Liberwocky:
What Liberals Say and What They Really Mean
by Victor Gold
(WND Books, 210 pages, $15.99)
Mock reference books go back a ways but the first really great
practitioner of the art was newspaperman Ambrose Bierce. Collected
under various titles and put out in a few editions, his so-called
Devil’s Dictionary is the standard for judging the
definitional darts of these specialized lexicons. Looking at
Bierce’s Dictionary now, the tasty parts of the stew boil
to the surface: its bile and wit, its misogyny, its digressions
(poetry or snippets of dialogue follow many entries), its practiced
cynicism.
Bierce poked at everything about society that seemed false to
him, from organized religion to hypocritical social norms, but he
also skewered the dissenters. So, while history was “an account
mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about
by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools,” non-combatants
in the Civil War were written off as a bunch of dead Quakers. A
nihilist was “a Russian who denies the existence of anything but
Tolstoy.”
Liberwocky is not nearly so catholic a work as the
Dictionary. Its focus is tight and, in the definitions and
the short essays, you can observe the anger seeping through the
wit. Author Victor Gold is a grand old man of the right. He worked
for Barry Goldwater and Spiro Agnew, co-wrote a book with George
H.W. Bush, and back in the day was a regular contributor to several
journals of conservative opinion, including this magazine, and his
views haven’t “evolved” over the years.
Though Gold allows that liberals “can be a load of laughs” in
the abstract, it is clear that he is more maddened than amused by
the continuing dominance of progressives in the press, the academy,
and certain slices of American society. The first entry under C is
“Camelot. A mythical liberal era when all men were
equal, affluent, and inspired, and women were beautiful, witty and
well-groomed, and Republicans knew their place.”
The italics are his, which pounded the first warnings into my
very thick skull that this is a serious book masquerading as a
silly one. It wasn’t enough to throw the joke out there and let the
audience either understand or fail to grasp it; it was important
that you get the point. On closer inspection, the veneer of
frivolity is very thin indeed. Gold didn’t even bother with the
normal word-usage indicators (n., v., adj., etc.) that are common
to the genre.
The point, he explains, is that words “like ideas-even empty
calorie words that pass for ideas- have consequences,” and that
liberals have been very good at molding the language to their own
propaganda ends. Gold aims to draw out the assumptions behind word
usage and thus do his own little bit to ruin some poor Democratic
Party hack’s day.
Here’s is Gold’s definition of gender gap: “Liberal media
conundrum first posed by a bored desk editor at the Sacramento
Bee, circa 1980, viz. (1) the inability of the Republican
Party to get wives to vote like their husbands; (2) the inability
of the Democratic Party to get husbands to vote like their
wives.”
And here’s why it matters: Reporters often thrust microphones
and tape recorders at members of the GOP running for office and
pepper them with questions about why, according to polls, the
Republican is trailing Democrat candidate X in a race for the
women’s vote. But I’ve never heard a reporter pull the opposite
trick: ask the Democrat why he is doing so lousy with the men.
As a result, the votes of women are assigned grand metaphysical
importance. Rather than attempt to make up for a small deficit of
female voters by appealing to more men, Republicans try to smile
more, talk often about education, and describe their policies as
compassionate-in other words, they try to out Kennedy the
Democrats.
Much of Gold’s shtick is predictable but probably worth saying.
We may know that Peter Jennings will refer to left-wingers who take
their grievances to the streets as “alienated” and right-wingers
who do the same as an “angry mob,” but it’s worth reminding
ourselves of this now and again.
Liberwocky really gets interesting when Gold departs
from the well-trod trail of conservative media criticism and hike
his skepticism up to altitudes where the air gets thin. In a
five-page essay titled “SPIN-DOCTORING HISTORY,” the author
expounds on his theory that the “Judgment of History” is, in fact,
a “factitious verdict handed down by a stacked jury of Liberal
revisionists bent on redeeming the reputation of failed Democratic
presidents.”
For evidence, we call to the stand the presidencies of Woodrow
Wilson and Harry Truman. Because of foreign policy blunders,
personal prickliness, and domestic antipathy to civil liberties,
both left the White House under a dark cloud of voter disapproval.
However, “by the time the Liberal revisionists had cosmetized the
record, all that remained was the myth of Saint Woodrow and the
legend of Give-‘em-Hell-Harry.” Undaunted, Gold takes out a can of
makeup remover and goes to work.
