One of my readers informed me the other day that some little twit of a blogger had cited my past writings and was trying to employ them as evidence I am a racist.

There's something I want to tell this clown as well as all those other wannabe conservatives going after Ron Paul for some un-p.c. statements that ran in his newsletters long ago:

Real conservatives do not go peeking under mattresses to try and flush out people who are not politically correct. That's what liberals do, like this guy in the Nation magazine who finds racism in every utterance by a Republican.

In fact, the writings this blogger cited were all work I did for a newsletter that existed for the very purpose of puncturing pretensions of political correctness. It was called Heterodoxy and it was published by David Horowitz and Peter Collier.

As the name implies, the whole and entire purpose of Heterodoxy was to challenge the reigning orthodoxy embraced by the liberals who mostly control the mass media.

Heterodoxy published some classic works of mine, including my expose on the criminal past of Kwanzaa founder Maulana Karenga and the piece in which I revealed that, contrary to media reports, cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal had never denied shooting Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Oops. Both those criminals are black. I guess I'm a racist after all. White people are not allowed to publicly criticize black people.

That was this moron's premise, anyway.

But I owe him a big favor. He's linking to some really good stuff I wrote back in the old days. It's difficult to read the online version of most the pieces. But I had one of the original on my desktop and I am reproducing it below.

It's quite long but well worth the read if you're interested in discerning what type of mind goes looking for racism where it is not.

The headline was "Ship of Fools." It began:



Are you sure you're not a racist?

I can’t recall how many times I was asked some variant of that question during the seven days I spent on the Nation Magazine’s annual luxury cruise. It usually came in response to some observation I had made about some lamebrained idea expressed by a black person. I also made a lot of observations about lamebrained ideas expressed by white people – there were plenty of lamebrained ideas to go around - but that didn’t elicit the same response from the typical Nation reader.

At first I felt insulted by the implication that I was a racist. But then I came to understand the mind-set of the Nation crowd. The typical Nation reader is overflowing with guilt about being a white person - and a rich white person to boot if the cruise crowd was any indication. He or she is constantly asking himself of herself whether he or she is a racist. So it only seems right to ask a total stranger.

Right perhaps, but tedious. Before I got on the M.S. Ryndam for the cruise of four Caribbean islands, I had expected to spend a lot of my time debating politics with intelligent people who just happened to have different views from me. I am the sole right-of-center columnist at The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s leading newspaper, so I’m used to arguing with liberals. My editors figured the Nation cruise would give me plenty of liberals to argue with. So they thought it would be fun to send me along.



And it was fun. The cruise anyway. I'd never been on a luxury cruise before. Beautiful views of the sea. Room service. Great food. Pools, saunas, exercise rooms. Pleasant afternoons ashore in amiable tourist traps like the Cayman Islands and Key West. What's not to like?

The only problem was that 300 of the 1,500 passengers on the cruise were readers of the Nation Magazine. And I had to hang around with them.

Though the Nation cruisers seemed to have an average age of about 72, they had the political views of children. They grew up at a time when socialism seemed to be taking over the world. Now even the communists want to be capitalists. The Nation readers are in deep denial. It hurts too much for them to discuss economics. Race is all that's left.

But these people were incapable of noticing true racism when it occurred right before their eyes. I'm talking about the way they treated Patricia Williams.

Williams was, as far as I could see, the only African-American on the cruise. She is a professor at Columbia University and she writes a column for the Nation. Its standing title is “Diary of a Mad Law Professor.”

That title alone gives a clue as to how this unfortunate black woman is being patronized by these rich white people. And they patronize her so consistently, without the slightest interruption, that she is unable to grasp that they are treating her like a fool.

That became evident at the daily seminars. Williams would sit on a panel with a number of other Nation writers. The panel members would pontificate on some topic. Williams would sit silent through much of the proceedings, until the topic of race would arise. Then she would speak.

