4 Opinion Page 8 Tuesday, May 12, 1981 The Michigan Daily The Michigan Daily Vol. XCI, No. 5-S Ninety Years of Editorial Freedom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan Guns and logic A MAN AMBLES into a crowded Salem, Oregon bar, coolly pulls a semi-automatic out of his pocket, and opens fire on the assem- bled throng. Within seconds four people have Fallen dead, and a score of others lie wounded. Once again the suicidal idiocy of America's End of the liberal fad? 4 Once upon a time, nearly everybody in America wanted to be called a liberal. It was the societal passkey of the early and mid-1930s, the ticket to political and social ac- ceptance. Franklin Roosevelt an- d his New Deal were riding high, WPA and the Wagner Act were Coring Apart h th fr th co en m m no m te dr m lo lit ar on si N A: ev se Ti th of ca vi fi C 4. andgun philosophy is waved bloodily aloft for all the rage, and suddenly it ie rest of the world to marvel at and recoil seemed antiquated, even un- patriotic; not to pay lip service to om. America's new lockstep march in It does little good to reiterate for the hundred- quest of economic recovery. It time the arguments supporting a sane gun- was vogue, it was chic, and no )ntrol program: that virtually every country one likes to feel left out. lforcing strict handgun limitations has a So conservatives started urder rate far below that of our own; that the calling themselves liberals, too. To be sure, they remained ajority of America's murders are committed liberals with a difference - t by professional criminals but by family liberals who worshipped a balan- embers or neighbors possessed by fits of ced budget and a government mporary rage. without handouts; liberals who It does little good to debunk the 2nd Amen- ad tocialist agittion at home nent civil-libertarian hypocrisy which per- abroad. While campaigning eates pro-gun arguments. The fact that gun- against FDR in 1936, GOP can- bby chieftains remain among those least didate Alf Landon declared, "I kely to champion civil liberties in any other believe a person can be a liberal ea phases their well-drilled supporters not thus illuminating the sublime le wit. ease of attaching the "proper" What would do some good is for the very label to even the most an- lent majority to stop being so silent. A recent tithetical set of political prin- BC poll indicated some 75 percent of ciples. mericans support handgun restrictions; yet GIVEN enough time, all movements and trends come full ven the most militant gun-control advocates circle. Our current congressional .em strangely locked into a mindset of defeat. liberals may by and large still hey whine incessantly about the uphill odds of behave like liberals, but for God's eir cause, about the near-invincibility of the sake don't address them as such; they will run screaming in terror, )position' diving behind new press releases It would be nice if Goliath would stop proclaiming their love for apitulating to David. If that slumbering 75 frugality in government and their ercent would ever wake up and assert its con- newfound respect for that gutsy ctions, the National Rifle Association might guy in the White House. After all, nd itself with hardly a friend left either within a person can be a conservative without being a tightwad. ongress or without. And fewer people might It's a shameless hypocrisy, ad up bleeding to death on a barroom floor. yet who can blame them? "Liberal" has evolved into the dirtiest word in the American /44Q'4 political lexicon - a term to con- jure up one's darkest associations with economic mud- dle and sociological deviance. Better to call your congressman a crook, a lecher, a pederast - anything but aliberal. Last week's embarrassing Democratic defeat on the Reagan budget vote was poignant but hardly surprising. The ghost of recently-axed comrades still -4hang heavy over Capitol Hill, and conservative me-tooism has / become the hottest-selling chap- ter in the manual of political sur- vival. Idealism isn't paying off - Edward Kennedy stuck doggedly and proudly to his liberal creed throughout his 1980 presidential primary run, and was consisten- tly, humiliatingly trounced; Iowa senator John Culver did likewise last fall in a Senate race which became a microcosm of liberal vs. conservative Middle America - for his troubles, he was pum- meled by more than 100,000 votes. SUCH RESULTS are merely the electoral manifestations of a decades-long verbal fusillade: Kick a liberal - it'll make you feel good. Attacks from the Left have been as venemous as those from the Right: Last week on this page, Cornell professor Manning Marable castigated "white liberals and self-appointed 'do- gooders' (who) act self-righteous about the oppression of the black community without lifting a single finger to halt it." Well, damn those bleeding hearts! No matter that liberals single-handedly engineered every bit of civil rights and aid- to-the-poor legislation currently in existence, while conservatives fought such enactments tooth and nail; after all, it's much more ego-lifting to bite the hand that feeds you. Though your average conservative may have the vision of a mole and the heart of a weasel, by golly, at least you know where he stands! Such logical illogic drives un- wittingly to the likely core of anti- liberal vitriol: Envy. Through his very idealism, the liberal places himself perpetually on the firing line; the very connotation of "idealism" implies one possesses a superior view of society and its problems, an ascendant vision of perfection. To which many would reply: "Who are these creeps who think they're better than we, are?" The "impractical" liberal dreams of a society without misery, of the perfectability of man; the "practical" conser- vative accepts, even encourages - in the pursuit of self-interest - the defects of civilization and the evils of humankind. Thus the liberal is forced to play and be judged by different standards: If he doesn't wear a hair shirt both in public and in private, then he's open to charges of hypocrisy not applied to his cynical, conser- vative brethren. IF THE LIBERAL desires to live in a comfortable neigh- borhood, then he's a fraud. If he wishes to send his kids to a good school then he's a traitor to racial equality. The liberal isn't allowed the good life - if he doesn't AR emulate Christ, he's Satan incar- nate. It's a wearying existence at best, which may account for the alarming loss of vitality in the whole progressive movement. The tragedy of it is that, with few exceptions, the liberal thinker remains firmly on the side of the angels. We need his ideals, now more than ever: Reagan supply- side economics are likely to suc- ceed only at the price of catastrophic unemployment; the poor, the elderly, the under- privileged suffer ever-mounting deprivation; our civil liberties are under fire as never before; our State Department's toughest- kid-on-the-block symdrome threatens the future of the world. While liberals can certainly be insufferable (Eugene McCar- thy's presidential "children's crusade" was the quintessence of I-know-what's-best-for-you elit- ism), now is hardly the time to' stone the guardian of the gates to apocalypse. Though all the slings and arrows of a fickle body public, the liberal has remained our best hope; if Reaganism con- tinues to have its unchallenged way, he may prove our last hope as well. Christopher Potter is the Summer Daily Editorial Direc- tor. 4 4 I I I a a