Word: podhoretz
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...thing, he is beginning to show the signs of an affliction peculiar to liberal-left wits--Podhoretz fixation. Norman Podhoretz and the magazine he has carried to the political right since the 60s, Commentary, make a number of appearances in the book...
...prevailing political winds. Trillin writes, "When Reagan named a neo-conservative to chair the NEH, Big Grant submitted a history proposal with a thesis that amounted to this: slavery was bad, of course, but could the slaves be said to have suffered compared to the Yeshiva student on Norman Podhoretz's block in Brooklyn who lived in constant peril of being ridiculed by black teen-agers for throwing like a girl...
Kerouac himself describes a deflant search for good times in an essay. The Roaming Beatniks. The Beats' critics get a word in, too--from the granted condescension of Bostonian poet John Ciardi to the quasi-intellectual sneering of Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz. And New York Times accounts of Beat revelry round out the assortment of perspectives...
...isolate us from the real world, but some people, like Mr. Abramowitz, are much more isolated than that. After four years, they are unable to see Harvard life in other than the tired stereotypes the Crimson does its part to foster. I liot House is not full of little Podhoretz's, nor, probably, has it ever been. Eliot does indeed have more than its share of students with conservative views, but for those of us who consider ourselves "liberals," (and that's with a small 'I'--the self-conscious "Liberal" Abramowitz misses is better off dead) Eliot has one advantage...
...point here is not to second-guest the Class of 1970, but to suggest the ways in which Harvard works to shut us from responsibility for our politics. This trend cuts both ways. The little Podhoretz's in Eliot House today telling us to protect our "interests" in Central America would be singing a different tune were they getting draft notices in the mail next week rather than invitations to work for Morgan Stanley. Happily we don't have to make the life and death choices Fallows had to make, but indications are that we still haven't learned...