The room would fall silent. Williams would launch into a peroration full of all the cliches of the public intellectual – the "umm," the "ahh" and the "again, I must say." Her main clauses would spring subordinate clauses which would give birth to subordinate clauses of their own. The sense of these sentences was impossible to deduce. It didn't matter. When she stopped, Williams would get a round of applause that bordered on a standing ovation.

The white speakers would regularly get hostile questions from audience members. Not Williams. Her words went unchallenged.



There is no greater insult for a columnist than to be ignored. I judge the impact of my columns by the number of calls and letters to the editor they generate. It matters not at all whether those calls and letters are approving or disapproving. If they don’t come, then I have no idea whether my columns are being read.

The Nation readers were not doing Williams any favors with their unquestioning acceptance. They were depriving her of the feedback she would need if she is ever to become a competent writer.

Because I am a journalist, I refrained from commenting during any of the seminars themselves, but at the dinner table I felt free to speak my mind.

“Did any of you notice that Patricia Williams sounds like a blithering idiot?” I asked after the first seminar.

This shocked my fellow diners. They replied that they found her musings on racism in America quite convincing.

“Well, then, what did she say?” I asked.

One pleasant gray-haired lady replied, “She was saying that white people have to recognize the long history of racism in America.”

Perhaps. But that’s one simple sentence. Why did it take Williams three minutes to say it?

One morning, I brought my tape recorder and my stopwatch to the seminar. The topic was the environment. There was no obvious race angle, so Williams kept quiet until an audience member mentioned population growth caused by “unwanted” children. Oops. That gave Williams an opening. I set my stopwatch as Williams began an oration on the problems that occur when “you privilege the wanted population over the unwanted population.”

Williams was up and running. The sound was that of a great mind at work, but a close examination of the actual words revealed a mind going in circles. An excerpt: “The use of the terms ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ translates itself into the language of ‘desired’ and undesired.’”

To which my 12-year-old daughter might reply, “Duh!” What Williams was saying was that words mean the same thing as their synonyms. “Wanted” means “desired.” Its opposite, “unwanted” also means the opposite of its synonyms.

If a purer syllogism has ever been uttered by a public speaker, then I am not aware of it.

This made no difference to the audience, however. Three minutes and 30 seconds after she began her oration, Williams finished to a round of applause that would have rocked the boat if it had not already been rocking.

The people who invited her on this cruise clearly wanted a token black person. Too bad they didn’t invite a token Republican as well – me, for example. I would have punctured the stillness by observing: “Patricia, that is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. And privilege is a noun, for God’s sake, not a verb.”

That would have livened things up.

But this was not a cruise for the lively. There was more nostalgia for the Old South among this crowd than you’d find at a meeting of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Perhaps the loudest applause of the entire cruise came when Studs Terkel told a story about a former Ku Klux Klan member who’d seen the light and become a labor organizer. That connected the two themes most beloved by the approximately 300 old lefties who’d signed on for the cruise – racism and labor unions.

But then, these old lefties were really old. At 50, I was among the youngest of the Nation cruisers. This is partly because the Nation is a magazine that is stuck in the past but it’s also because young people don’t have the time and money to go on luxury cruises. The tab for a week on the M.S. Ryndam with the Nation was about $2,500.

This is a source of some embarrassment to the magazine, which prides itself on representing the working classes. So it was particularly amusing when a New York Times reporter came on board midway through the cruise and interviewed Nation publisher Victor Navasky.

The reporter, a woman by the name of Alex Kuczynski, wrote, “One of the richest ironies of The Nation cruises is that Mr. Navasky was inspired by the success of a similar cruise program run by The National Review, which is as right-wing as The Nation is left-wing liberal. Not only that: Eric Alterman, a Nation contributor, wrote an essay for the magazine in 1997 about a week he spent on a cruise to Alaska with The National Review, describing in vicious detail the elaborate food, the servile staff and the ostentatious surroundings with a disdain that would be telling and amusing if it weren't the exact same ship The Nation cruised on this year, the M.S. Ryndam, that he were describing.”

