On Mon, 25 Jul 2005 20:22:24 -0700 Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com>
writes:
> Jim F. writes:>... It is said that back when he was a commie leftist,
> Horowitz didn't have a penny to his name, and spent years earning a
> poverty-level income at most. Then when he became a right-winger, all
> sorts of money began to flow in and he has now become quite wealthy.
> On the other hand, the one thing that he has failed to acquire is any
> real respect. After all, in his pilgrimage from the far left to the
> far right, he has been preceded by many better men like Max Eastman,
> James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers etc. ...<
>
> though money had something to do with it, H's transition also
> involved
> some weird twists. At a time when most of the Berkeley Left was
> moving
> away from the Black Panthers because of their thuggery (in the
> 1970s),
> H embraced them. He recommended a job to a friend of his as the
> Panthers' accountant. When it turned out that the Ps were cheating on
> their accounts, she ended up in the San Francisco Bay (with cement
> overshoes, I would guess). Naturally enough, he freaked out....
Which of course raises the question of what was he thinking. In *The Fate of Midas and Other Essays*, he also included essays in which he critiqued the then current trends in the New Left, including a blistering critique of the Weather Underground. His sucking up to the Black Panthers seems to have represented the very sort of politics that he attacked in his 1973 book. And, as you say, he was doing this at a time when the rest of the radical left was distancing itself from the Panthers.
> Jim D.
>
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