Howe Now, Chairman Mao

A guide to the Professional Leftist of the eighties

IN the sixties, the Professional Leftist could be as catlike and sleek as Jim Morrison in leather or as bushy and rumpled as Dennis Hopper in faded denim. He could wear ridge-soled boots capable of kicking in a policeman's chops or pad about in pacifist sandals. The important thing was to look like a hip Christ, hairy and destined for martyrdom, crowned with a halo of cool. In those high-caliber days, when Black Panthers armed themselves like bandidos and student radicals pulled Marx Brothers antics in the dean's office, the Professional Leftist could feel that he was saddled to a mighty steed, riding into the apocalypse. History is ours! said the youth of America, and on the crotch of his black leather pants Jim Morrison struck a match, as if his very loins could spark revolution. But the Professional Leftist was worried. Radical magazines were fond of showing pictures of little tykes taking big drags of reefer (the message being: The children of Amerika are turning into alien life-forms), but what would happen when the pot fumes cleared? "Which books, records, films, and slogans will form the sacraments of their salvation?" asked Richard Goldstein in the radical pop magazine (75(1969). "How will they handle the memory of their violent past? When they look back on this year of the heroic guerilla, will they see a model or an aberration?"

Aberration, Daddy-o. Only a fringe of true believers still dream of unionizing the army, taking to the hills with oliveskinned insurgents, or founding a farm commune where we can, like, grow our own food, man. Yet, unsaddled by history, the Professional Leftist hasn't slunk off into the bushes and disappeared into silence. In the sixties, the Professional Leftist believed in Mao, marijuana, Marcuse, booming orgasms, Ramparts, and the radicalizing power of rock 'n' roll. In the eighties, the Professional Leftist has put away the foolish things of youth and become an out-ofsorts grown-up, a moralizing grouch—a high-minded kvetch. His hero now is Irving Howe— not Irving Howe the literary critic, but Irving Howe the conscience of the left, whose magazine, Dissent, is a quarterly tombstone for socialism. To the Professional Leftist, Howe —cranky, forthright, stubbornly committed—has kept faith while others have sold out to neoconservatism or retreated into (favorite left-wing word) "privatism." His commitment to socialism is noble precisely because it's so futile and feistily vague. "We always know what he is against," wrote Hilton Kramer of Howe in TheNewCri- terion, "or at least whom he is against; we almost never know what he is for. ' ' The Professional Leftist isn't into positive particulars. He's an all-purpose guilt dispenser, specializing in feeling bad and making others feel bad. A whiff of religion and he turns into Robert Coles.

Here's how to spot a Professional Leftist.

Likes: John Berger, E. P. Thompson, Fassbinder films (as allegories of rotting capitalism, etc.), the political melodramas of Costa-Gavras and Sidney Lumet, debates at Town Hall, unions, 1930ish Jewish left-wing sentimentality (Odets, where is thy sting?), Dylan before he enlisted in Jesus' army, Tom Wolfe before he speared Leonard Bernstein with a toothpick in Radical Chic, antinuclear lesbian folksingers, Studs Terkel's tape recorder, opera.

Dislikes: Nixon, Kissinger, Jerry Falwell, Commentary, The New Criterion, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, The Big Chill (for fostering "privatism"), Hill Street Blues (for fostering pessimistic attitudes toward the underclass), the invasion of Grenada, General Westmoreland's lawsuit against CBS, cruise missiles, Israeli jets, ballet.

Ambivalences: Susan Sontag (since her equation of Communism with Fascism), Fidel Castro (all those gays in the slammer), George Orwell, Ms. magazine, Yoko Ono, MTV.

Favorite topics of discussion: the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, American bases in Honduras, Jesse Jackson's true "Hymie" feelings, the rightward drift of The New Republic, the correct response to AIDS, the new baby boom, Milan Kundera's lightness of being.

Favorite topics of ridicule: George Will's erudition, Ed Meese's finances.

Favorite topic of speculation: Alexander Cockburn's finances, as in "Did he ever return that $10,000?"

The women in their lives: The Professional Leftist tends to marry rich so that he can live comfily and yet shield himself from suggestions of gross intimacy with m-o-n-e-y. A P.L. never says, "I have a house on Cape Cod," but "My wife's parents have a house on Cape Cod that we're using for the summer."

Whom the Professional Leftist would most like to be in history: John Reed.

Whom the Professional Leftist would most like to be today: Warren Beatty, playing John Reed.

The Professional Leftist's vision of paradise: a tropical Sweden, politically neutral and economically socialist, yet staffed with bare-breasted girls pouring milk from coconuts.

The Professional Leftist's vision of hell: being the pillow on which Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter lay their complaining heads.

James Wolcott