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MUGGED BY MATURITY
A REVIEW OF Harry Stein’s How I Accidentally Joined the Vast
Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace) by Mark Webster
Warning! This is a silly book with a serious message.
In middle age, Stein, a novelist, column writer, and former card
carrying liberal and new age kind of guy, found himself lost in the dark
woods of the culture wars and a part of the vast right wing conspiracy. Of
course, there was no “conspiracy.” That was Hillary Clinton’s phrase
for anyone who had the temerity to hold different views than the members
of her fellow/sister narcissistic and self-justifying whiners.
What brought Stein to this lowly state?
Well, he became a parent.
About the time of the birth of his first child, Stein became mugged
by the realization that his once cherished liberal beliefs could not
sustain his family into the future. As
a sixties person, Stein realized he had lived in a parent-less society in
which bad ideas could burden the future of his children.
It’s not so much that Stein changed.
He always saw himself as committed to fairness and individual
liberty. He still is.
The society around him, however, had changed.
Liberals no longer stood for fairness but inequity, not individual
liberty but collective rights. Attempts
to remake society had failed and left disaster in their wake.
This book recounts Stein’s journey to the re-realization that
“right is still right and wrong is still wrong.”
Stein blames his wife for pushing him to the right.
After their first child was born, she surprised him by quitting her
job to live round the clock with their baby.
This pushed him into the “Mommy” wars.
While researching an article about the pros and con of child-care,
it suddenly hit him that there might be emotional costs for children daily
warehoused in kinder-gulags. Even
the famous Dr. Spock told him, off the record of course, he had serious
doubts about day care. When Stein put forth his doubts in the article, he
suffered an onslaught of denunciations.
He learned to agree with Christopher Lasch’s statement that
“[t]his is a profoundly anti-child culture.”
After Reagan trounced Mondale in 1984, Stein wrote an article in
the New York Times about what went “wrong.”
He argued that Democrats had handed the Republicans the values
issues and had made “pariahs of millions who might have been our
allies” instead of requiring rigid ideological stances on hot cultural
issues. He catches hell from
the usual true believers.
Early in 1992, he sees through candidate Clinton in a singular
event: Ricky Ray Rector severely damaged his brain in a prison suicide
attempt following his conviction for murdering a police officer.
Candidate Clinton flew back to Arkansas from New Hampshire to deny
Rector a stay of execution on television.
When Ray went to the death chamber, he left a piece of pie he
intended to eat later. Rector
died because focus groups told Clinton he had to appear tough.
Stein voted for Perot.
Also in 1992, Stein made the statement that Dan Quayle was right in
his famous “gaffe” about Murphy Brown and single moms bringing up
children. This time he
was called a fascist, an all-purpose word favored by the anointed in lieu
of developing a counter-argument.
Not so oddly, Stein’s parents were Communist sympathizers who
believed the aspirations of the Communist Party were to “make America
live up to its highest aspirations for itself.”
Of course, these same people still refuse to confront the horror
they supported. They seek to
be right even when they are wrong by arguing, right or wrong, it was the
nobility of their intentions that mattered. I saw something similar
recently when former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson,
aka Kathleen Soliah, pleaded guilty in California to two felony counts.
A few seconds later, outside the courtroom, she argued her
innocence while justifying her acts. She maintained it was not she who was to blame but the
“tenor of the times.”
Stein has small chapters on all the hot button issues of the times.
At length, he shows how the New York Times has declined from
being a great newspaper of record to a rag of political correctness.
He is sympathetic to gay rights but sums up the whole movement in a
couple of pithy statements. His elderly father-in-law says:” The first seventy years of
my life I never heard anything about homosexuals; the last ten years
it’s all I hear about.” After
a run-in with gay author and activist Harvey Fierstein, Stein says: “The
bottom line is, lots of us out here don’t want the Harvey Fiersteins of
the world imposing their version of normalcy on us any more than they want
Pat Robertson imposing his on them.”
He also discusses the great mistake it was to politicize AIDS.
He demonstrates how Michael Fumento’s book The Myth of
Heterosexual AIDS never got a fair hearing, and bookstores that
thought of themselves as the protectors of the First Amendment wouldn’t
even stock his book.
He goes ballistic on feminism.
As a husband and father, he wants his wife and daughter to have the
same rights and privileges as men. He sees that as common sense feminism
few would oppose. But
feminism has been “replaced by an army of ideologues seeking to impose
their own, narrow, joyless version of how things ought to be on us all.”
Curiously, he still favors a woman’s right to choose abortion
although he longingly thinks about the three children he co-created who
were aborted. They would now
be in their twenties.
He portrays the bias of the media by showing how unfortunate
statements by LA Dodger manager Al Campanis and Jimmy “the Greek”
Snyder ruined their careers while Andy Rooney and Jimmy Breslin were
quickly excused for the insensitive statements they made.
By the way, I had forgotten that Campanis had made his racial gaffe
during a television show celebrating Campanis’ old friend and
roomate Jackie Robinson. In
addition, Atlanta mogul Ted Turner can get away with anti-Catholic
statements, but Atlanta Brave John Rocker is quickly taken to task for his
illogical rants.
Although this book was published long before September 11, Stein
praises Mayor Giuliani for forging the link between good citizenship and
private morality in demanding that citizens take responsibility for their
actions and not blame their errors on society or the police.
This evidently was before the good mayor’s marital problems.
Nevertheless, Stein is right: Giuliani has his faults, but he calls
it as he sees it.
Stein also takes on schools for their declining standards and the
racist assumptions of affirmative action.
Sometimes the problems overlap, as when radical feminist professors
teach their students that logic and consistency are “male constructs”
which need to be eliminated.
Stein is no libertarian - yet.
Give him a few years. He’ll
get there.
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