Heterophobia

ETHNOPHOBIA, HETEROPHOBIA, & LIBERAL FASCISM

NIETZSCHE SPOKE of a transvaluationof values, of standing on their heads the values around him that he considered decadent. The bourgeois would be replaced by the heroic. Today the freshman entering the portals of the university confronts a different transvaluation of values.

Writing in The New Republic recently,Jeffrey L. Pasley began an essay with a paragraph at once sad and hilarious:

You are 19 years old, you own a lot ofOxford shirts, and you believe everything your parents told you. After a peaceful adolescence in the suburbs of Kansas City, you have arrived at a well-regarded private university. You expected Western Civ courses taught by Cicero-quoting old men in tweed jackets. Instead, your Philosophy 10 professor turns out to be a bisexual Hispanic-Jewish woman who tells you that Cicero was a sexist-imperialist pig. Your vegetarian-Buddhist roommate sleeps on the floor in the nude. . . .

Now, how did this fantastic situationcome to pass? The average academic acquiesces in rather than actively promotes the prevailing ethos: The ethos is imposed by a cohesive and self-conscious minority that sets the pace. I have listened carefully to these people and here offer an outline of the constituent parts of their ethos.

1. They are soft socialists. Few ofthem look to the Soviet Union as a model. They have in mind something like Sweden: greatly expanded government, with high taxes to pay for it.

2. They are virtual pacifists, it neveroccurring to them that pacifism can mean complicity in cruelty, degradation, and death.

3. American minority groups takeon iconic importance, the buzzword being "diversity.' Blacks are the main icon, exploiting victim status to the hilt, but they are surrounded by Hispanic, Amerind, and even Eskimo icons. An Amerind-studies course at Dartmouth is actually entitled "The European Invasion of America.' One's moral worth depends heavily upon one's "sensitivity,' or willingness to worship these icons and bend to their every whim. This all comes under a term I have coined, "ethnophobia,' or hatred of one's own ethnic group.

4. The ethos promotes a renovationof sexual norms according to which behavior previously considered deviant is now thoroughly approved of and even given special symbolic and material rewards. Lesbian and homosexual organizations receive university funding, as well as various forms of symbolic approval. "Heterophobia,' hatred of the normal.

5. The agenda of militant feminismconstitutes an orthodoxy: ERA, tax-supported day care, pregnancy leave, lesbianism of course, renovation of the language to purge it of "sexism.'

6. For the ethos, drinking is out,tobacco is out, marijuana and cocaine are okay. No one within the ethos is "lifting a highball, at nightfall,' for good old Penn. Steaks are out too. Soccer is all right, but football is bad. You are liable to be served a plate of bean sprouts and some sparkling water from Nepal.

7. The cohort believes that the SovietUnion may be bad enough, but is no worse than the West. The Soviet Union, for example, is said to have less pollution. References to Lake Baikal and Chernobyl are not welcomed.

8. The Third World is very importantin all of this, but, as in the case of "minorities,' some countries are more iconic than others. Afghanistan is not very important. But Nicaragua!-- pronounced "Nicarraaaggua' by the real devotees--well, oh to be in Managua now that Danny Boy is there! Third World advances toward Communism are exciting; democratic gains, as in Argentina and Brazil, are boring.

9. Much of the time, however, therereally seem to be only three countries in the world. The United States (bad generally, but proto-fascist under Reagan), Nicaragua, and South Africa.

The elements of this ethos are vigorouslyenforced, and suppression has sharp teeth, in the form of deans' notations in a student's permanent record, and trips before the disciplinary committee, which is always draconian. At Yale, sophomore Wayne Dick, who had put up posters ridiculing "gay pride,' escaped with his skin only when the university president and the dean of the law school came to his rescue.

Thus what we see is something new,liberal fascism. The ethos must be imposed by force because it is so unnatural.

ONE WAY TO view the ethnophobic,heterophobic, liberal-fascist ethos would be as pity run mad, destroying what is good in the name of putative victims. Or one could see it as the last, rotten, decadent phase of Christian charity. It is natural to admire the strong, the intelligent, the beautiful. It is perverted to displace them with the weak, the inept, the "handicapped,' in secularized leper-kissing. Nietzsche foresaw it all. Or, as Pound puts it in Canto XXX:

Artemis singing, Artemis, Artemis

Agaynst Pity lifted her wail:

Pity causeth the forests to fail,

Pity slayeth my nymphs,

Pity spareth so many an evil thing.

Pity befouleth April,

Pity is the root and the spring.

Now if no fayre creature followeth me

It is on account of Pity . . .

COPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc.
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