The Enemies List

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The Enemies List Page 11

by P. J. O'Rourke


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  Amnesty International

  Common Cause

  Greenpeace

  National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL)

  National Audubon Society

  National Organization for Women (NOW)

  Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

  The Nature Conservancy

  Pediatric AIDS Foundation

  People for the American Way

  Public Citizen

  Rigpe Dorje Foundation

  Save the Manatees

  Sierra Club

  We’ve spared you the phone numbers of these “organizations,” which are listed alongside.

  Getting slightly off the eleemosynary track, Irving L. Jacobs of San Diego, California, gleefully roasts:

  The San Diego Union-Tribune, ostensibly a conservative daily newspaper, for turning over its Arts and Entertainment departments to the liberal-left. A red star goes to book editor Arthur Salm, who damned Give War a Chance for its “fascist sentiments,” bashed The Conservative Crack-Up as the work of a has-been, but who just did an adoring, worshipful interview with Molly Ivins, who “gleefully roasts right-wingers.”

  Ronald D. Crockett of Wollaston, Massachusetts, wrote to the United States Office of Personnel Management to complain about the inclusion of the idiotic People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in the Combined Federal Campaign, a United Way-type program that solicits charitable donations in government workplaces. This is from the reply he got:

  In December 1987, Congress passed the first permanent legislation on the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). In that legislation OPM was mandated to make the CFC more inclusive rather than exclusive. As a result, many new and different types of voluntary agencies have been found eligible.... Next year’s CFC list of eligible charities will probably increase again. Furthermore, in conformance with the mandate of Congress, it is reasonable to expect that this list will contain groups that some employees may find objectionable. Nevertheless, I expect the past trend to continue and the CFC will have another record year for total contributions.

  Sincerely,

  Dennis A. Matteotti

  CFC Operations

  Hope you never need a baboon liver, Dennis.

  Marguerite Snow of Stockton, California, admits:

  I’ve lived in California all of my life and I know it’s a big state and I know we have more than our share of flakes, but even I was amazed to see how many groups could crawl out from under the woodwork to oppose the liberation of my children from our loathsome teachers’ union. And they claim it’s only a “partial” list.

  She attaches a California Teachers Association/National Education Association advertisement:

  On Record Against “Choice/Vouchers”

  Groups Agreeing with CTA’s Position

  American Association of University Women

  Americans United for Separation of Church and State

  Anti-Defamation League

  Black American Political Association of California

  California Council of United Auto Workers Retirees

  California Democratic Party

  California Legislative Council for Older Americans

  California National Organization for Women

  California State P.T.A.

  California State Police Association

  Chicano Federation

  Coalition of California Welfare Organizations

  Coalition of Medical Providers

  Committee to Protect the Political Rights of Minorities

  Jewish Community Relations Committee, Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles

  Legislative Black Caucus

  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Region 1

  Older Women’s League, San Francisco

  The Rainbow Coalition

  A. Philip Randolph Institute

  Raza Administrators and Counselors of Higher Education

  Thai Association of Southern California

  Unified Vietnamese Community Council

  The above is a partial listing of their partial listing.

  Adrian H. Krieg of Woodbridge, Connecticut, forwards a wonderful article from the September 17,1990, issue of Forbes, describing some thirty-five interlocking and largely tax-free Ralph Nader organizations. Says Forbes: “Like all good empire builders, Ralph Nader has created a highly effective organization, the elements of which are tied together by financial and personal relationships.” Some of the most egregious Nader metastases, as described by Forbes:

  Center for Auto Safety: major grants from State Farm and Allstate foundations. Sells litigation kits to lawyers involved in auto litigation

  Occupational Safety and Health Law Center: specializing in defending workers’ rights and employee suits

  Center for Science in the Public Interest: petitions and lobbies for regulation of the food and pesticide industry

  Citizen Utility Boards: funding: membership; “intervenor fees” utilities are legally obliged to pay CUB activists

  Public Citizen, Inc.: Nader’s longtime flagship lobbying litigation group

  Public Interest Research Groups: twenty-five state chapters on ninety college campuses. Funding: through mandatory or “negative checkoff” student fees

  Trial Lawyers for Public Justice Foundation: activities: class action, precedent-setting suits; litigation clearinghouse

  Council for Responsible Genetics: works to restrict recombinant DNA research

  Institute for Injury Reduction: funding: plaintiff attorneys. Finances product liability research and media events

  Consumers Union: co-founded Center for Auto Safety with Nader. Collaborates with Public Citizen to fight against tort reforms.

