreme Court majority or minority
Feminists in slacks
Ugly feminists
Old feminists
Ecofeminists
Feminist dykes
Masculine feminists
Anyone who uses “Ms.” without wincing
Social workers
Pollsters
Therapists
Bureaucrats
Activists
Slugs
Anyone who believes in homophobia
Anyone who disapproves of it
Everyone at every prestige university except first-semester freshmen, maybe
Anyone who consciously forms “relationships”
Anyone belonging to any group that has “Coalition,” “Alliance,” “Community,” “Solidarity,” “Citizen,” “People,” or “Popular” in its name