You know the old saying, "If you can't say anything nice about somebody, don't say anything at all." This saying is apt for the one-time Marxist-turned right-wing author and commentator David Horowitz, 86, who died yesterday at the age of 86.
At least his one-time associate, the late Peter Collier, had the saving virtue of writing children's books after he finished with co-writing with Horowitz those right-wing screeds that were called "biographies" about the Kennedys, the Fords, and the Rockefellers. I can't say the same with DH. He was insufferable, clearly going to the right because there was more money in it.
He used to post on a thread at the old Salon Table Talk discussion board (I really miss that board--it was the best), which was about him and his writings (he had contributed some articles/opinion pieces over there years ago). I once took him to task for writing right-wing screeds and trashy "biographies" for purely monetary reasons. I boasted I took my copy of his shitty Kennedy book and tossed it in the dumpster. He took umbrage to my knowing what he REALLY was, and he tried to talk down to me, but it didn't work. I will never forget what he posted: "This sandbox is history." I had his number a long, long time ago.
Horowitz died of cancer, according to his fourth wife, April. He lived in Colorado.
David Joel Horowitz was born on Jan. 10, 1939, in New York City, in Queens. His parents, Phil and Blanche Horowitz, were schoolteachers and members of the American Communist Party. They quit the party in 1956 when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin.
David grew up “a sheltered child in a Marxist bubble,” he later wrote, attending a May Day parade at age 9. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1959 and a master’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. He helped found Root and Branch, a campus-based New Left magazine.
While living in London in the mid-1960s, he wrote a leftist critique of the Cold War, “The Free World Colossus,” which excoriated the United States as imperialist.
_____________________
No comments:
Post a Comment