1 William Henry’s largely overlooked book In Defense of Elitism (1994) has many intelligent (and horrifying) things to say about the “battle between elitism and egalitarianism” that has been waged in American society since World War II—a battle in which, he points out, “egalitarianism has been winning far too thoroughly.”
2 Tenured Radicals was originally published in 1990 by Harper & Row. HarperCollins brought out a paperback edition, with a new postscript, in 1991. In 1998, a thoroughly revised and updated edition of Tenured Radicals was published in paperback by Ivan R. Dee.
3 Other stops for “Beat Culture and the New America” were the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
4 Among the dissenting voices was my reflection, “A Baneful Influence,” The New Criterion, May 1997, pages 1-2.
5 Commentary also published an excerpt.
6 Mudrick is especially good on Sontag’s use of the word “exemplary”: “Barthes’s ideas have an exemplary coherence”; “Some lives are exemplary, others not”; Rimbaud and Duchamp made “exemplary renunciations” in giving up art for, respectively, gun-running and chess; “Silence exists as a decision—in the exemplary suicide of the artist ...”; etc. Dilating on Sontag’s effusions about silence—“the silence of eternity prepares for a thought beyond thought, which must appear from the perspective of traditional thinking ... as no thought at all”-Mudrick usefully points out the similarity between Sontag and that other sage of silence, Kahlil Gibran: “Has silence or talk about it,”Mudrick asks, “ever anywhere else been so very ... exemplary?”
7 Norman Podhoretz has suggested that the “rapidity”of Sontag’s rise was due partly to her filling the role of “Dark Lady of American Letters,” vacated when Mary McCarthy was “promoted to the more dignified status of Grande Dame as a reward for her years of brilliant service. The next Dark Lady would have to be, like her, clever, learned, good-looking, capable of writing [New York-intellectual] family-type criticism as well as fiction with a strong trace of naughtiness.” The “ante on naughtiness,”Podhoretz notes, had gone up since McCarthy’s day: “in an era of what Sherry Abel has called the ‘fishnet bluestocking,’hints of perversion and orgies had to be there.”
8 Hollander quotes from “Dissent in Cuba,” a 1979 essay by Carlos Ripoll: “Armando Valladares, a poet and painter, has been imprisoned for the last 19 years.... The young poet Miguel Sales was given a 25-year sentence in 1974 after he was found preparing to flee Cuba with his wife and infant daughter.... Another poet, Angel Cuadra, ... served two-thirds of a 15-year sentence.... Cuban penal legislation prescribes sentences of up to eight years for those who ‘create, distribute or possess’ written or oral ‘propaganda’ ‘against the socialist state.’” Et cetera.
9 Silber is careful not to blame Clark Kerr, then in charge of the University of California “multiversity,” for the disaster. “After all,” Silber observed, “higher education in this country has no Distant Early Warning system, unless it be California itself.”
10 Readers nervous at the thought of Jones at the helm of TIAA may rest easy: as of this writing he is chief executive officer of the Smith-Barney Asset Management division.
11 Among those at Yale who vociferously supported the Panthers were Bill Lann Lee, now head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and Hillary Clinton (then Hillary Rodham). As David Brock noted in his book The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (a generally sympathetic account of its subject), “Hillary was not just one of the faceless thousands who appeared on the [New Haven] Green to show symbolic support. Rather than fire-bombing buildings, she was busy using the legal system to further the Panther cause.” It was a strategy that worked. Ericka Huggins, who boiled the water with which Rackley was tortured, was later elected to a California school board. Warren Kimbro, who confessed to shooting Rackley in the head, won an affirmative-action scholarship to Harvard and became an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State College.
12 The Australian philosopher David Stove spoke of “the frivolous elevation of ‘the critical attitude’ into a categorical imperative” in colleges and universities today. The principal result, Stove noted, has been “to fortify millions of ignorant graduates and undergraduates in the belief, to which they are already too firmly wedded by other causes, that the adversary posture is all, and that intellectual life consists in ‘directionless quibble: ”
13 One can trace this idea back at least to John Stuart Mill’s attack on “the despotism of custom” and the “tyranny of [established] opinion” in On Liberty. For a criticism of Mill’s position, see my essay “Mill, Stephen, and the Nature of Freedom” in The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), pages 43-69.
