MISCmedia for 1/20/00
The Ex-Liberal Industry

LIKE MANY FREE-LANCERS and self-employeds during Tax Time, I've been looking around for potential new gainful means of employment.

I've looked into everything from the 2000 Census to "Today's Hottest Upstream MLM Opportunity."

Heck, I've even looked into working for Microsoft.

But there's one career opportunity I haven't seriously pursued, because it would involve a no-turning-back life alteration: To cash in on my left-wing reputation by renouncing it.

It's becoming quite a lucrative profession, both in the U.S. and in Europe. There's one East Coaster, David Horowitz (not the '70s TV consumer reporter of the same name), who's spent nearly three decades capitalizing on the two or three years he spent as a '60s radical--before he realized how much more he could make in lecture fees to conservative think tanks.

In France, meanwhile, the neo-con parade of right-turning intellectuals has grown so ubiquitous that German-British historian Eric Hobsbawm couldn't get anybody in France to publish his book The Age of Extremes : A History of the World, 1914-1991 for five years. While Hobsbawm has acknowledged Stalinism's cruelties, he's refused to renounce his essential beliefs in the Marxian principles that Stalin & co. had perverted.

To personally blame a western Euro-Socialist for the Gulag is, to me, equivalent to blaming your local nunnery for the Inquisition.

There. Now I've just made a leftist statement I can subsequently renounce for big money.

Now all I have to do is make my presence and intentions known to the Discovery Institute, the Washington Institute for Policy Studies, KV-Lie, and Food Services of America.

They'll eagerly welcome me as a convert to The Cause. I'll tell them just what I'll subsequently tell their friends--how I once was a lost soul in the wilderness of mistaken notions of equality and justice; but now realized that the only people who deserved any money or power were exactly the people who have most of the power and money right now.

I'll gleefully tell the rich and comfortable that all the real problems in this country are due to those awful poor people. Yeah--and it's also due to those pesky liberals who foolishly want to help those poor people instead of disciplining 'em with boot camps and more prisons and welfare "reform" and the demolition of public transportation.

Then I'll go on to say global warming's just a myth, that big-ass SUVs are really good for the environment, that anything Communist dictators ever did was evil but everything anti-Communist dictators ever did was good, and that you mustn't believe anything the Liberal Media tell them but you must believe everything I tell them.

I'll command umpteen-thousand-dollar book advances from HarperCollins or Regnery. I'll rake in $50 grand talking to millionaires' weekend retreats. I'll be on the Fox News Channel and MSNBC whenever I want to.

Unless I have a sudden conscience attack and renounce my renunciation.

TOMORROW: 'Norma Jean & Marilyn' & Frances Farmer.

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