  National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy: lobbies foundations, corporations to give to “progressive” groups

  Fund for Constitutional Government: funded in part by General Motors heir Stuart Mott. Its Government Accountability Project works closely with Public Citizen, filing joint amicus briefs against the government.

  As if on cue, Matthew G. Mirmak writes from Minneapolis, Minnesota:

  I suggest that you nominate Augsburg College, their student senate, and the Naderite chapter of MPIRG (Minnesota Public Interest Research Group) for conspiring to force the student body of Augsburg to pay an additional mandatory fee of $3.75, which is tacked on to our tuition bill, to MPIRG, in order to fund their leftist and downright pinko activities.

  Eric T. Fritz of Mauston, Wisconsin, is, like Mr. Mirmak, angry with his midwestern institution of higher learning:

  $47 of my $1,957 student bill at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater goes to the Segregated University Fee Allocation Committee, which in turn goes to groups like the Gay Lesbian Student Union, the Environmental Federation, and RISE, or Resistance to Intervention, Suppression, and Exploitation, a bunch of sixties dropouts and crybabies just to the left of Pol Pot.

  Mark Peña of Austin, Texas, sends us the schedule of the University of Texas’s “1992 English Department Graduate Colloquium: Pedagogy and Values.” Among the various panels offered the lucky participants:

  Feminism, Marxism, and Cultural Activism in the University

  Rethinking Pedagogy in Light of Postmodernism

  Desire in the Classroom: A Pedagogical Rubric

  Coming Out Professionally: The Responsibility of Gay and Straight Faculty

  Gender and Trauma in the Classroom

  Teaching Writing and the Lesbian Subject

  Writing, Power, and Homophobia in the Computer-Mediated Classroom

  Learning Composition and Literature from Women of Color

  Teaching Reading and Writing as a History of Competition Between Social Discourses

  The Cultural Trope of Literacy and the Rhetoric of Grammar

  The Shifting Subject(s) of Literary Study; or, How Do You Spell ‘Hegemony’?

  We need hardly say t
hat Mr. Peña would like the U.T. English Department added to the Enemies List.

  J. Lloyd Simms of Barnegat, New Jersey, detests:

  Warner Bros., for funding Spike Lee’s Malcolm X movie when they could’ve used that money toward Batman 3

  Network executives, for giving millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity to Sister Souljah by booking her on such shows as Larry King, Today, etc., etc.

  Robert P. Fairchild of Arlington, Virginia, gives a Bronx cheer to:

  Michael Wood, PBS personality and putative archaeologist, described as “writer and presenter” of Legacy, whose final installment (“The Barbarian West”) concludes with one-world platitudes and ravings in the genre of apocalyptic environmentalism

  And points out that Maryland Public Television, NHK (Enterprises?), MFS (Mutual Fund Services?), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were all listed in the credits as sources of funding for Legacy.

  Dr. Tom Bohr of Redlands, California, would have us spin the dial on:

  KPFK, a Los Angeles-area station located somewhere near Tom Hayden’s haunt of Berkeley-South, Santa Monica. It is part of the “Radio Pacifica” (Pacifistica?) network. Besides promoting the rantings of nuclear winter nutcake and pseudo scientist Helen Caldicott, they were proud to offer airtime to Louis Farrakhan henchman Steve Cokely of Chicago. Cokely insinuated that federal officials set some of the L.A riot fires. He is better known for accusing Jewish doctors of injecting blacks with AIDS.

