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Our era is supposed to be the 1950?s all over again. Indeed, we are experiencing anew many of the pleasures and benefits of that excellent decade: a salubrious prudery, a sensible avariciousness, a healthy dose of social conformity, a much-needed narrowing of minds, and a return to common-sense American political troglodytism. But there?s one delightful and entertaining feature of the Eisenhower years which is wholly absent from the contemporary scene?old-fashioned red-baiting. Where?s our McCarthyism? Who?s our Tail-Gunner Joe? Why don?t we get to look for Communists under our beds or?considering the social changes of the past thirty-five years?in them? (?Good night, honey, and are you now or have you ever been a member of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador??)
God knows the problem is not a lack of Commies. There are more fuzzy-minded one-worlders, pasty-faced peace creeps, and bleeding-heart bed wetters in America now than there ever were in 1954. The redskis have infiltrated the all-important exercise-video industry, not to mention movies and TV. Academia, too, is a veritable compost heap of Bolshie brainmulch. Beardo the Weirdo may have been laughed out of real life during the 1970s, but he found a home in our nation?s colleges, where he whiles away the wait for the next Woodstock Nation by pestering undergraduates with collectivist twaddle when they should be thinking about better car stereos.
We need some means of persecuting neuterers, nutters, and screaming greenies, some way to abuse entitlement tramps, participants in Gorby orgies, men who think the government is their mother, and women who think government can do the mothering for them. Let?s give a wedgie to the whiners, criers, and wet smacks in mortarboards. Let?s soap the windows of those who would beggar achievement, vandalize the lawn ornaments of magical thinkers, and heave rotten fruit at haters of beef, gin, and cigars. Let?s tell ghost stories to the mollycoddles who fear atomic power, military strength, and the very puissance of Western Civilization itself and turn the garden hose on the people who can?t bear their freedoms, their selves, or their society and want to vent those pathetic loathings on us, the betters.
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