Monday Reads

 Good news for lower income people like my brother who could take advantage of such a program.

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Obituary:  Author and noted neocon  Midge Decter, 94, has died.  She garnered a lot of criticism over women's rights nearly fifty years ago with The New Chastity, and then she further alienated the gays with her infamous article,  The Boys on the Beach:

Then there is that fearful detail: not enough sadists to go around. Having to some extent succeeded in staying the hand of the cops—in New York, they now annually play softball together—can it be that they feel the need to supply for themselves the missing ration of brutality? Having to a very great extent overcome the revulsion of common opinion, are they left with some kind of unappeased hunger that only their own feelings of hatefulness can now satisfy?

One thing is certain. To become homosexual is a weighty act. Taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence is not something one does from any longing to think oneself ordinary (but only following a different “lifestyle”). Gay Lib has been an effort to set the weight of that act at naught, to define homosexuality as nothing more than a casual option among options. In accepting the movement’s terms, heterosexuals have only raised to a nearly intolerable height the costs of the homosexual’s flight from normality. Faced with the accelerating round of drugs, S-M, and suicide, can either the movement or its heterosexual sympathizers imagine that they have done anyone a kindness?

These were the last two paragraphs of the article, published just as HIV--then known as AIDS--started to get a foothold on the gay community.

She was married to second husband, Norman Podhoretz, who among family members survives her,  and their son, John, is a noted neocon in his own right.

Obit:

Midge Rosenthal was born in St. Paul, Minn., on July 25, 1927. Her father owned a sporting goods store; her mother was a homemaker who sometimes referred to her talkative daughter, in Yiddish, as “Mouth.”

In high school, she wrote for the literary magazine and harbored what she later called “a series of girlish fantasies I wanted to die on the barricades in Palestine.” She attended the University of Minnesota, New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary and New York University but never earned a college degree.

Mrs. Decter stayed at home for several years to raise two daughters from her first marriage, to Jewish activist Moshe Decter. When the marriage ended in divorce, she joined Commentary as a secretary to its editor. She married Podhoretz in 1956, four years before he was named editor.