  Paul Pakala of Appleton, Wisconsin, vents his spleen upon the New York State Arts Council: “I feel they deserve an evening in a burned-out theater, sitting in urine, listening to lesbian rap singers, and wearing tie-dyed T-shirts.”

  John Doughty of Monrovia, California, mails us the National Chicano Moratorium Committee’s “wanted” poster of Christopher Columbus. The great misplacer of India is accused of “grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a culture, rape, torture and maiming of indigenous people.”

  Scott Forrest of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, is a consumer-activist consumer of Consumer Reports. He suggests they be recalled for “their constant sermonizing about the homeless, the ‘environment,’ and socialized medicine. I wish they would spare me the lectures and just tell me which VCR to buy.”

  Eric J. Paddon of Devon, Pennsylvania, avers:

  My nominee for the Enemies List is Comedy Central, an irritating cable TV channel which on the average serves up two hours of decent programming (Jack Benny, Steve Allen) and twenty-two hours of pinko propaganda. [Eric, are you sure about Steve?—Ed.] In addition to the usual group of talentless stand-up comics who think they can get a laugh by uttering the name “Ronald Reagan” in a sarcastic manner, the worst abuser is a series known as Mystery Science Theater 3000.

  The premise of the series isn’t too bad. A naive geek and his two robots are stranded in space and forced to watch bad movies that they talk back to. However, their forays into political satire always end up on the pink side.

  Case in point: While talking back to a bad science fiction movie in which aliens brainwash earthlings to do their bidding, the stupefied human begins to walk about in a daze and offers up this bit of sarcasm: “Now I understand, Ronald Reagan was a great president.”

  Kevin J. Hritz—what is it with the middle initial “J.” among us incredibly talented and sensitive people?—of St. Mary’s, Pennsylvania, proscribes:

  General Electric, for those saccharine multicultural ads on This Week with David Brinkley

  One World Ted’s little outfit in Atlanta, [CNN, for the] disgusting The People Bomb series shown during May of 1992. I hope he takes the advice of the series and decides to forgo the creation of his progeny with Miss Hanoi 1972

  Pennsylvania State University, for creating the Office of the Vice Provost of Underrepresented Groups

  Any group or corporation that actually pays to sponsor a $10,000 Anita Hill speech. You know who you are.

  The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. I never thought it would happen, but in the latest issue of its house publication Spectrum, the cover story, “Diversity in the Engineering Workplace,” discusses sexual orientation. I suppose I will now have to show that my designs contain 10 percent gay/lesbian/bisexual engineering content before I can land accounts with really big corporations.

  The Reverend James H. Fladland of Richmond, Virginia, is a professional in the field of sin and knows an enemy of God and man when he sees one:

  Much as it pains me to do so, I must nominate the denomination of which I am an ordained clergyman for this year’s Enemies List. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has proved itself to be the most PC church body in the U.S., not just for the usual stuff (e.g., Columbus-bashing and New Masses-sounding “socioeconomic analyses”) but by ensconcing in its very constitution the hideous principle of racial, sexual, and linguistic quotas.

  Timothy C. Reiner of Worchester, Massachusetts, will rent some John Wayne videos and eschew:

  WGBH (Channel 2) and WGBX (Channel 44), for hectoring the good people of eastern Massachusetts with left-wing PBS propaganda, much of it at their own expense, and for scheduling Bill Buckley’s Firing Line at eleven o’clock on Sunday nights

  Dr. Edward B. Elmer of Pleasanton, Texas, decries:

  The Nature Conservancy (“Fifth Amendment—what Fifth Amendment?”)