She quoted the response of Navasky: "My gosh, I didn't even realize that."

Another way of putting it might be a slight variation on that famous exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway: Nation Magazine readers are different from you and me. They got a lot of dough.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s a free country. But it didn’t take me long to get tired of dining with New Yorkers who would in one breath express their solidarity with the wretched of the earth and in the next breath talk about their summer houses by the beach - especially when I realized their summer houses by the beach cost about four times as much as my summer house by the beach - which also happens to be my fall, winter and spring house.

Still, there’s nothing wrong with being rich. In fact, it is a wonderful thing. Since I am a typical suburban father with school-age kids, the only cruise I could normally afford would be on the Staten Island ferry. So it was wonderful to pretend for a week that I was a rich guy.

The sensation of being on a huge vessel plying through Caribbean waters is an immensely satisfying one. I never got tired of taking the elevator to the top deck and watching the ocean waters churning nine stories below. There’s nothing quite like being able to indulge in fantasies of the high seas while also indulging in 24-hour room service and gourmet dining.

It would have been perfect but for my need to periodically strap on my Nation name tag and join all the other cruisers with their names and home towns displayed on their chests. The ultimate indignity was that these characters would assume I was one of them and ask questions like, "Isn't it horrible the way the Republicans are trying to steal votes in Florida?"

It happened that the cruise was scheduled for the first week in December, the same week when the Florida election drama reached its climax. The cruisers were convinced to a person that the Republicans were stealing the election. I would point out to them that election theft is an art form perfected by the Democrats. In my newspaper's home base of Newark, for example, the party bosses make a habit of jamming toothpicks into the voting machines so the Republican lever cannot be depressed.



But these Nation cruisers were, as I said, almost criminally naïve. That was proven by an anecdote that panelist Molly Ivins offered during a discussion on the get-out-the-vote campaign. She described how at noon on Election Day in Massachusetts, the Democrats realized that neighboring New Hampshire was still up for grabs. So Teddy Kennedy and the mayor of Boston quickly decided to let government workers in Massachusetts off early because many live in New Hampshire and would presumably vote the Democratic ticket there.

If the Republicans had done this sort of thing in Florida, the readers of the Nation would have been calling for indictments. But when Ivins finished the story about what she termed "the brilliant ground war" of the labor unions, they applauded.

About the only interesting comments I heard during the week concerned the behavior of the writer Christopher Hitchens on the prior year’s cruise. To hear the cruisers tell it, Hitchens spent most of the cruise alternately swigging from a bottle of Scotch and insulting his fellow lefties. This bothered them, though to me it sounded a lot more amusing than watching Tom Hayden drone on about globalization while availing himself of the services of a staff made up largely of Indonesians and Filipinos.

Hitchens may be a leftist nut himself, but at least he’s a leftist nut with a European perspective. Which is to say that he has no tolerance for what he calls the “credulous liberals” who make up the American left. In a recent Wall Street Journal column on the legacy of Bill Clinton, for example, Hitchens described the outgoing president as “the first American president to be credible accused of rape (and refuse comment on the charge),” and “the first president, or even human being, to say that he had a climax and she felt nothing, so it wasn’t sex.”

A little bit of that spirit would have done wonders to liven up this crowd. As it was, the panelists were all Americans and were all therefore believers in the absurd notion that it is possible to be both a socialist and an individualist simultaneously.

The juvenile level of the discourse was best illustrated by the argument advanced by a novelist by the name of Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver’s major theme, I gather, is environmental alarmism. She kept insisting to the audience that the way to understand the truth about the modern world is to read novels, particularly hers. A valid theory, perhaps, but why not follow it to its logical conclusion and read comic books?

