In 1992, David Horowitz and his long-time writing partner Peter Collier founded Heterodoxy, a newsmagazine that they subtitled "Articles and Animadversions on Political Correctness". Over the next several years they diced and sliced the PC silliness and hypocricies of academics and other Leftists in those early 90's years before the Internet was so universally accessible as a platform for exposing such things.
I wasn't a charter subscriber, but I jumped on board as soon as I could, and came to relish every word thereafter. Now David is bringing Heterodoxy back, eventually republishing every issue in pdf format over the course of the next two years. Here Collier explains the rationale behind the irreverent tone of the publication:
...It could have been an intellectual journal. But it occured to us that, mutatis mutandis, those of us who opposed this new treason of the clerks were in a position similar to the one we had been in the early 60s--a counter culture fighting against an establishment. (Except that in the historical turning of the tables this ruling elite was now leftist with a deconstructive agenda.) And our publication should therefore resemble the counter cultural underground papers of our wicked youth--irreverent and provocative and willing to enter the house of power and rearrange its furniture. Heterodoxy therefore set out, in the famous formula of A.J. Leibling, to comfort the oppressed and oppress the comfortable. For the next eight years, we attacked the world of PC relentlessly, fingering its villains and forcing them to do the perp walk. We named names. We ridiculed the fatuous. We constructed an intellectual CT-scan of the malignancy that was spreading throughout high culture. Heterodoxy was funny and brash. It took no prisoners. The magazine sometimes seemed inconsequential to us even as we produced it because its targets were, in the final analysis, such paintywaists and lightweights. But examined once again after more than a decade, it has integrity as an artifact from an era when bad ideas were in the saddle riding mankind. Then it gave our side ammunition and camp songs for the culture war. Today it is a rich archive chronicling the dada and nihilism of the plague years of Clintonism.
The first issue is here, and the second, from May, 1992 is here. I still have some of my back issues, and have archived as much as possible as DH made it available at FrontPage Magazine, but I'm looking forward to enjoying it all, all over again.
Posted by dan at September 2, 2005 11:11 PM