  CBS “News” (lovers of Leonard “I Wuz Framed” Peltier)

  Any and all teachers’ unions

  The AMA (the newest gun control lobby)

  The Boston Globe

  The Boston Globe

  The Boston Globe

  Carl L. Rowley, Jeffrey E. Asbed, and Jon M. Moyers of St. Louis, Missouri, being lawyers all, bring a bill of attainder against:

  The Peace Corps, because its name contains the word “peace,” and because it arrogantly and mistakenly implies that the corps’ “mission” could conceivably prevent war, or even an argument between pygmies over who cooks the cat tonight. (And for doing so with money that was not its until it took it from us.)

  The National Education Association, because its non-merit-based-pay, six-hour-per-day, nine-month-per-year members refuse to take competency examinations, purportedly for reasons other than their own incompetence. And because most of them are Communists.

  Sean Smith of Weehawken, New Jersey, goes right to the top when he’s mad. He has it in for:

  Matthew, who misquoted Jesus in 19:23. The actual quote was “It is easier for a rich man to enter the gates of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,” not the other way around. If Old Matty hadn’t screwed that up we wouldn’t have Liberation Theology, Vatican II, or the Christic Institute.

  Neither rain nor snow nor Victoria’s Secret catalogs stop mailman Art Vasterling once he gets going:

  I want to see all nonprofit mailing discontinued with the exception of material for the blind. I know this makes me a heretic in both the union and the post office by insisting that we rid ourselves of every person and/or function that does not move mail. But our body politic is riddled with those who use the U.S. Mail for fund-raising to attack my lifestyle and culture. The latest lousebag lobby is the Native American Rights Fund, which appeared last fall. They are soliciting donations for protest and bail bonds to be utilized in the spoilage and ruination of every Columbian Celebration within their reach.

  Art, by the way, did not provide us with a return address.

  J. J. Rose of Boston, Massachusetts, says:

  The Brother Can You Spare a Billion medal is pinned to the derrière of the stockholders of American car companies. These patsies dole out tens of millions in salaries and perks to their executives, who then become globetrotting mendicants asking for protection against Japan. There was a time when the “protection” against foreign competition was a good product, not congressional action. But, hey, why do it the hard way if Uncle Sap will foot the bill?

  Joe A-something, whose last name is illegible but who identifies himself a
s “the only sagebrush Republican male nurse in America,” has put down the bedpan and picked up the gun:

  Stand back! I don’t want you to get hit with any shrapnel:

  The African National Congress

  The World Wildlife Fund

  The National Conference of Mayors

  The ACLU (Too obvious, huh?)

  The Albuquerque Chapter of the NAACP (for the Bobby Knight flap)

  The Staff at the Oregonian (a nest of pathological liars posing as a newspaper)

  Lawrence Walsh’s gang of thugs

  The Oregon Peace Institute (What does their “I believe you, Anita” bumper sticker have to do with world peace?)

  People for the American Way

  Time magazine (Watch out, U.S. News & World Report. You’re heading down the same path.)

  Physicians for Social Responsibility (a bunch of bell-bottomed finger-pointers who feel guilty about their adjusted gross incomes)

  The World Health Organization (for inviting Liz Taylor to lecture on matters of personal hygiene)

  The National Commission on AIDS (for promulgating the biggest fraud since “Camelot”)

  And, finally (Pull!... Kaboom!), the Republican Party (for piddling away the greatest intellectual revolution since E = MC2).

  Todd Davis of Kentwood, Michigan, excommunicates:

  All the churches whose leaders apparently live by this revised version of the Ten Commandments:

  I. You shall have no other gods before the Federal Government of the United States.

  II. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything on the earth, but worship the earth itself.

  III. Do not take Jesse Jackson’s name in vain.

  IV. Remember the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and keep it holy.

  V. Honor your mother, your mother’s boyfriend, your father’s boyfriend, etc.

  VI. You may not kill criminals who have been convicted of heinous crimes, but feel free to kill human fetuses of all ages.

  VII. You may not commit adultery—without a condom.

  VIII. You may not steal—except from the rich or during a riot.

  IX. You may not give false testimony—except when attempting to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court.

  X. You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor—except for the purpose of redistributing the wealth.

 

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