What was most childlike about Kingsolver was her hypocrisy on the issue of the cruise itself. An audience member asked her whether it was politically correct for the Nation readers to burn huge amounts of fossil fuels traveling to tourist traps. This gave Kingsolver a chance to expel some air on her theory about what she calls “the kinship model” of human relations with nature. What this boiled down to was that luxury cruises are okay as long as lefties are on them. “It’s a way of getting at a more profound appreciation that will lead us to protect, for example, these coral reefs, even if no one can see them.”

Speak for yourself, Babs. When we got to Cozumel, an island off Mexico, I escaped the Nation crowd and headed to a beach. There I encountered a Mexican surfer named Pedro Marcial who rented me a surfboard. I spent the day not only looking at reefs but also getting pounded into them by some surprisingly large waves.

When I got back to the ship I made a point of telling the Nation people that I’d been surfing all day. I knew this would irritate them. Surfing is perhaps the best-ever example of what this crowd terms “cultural imperialism.” This is the export of American practices that are so much fun that Third World locals abandon their barbaric ways and begin to dress and act like Americans. Pedro was a classic example. Instead of whining about capitalism, he spent his days surfing, selling trinkets to tourists and picking up girls who came in on cruise ships. This is fun and therefore frowned upon by the left.

That is the dirty little secret of the American left. For all their talk about drugs and sex, they lead really boring lives. There are cops I know in Jersey who have more sex in a week than the typical leftie has in a year. But the cops are smart enough to keep their mouths shut about it.

That was the really funny thing about the Nation crowd. There was no one they hated more than the members of religious right. Yet in most respects they were exactly like fundamentalists. Everything from their lifestyles to their strict adherence to a rigid belief system was a mirror image of the religious right.

There was one difference: The members of religious right understand politics. They made an early decision to back George W. and they followed through on it until he had the most powerful job on the planet. The lefties, meanwhile, wasted their votes on Ralph Nader and helped get Bush elected. It was a measure of their political stupidity that even at this late date they were still debating whether it was a good idea to vote for Nader.

The ideas being offered were as old and tired as the audience, so I had a hard time paying attention. If not for a liberal supply of coffee and chocolate chip cookies, I would have had to give up altogether.

The intellectual highlight of the trip actually occurred before I got on board. My welcome packet included a slim paperback filled with past writings from the Nation, which was founded in 1865. The timeline on the cover showed the degeneration: The magazine that once boasted of publishing George Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken and Robert Frost now boasts of publishing Alice Walker and Susan Faludi.

The Mencken essay alone made the point perfectly. It concerned the subject of criticism. Mencken argued that the reason writers write is to show how brilliant they are. Anyone who claims to write to improve the world is a fraud and, much worse, a bad writer.

By that definition, of course, the current Nation magazine is a playground for bad writers. Here’s Walker: “All of our children, because of the white man’s assault on the planet, have a possibility of death by cancer in their almost immediate future.”

Forget the racism and the bad science. Look at the language. The "almost immediate" future? Events are either immediate – "having nothing coming between, with no intermediary" (Webster) – or not immediate. They cannot be almost immediate.

That type of writing comes from a certain type of thinking. The writer wants to show not how brilliant she is but how concerned for humanity she is. Walker does this not because she is a good person but because she is a bad writer. She has no choice.



The problem, as Mencken saw it, was that people who do not understand liberty cannot write intelligently. Liberty, he wrote in the Nation in 1923, “is the first thing and the last thing. So long as it prevails, the show is thrilling and stupendous; the moment it fails the show is a dull and dirty farce.”

The current crop of writers, Walker, Faludi, and that ilk, don't even understand the concept of liberty well enough to know that they are attacking it. The show is a dull and dirty farce.

It was not always so. The Nation used to discover such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, whose 1965 Nation essay on the Hell's Angels recalls an era when the show was still thrilling and stupendous. He was discovered by Carey McWilliams, the magazine's editor from 1955 to 1975.



By coincidence, I happen to have taken courses in political science at Rutgers with his son, a political science professor named also Carey McWilliams. It was the early 1970s, a time when virtually all of the youth of America were living under the same delusion that still grips the Nation crowd. Most of us students believed the old cliché about Marxism, the one that states that it is a good philosophy that was misinterpreted by bad people.