14 By way of contrast, in 1960 Redbook was featuring such stories as “Christmas and Santa Claus: A Revelation” (December) and “Queen Elizabeth’s New Baby: Fascinating Preview by a Veteran Royal Observer” (January). In 1960 no one would have assumed that “revelations” about Christmas and Santa Claus contained anything untoward; today, a story with that title would be the occasion of ribald jokes.
16 Davis’s career provides a splendid example of Marcuse’s political thought in action. Indicted in 1970 for supplying guns to aid in an attempted courtroom escape that ended in four deaths, she became a fugitive for two months. Arrested, she was tried for murder, conspiracy, and kidnapping, but was acquitted by a sympathetic jury. Davis subsequently toured several Communist regimes, receiving various honors while denouncing American society for its racism and injustice. In 1994, she was appointed to the Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies at the University of California, where she is still employed.
17 Perhaps Reich was correct about surfing. In March 1999, newswires carried a story about Plymouth University in England, where students can now obtain a degree in surfing. Emphasizing the academic rigor of “Surf Science and Technology,” Dr. Colin Williams, identified as the “head of surfing,” said applicants would need A-levels as well as surf boards. The university’s course catalog explains that “the three year (or four year with placement) course offers a broad perspective on the marine sciences and the technology underpinning the surf industry and the surf culture itself” Matthew Arnold, where art thou?
18 Leary later claimed that the whole psychedelic movement had been “planned and scripted by the Central Intelligence [Agency].” Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain offers an extensively documented exploration of that thesis. Written from a hard left-wing perspective—it is endorsed, inter alios, by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg—Acid Dreams is part paean to psychedelics, part paranoid anti-American diatribe. The authors repeatedly assure us that people will continue to take LSD “to satisfy a deep rooted need for wholeness and meaning,” etc., even as they excoriate the CIA for its experiments with the drug on various unwitting individuals. The book needs to be taken with a grain of salt—it will appeal, as Andrei Codrescu says in his introduction to the 1992 edition, to “believers in capital C Conspiracy.” Nevertheless, it provides disturbing and credible evidence of abuses by the CIA and other agencies of the United States government.
19 That is according to some sources. According to the Timothy Leary website (
http://www.leary.com), the film in question “was a simulation created by profiteering filmmakers.” The authors of the website explain that although “Leary was excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension;” he discovered that the company with which he contracted to perform the procedure planned “to defame Leary and exploit the situation” for its own benefit. Instead, Leary’s ashes, together with those of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek,” and others were blasted 300 miles into space.
20 Helping to get scribbling violent criminals—especially ones who professed admiration for his work—out of jail became something of a habit with Norman Mailer. As noted above in Chapter 2, in the early 1980s Mailer helped get the murderer Jack Abbott released from prison. Abbott promptly stabbed and killed a waiter in New York and was then placed beyond even Mailer’s intercession.
21 The advertisements that ran in such publications in the late 1960s also give one a good sense of the radical atmosphere of the times. Among the ads one finds accompanying “The Trial of Bobby Seale;” for example, is one for “the first-run campus premiere” of Fidel, a film brought to the world by “Review Presentations,” an offshoot of The New York Review of Books. This “startling new film on Fidel and Cuba today” is described as “an extraordinary in-depth report on Fidel and the continuing revolution. Beautifully photographed in color, it shows Fidel among his people, listening, arguing, philosophizing, laughing, cajoling, reminiscing” and includes “a very moving section on Che called ‘The Ballad of Che Guevara.’”
22 This chapter, with an introduction by Joseph Kraft, was published without identifying the translator in the March 1960 number of Harper’s. Silvers subsequently translated the rest of the book, which was published in English as The Gangrene (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1960).
23 To his credit, the Review’s resident caricaturist, David Levine, refused to provide a drawing of the incendiary device. Though himself a self-described “radical-socialist” who cheerfully supplied malevolently grotesque send-ups of President Nixon and other political figures, Levine rightly regarded this seeming endorsement of violence as beyond the pale.