Some 20 years ago, my friend P.J. O’Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with his new bride.  She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner called me a male chauvinist, racist anti­semite and left the house in a fury.  P.J. apologized and followed his bride out.  To this day I haven’t figured it out, nor has P.J.  Mind you, they didn’t stay married long enough for a serious inquiry to take place, and P.J. is now very happily married to Tina and has a large brood as proof of his happiness.  The first Madame O’Rourke was the granddaughter of the beautiful black singer Lena Horne.  Her father, the movie director Sidney Lumet, recently passed away.  Although I knew that Lena Horne was her grandmother, I was not aware of her father’s extreme liberal credentials, as of course I should have been, having sat through Dog Day Afternoon, the apotheosis of a queer bank robber who needs the money for his boyfriend’s sex change.

Looking back, I realize that I might have stated certain platitudes, such as black-on-black crime being publicized more than black-on-white crime, or that many white-collar criminals on Wall Street happen to be Jewish.  One must remember that, back then, liberalism among the elite cosmopolites such as the lady in question did not take kindly to certain truths.  Intolerance with conservative thoughts was the order of the day.  Alcohol, too, might have played a role, as good old P.J. and I are known to have a tipple once in a while.  And of course the lady’s liberal credentials were impeccable.  Lena Horne had undeniably suffered from racism in her brilliant and long career, and her old man was one of New York’s most famous defenders of the downtrodden.  The trouble was, and is, the latter.  Who were, and who are, today’s downtrodden?  The welfare recipients, the drug addicts, the illegal immigrants, the single black mothers, the unemployed?  That was the subject discussed that infamous evening, and I had obviously put my foot in it.  If memory serves, I had said that the cop on the beat, the grunt on the firing line, the slum priest, the law-abiding, tax-paying citizen was the victim, and all hell had broken loose.

Although America had gone through the unpopular war-strife during the late 60’s and early 70’s, a noble vision had been sold by the liberals of a new dawn, a problem-solving, progressive hope that the culture would change once the government threw more money into the pot, money that would eradicate poverty and crime forever and ever.  The people perpetrating the hoax didn’t believe it for a minute, but it sounded good during chic dinner parties—not such as mine, but where rich, with-it elites met to discuss the theater, politics, and rising crime.  (Tom Wolfe put an end to them with his satiric essay on Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers.)

Well, we all know how that one turned out.  Crime in some big cities came down, not because of money, but because mayors and police commissioners applied the broken-window theory.  Lumet portrayed cops as corrupt, criminals as noble savages, businessmen as crooks, priests as perverts, and soldiers as blood-lusting murderers.  Nothing new there—it’s been a Hollywood line for the last 40 years.  The decline of civic liberalism has been filmed to death by our Hollywood buddies, and Sidney Lumet towed the line, like all good groupies do.  The enemy has always been the bigot, the white man, and the Christian, the last two bundled together to equal the first.  The barbarity of our now white-black-brown American culture has been fueled by the movies and by television, whose icons are rapping, muscle-bound cretins covered in gold chains, mouthing profanities and smoking dope.  Libraries and churches are empty; clubs with loud, cacophonous music full of drug dealers and hooker wannabes are full.  Liberals control academia, the media, the entertainment industry, and the law.  Wall Street is rife with greed and corruption, but the biggest crooks have never even been indicted.  Our heroes are a liberal’s dream: Barry Bonds, Sharon Osbourne, Charlie Sheen, Tiger Woods, Michael Vick, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton—I could go on.  The mother of LeBron James, a black billionaire thug basketball player, recently slapped a parking attendant because he was slow in bringing her car.  Al Sharpton, a race hustler, liar, and tax cheat, sits in Harlem, while the President of the United States flies up to kiss his ring and call him a great American.  Eliot Spitzer is given a television show by CNN and is thinking of running for office big-time.  This is the America the lady who sprinted out of my house wished for—and got—thanks to the liberal creed and to enablers of that creed, like George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, and the rest of the grotesque Republicans who think Ron Paul is an antebellum Southerner.  So here’s my advice to you, dear readers.  Next time, don’t give an opportunity to some smart aleck to mouth off liberal b.s.  Throw him out, and enjoy your dinner.