I can still recall McWilliams informing us that if we liked Marxism, then we had to support Stalin’s massacre of millions of peasants. Stalin didn’t do it because he was a bad guy. If he wanted to institute Marxism in the Soviet Union, he had to kill a lot of people. If not, not. But only a fool would think that the Russian Revolution could be accomplished without force.

By that standard, of course, I was on a ship of fools, people who persisted in the absurd belief that socialism can be imposed by some means other than government coercion.

When I got back from the cruise I called my old professor, who still teaches at Rutgers. McWilliams noted that his father came from Colorado and made a habit of finding and publishing writers from outside the mainstream. But the current Nation is being published by and for a group of people who live within a few blocks of each other in Manhattan. Because they’re wealthy Americans, they can afford to hold contradictory ideas about politics.

"You've got people whose basic view of life is at bottom aristocratic," McWilliams said. "At heart, they don't want to be told what to do, but because they live in America they have to think of themselves as democratic."

During the '60s, the left switched from being a traditional workers' movement into a movement for personal liberation. McWilliams recalls that his father was bemused by all the talk of liberation.

"He was such a critic. He hated the kind of fashionable shibboleths that come along with movements. When various types of liberation were in fashion, he always said he wondered what people are going to be liberated to do."



That remains a good question. For all their nostalgia about the New Deal era, the people on the cruise seemed to forget that it was a time of rigid social conformity. Individualism was actively discouraged by both the government and the society.

This conflict had become apparent during a group discussion after one of those endless seminars. These discussions were even more boring than the seminars and I generally avoided them. But duty is duty. So one afternoon I forsook the pool, the sauna and the hot tub and sat in on a group discussion of what these people called "progressivism.''



An elderly gentleman brought up the idea of restoring conscription. Every young American should be required to spend a year or two in government service, either in the military or in some other capacity, such as in environmental or social work, he opined.



Conscription is a concept with an impeccable left-wing pedigree. The New Deal had at its heart a reliance on peacetime conscription, which was enacted by the Democrats over Republican objections. Yet the Nation reader who proposed this was quickly shouted down. I was there merely as an observer, so I resisted the temptation to shout out, "You're leftists, for God's sake! You love Fidel Castro! What could you possibly have against government coercion?"

Conscription is just one example. On issue after issue, the Nation readers alternated between expressing distrust of the government and expressing regret that Al Gore or Ralph Nader hadn't won the election and made the government even bigger.

This was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as listening to Patricia Williams. The pattern of long-winded spiels followed by bursts of applause continued throughout the cruise.

Toward the end of the cruise it suddenly came to me what the whole Williams spectacle reminded me of. I had once seen a particularly good presentation of the Samuel Beckett play “Waiting for Godot.” One scene remained etched in my memory. Late in the play, a sadistic character named Pozzo appears on stage holding a leash connected to the collar of a poor wretch named Lucky, who walks on all fours. Lucky does nothing but grovel and moan until suddenly Pozzo commands him “Think!”

Lucky gets up on two legs, clears his throat and delivers a speech that begins with the words “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God …” He continues in this vein for several minutes, punctuating his peroration with such phrases as “with some exceptions for reasons unknown” and “in the light of” and so forth.

Beckett seems to have caught perfectly the role of the intellectual vs. the mob in the 20th century. A pretense of freedom but a very short leash. And of course it was the exact spectacle I had witnessed with the unfortunate Patricia Williams.

One thing I’ll say for the Nation crowd: They’re well read. So my dinner companions all understood instantly when I pointed out the parallel between their treatment of Williams and Beckett’s brilliant insight into the role of the intellectual.

“Remember that scene from ‘Waiting for Godot’?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, you guys are Pozzo and she’s Lucky.”

For a brief second, a glimmer of recognition crossed their faces. Then one piped up:

“Are you sure you’re not a racist?”