I mentioned on here a couple of weeks ago that after decades of making things up – writing novels and screenplays – I was now really going to make things up by writing a non-fiction book. I neglected to mention the publisher that is taking this wild risk. It is Peter Collier whose relatively new house Encounter Books has a growing reputation for serious political works. His list includes some fairly distinguished characters like Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball and Norman Podhoretz. [Does Collier know what he's getting into?-ed? Shhh...] Podhoretz in particular interests me as a model because he literally “wrote the book” on the genre in which I will be working – the memoir of political transformation. I have just finished his latest, Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. It’s great, but it makes me nervous. I have a few interesting “ex-friends” too – but nothing like that list.
Congratulations to you and Collier both. I hope, in addition to famous ex-friends, you will tell us lots about the texture of your experience around this issue as it changed, and the philosophical and world-view themes. Less riveting prose than being “cut” at a Hollywood party, but do try to sneak it in.
And tell us how to order advance copies.
Norman Podhoretzís insights on Hannah Arendt were most interesting. Her disgusting adoration of Martin Heidegger will make you want to puke. Arendt deserves our contempt. It is easy to argue that she caused far more harm than good during her life.
Isn’t the saying, “by their ex-friends, ye shall know them…” or something like that?
When it becomes time to translate your new work into the world’s languages give us, your international followers, the sign. Congratulations.
Roger ó I’d also recommend Harry Stein’s How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and Found Inner Peace, if Borders will sell it to you.
Did you know Hannah Arendt’s editor for most of her career was an ex-SS officer?
richard mcenroe
Yikes … I didn’t know that. A while ago I did a google on her. Seems to have been around and about in the philosophy world, which admittedly I don’t know too much of. I always found philosophy a bit to esoteric for my taste, although I do follow the Orthodox Christian theology quite a bit.
Arendt was the mouthpiece for the SS’s revisionist accounts of the camps. The “we were but innocents cogs in a wheel” crap. She ignored the victim’s accounts of the camps. Especially the many acts of heroism and resistance that occured. It is news to me her editor was SS, but not a surprise.
My experience of becoming conservative rather than liberal happened in 1980 ñ I was a Reagan Dem, now a Bush Rep I guess. Actually, I am still a JFK Dem? Rep? (The real JFK, not the imitation) The Dems left JFK-land long ago and got lost in the quagmire of Carter, McGovern, Dukakis, and now Kerry.
The hardest part is the image change. I went from cool to square, Robert Redford to Pat Boone. As you know, I am sure, peer pressure and the cult of cool is the glue that keeps the left together.
thedragonflies,
I think you are on to something. I remember at college Cheney came and gave a speech and all I could do was marvel at how uncool the students, his adoring fans, at the front of the lecture hall were. I too was not cool but I aspired….Which is why I think a parody group like Communists for Kerry and Arnold are so important. Republican cool and fun has become a real possibility.
Mongai,
It may be too late for you and me, but fortunately for us, Roger is cool enough to carry us all.
thedragonflies,
It is a lot of weight– The collective uncool of you [but I suspect you really are cool (but modest)], me and many others, but someone has to pull the load.
Mongai
I, for one, have always been actively opposed to “cool,” which is apparently the reason why I didn’t make it to the finish line as a Democrat.
I was thinking about this earlier. I first parted company with the left over Israel back in the late 60s and early 70s but continued to vote mostly for Democrats. The battle over Reagan’s Space Defense Initiative, which seemed emminently sensible, further pushed me to the right. As a child of the 50s and 60s, growing up under the threat of nuclear holocaust, a missile defense system made a whole lot of sense. Ultimately it was Reagan’s insistance on pushing forward with SDI that hastened the end of the USSR, because they literally could not afford to build enough missiles to overcome SDI.
A state-controlled economy couldn’t provide the bucks to build the missiles so the military reluctantly let Gorbachev initiate some reforms and pretty soon they were all tumbling down a slippery slope.
Catherine that is the coolest! Tis nothing cooler than having “always been actively opposed to cool” methinks.
John Amadeus,
And the Left has been holding a grudge against Reagan ever since. Being proven wrong is a hard pill to swallow.
mongal
It happens to be true.
Though I must say there is a wide, wide streak of non-cool amongst the Dems, too.
I mean . . . take Al Gore.
Please.
Catherine,
Al Gore was very non-cool. Very true. Carter was also not cool. Kennedy and Clinton were “cool.” But it is your kind of cool, the active opposition to “cool”, which I think is coolest, or the true cool. In this vein the Republican party has a chance to become the cool party in opposition to the reactionary “cool” of the Democrats.