Pro-Dissent in Abortion Controversy

Jason DeParle is against capital punishment and for legal abortion.

But these bald statements ignore the rinds of ambivalence that coat each issue for the Washington Monthly staffer, author of the liberal magazine’s April cover story, “What’s Right With Right to Life.”

The article--in the shibboleth-questioning tradition of the monthly that is celebrating its 20th anniversary--arrives during yet another high point of the abortion controversy, this week’s massive pro-choice demonstration and lobbying effort in Washington.

Clearly intent on tweaking the sensibilities of abortion supporters, DeParle argues that “the fact that three of 10 pregnancies end in abortion poses moral questions that much of the Left, especially abortion’s most vocal defenders, refuses to acknowledge.”

A former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, DeParle says he first began debating the abortion question with himself while covering Louisiana capital-punishment cases, including seven executions, one of which he witnessed. Although he remains opposed to the death penalty, DeParle was shocked that the execution he saw was “surprisingly cold and unemotional.” He added, “I came away thinking I could watch 10 in a row while eating a pizza.”

In the article, DeParle notes that the political dividing line of the abortion debate is largely marked by conservatives who support capital punishment but oppose abortion and by liberals who oppose capital punishment but support abortion.

“If killing criminals is wrong, what about fetuses?” he asks. “. . . The issues, of course, aren’t synonymous; there are thoughtful arguments to be made to permit abortion and ban capital punishment, and the other way around. But one of the real ironies of contemporary politics is that the Left and Right tend to split that ticket in exactly opposite ways, and each often invokes the word sanctity. “

What’s at Stake

In a summary paragraph, DeParle argues that “abortion is the eradication of human life and should be avoided whenever possible. Should it be legal? Yes, since the alternatives are worse. Is it moral? Perhaps, depending on what’s at stake. Fetal life exists along a continuum; our obligations to it grow as it grows, but they must be weighed against other demands.”

So far, monthly staffers say they haven’t received much response to DeParle’s article. But that’s because pro-choice leaders have been busy organizing last Sunday’s massive rally in Washington that drew an estimated 300,000 demonstrators. However, a number of pro-choice groups are expected to send a joint letter heavily critical of the article in the next few days, the magazine’s Victoria Herbert said.

If the magazine starts taking shots across the bow for its abortion coverage, that will be fine with Charlie Peters, the magazine’s opinionated, eccentric, maverick founder and the man credited with creating “neo-liberalism.” As a gadfly liberal, Peters has made his reputation--and the magazine’s--by questioning such liberal sacred cows as organized labor, entitlement programs for the elderly and by advocating the entrepreneurial spirit in American business. Back in the Vietnam era, the monthly began establishing its nonconformity by taking what Peters calls a “thinking” stance on national defense. For Peters this means frequent attacks on expensive weapons that don’t work but acceptance of the need for a defense establishment, albeit more efficient and less bloated.

Former Official

In fact, that seems to be Peters’ attitude toward all government functions. He has used the magazine for a two-decade campaign against government fat and ineptitude at all levels, particularly civil servants that Peters--a former Peace Corps official--sees as more interested in feathering their own nests than contributing to the public welfare.

Although the magazine has often lost money and its circulation hovers around 30,000, its influence is felt far beyond those limits. The chief reason is that former monthly editors--usually hired just out of college and paid a pittance--have gone on to positions at Newsweek, the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Another former editor, Taylor Branch, is the author of “Parting the Waters,” the best seller about the civil-rights struggle from 1954 to 1963.

In a telephone interview, Peters said that one of his latest causes is pushing the pendulum back toward more government regulation after the go-go years of the Reagan era.

“You need regulation because the natural tendency of capitalism is to maximize profit without regard to public health, safety or anything else,” he said.

Rocking National Review

Rolling Stone is getting ready to throw a few rocks at National Review, the conservative biweekly that in February published a broadside against contemporary rock ‘n’ roll. In the issue due out next week, Kurt Loder will attack Los Angeles writer Stuart Goldman’s assertions that rock is dead--and that what’s billed as rock music today is “merely the debased desire to shock and titillate.” (Goldman’s attack on rock was reported in this column Feb. 23.)

Loder’s article castigates Goldman’s essay as “a crude, sweeping spew” and as “not the sort of piece that one could say was distinguished by the elegance of its reasoning, the acumen of its assertions or even the accuracy of its facts.”

The Rolling Stone salvo is merely the latest in what’s proved to be a long-running and inky dispute created by Goldman, who says that rebuttals to his article also have appeared in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the New York Times. And there’s more to come. In the May 5 issue of National Review, Goldman reports that he and John Buckley, a nephew of magazine founder William F. Buckley Jr., will square off in a debate about the state of rock.

Goldman asserts that the attacks largely are a “revenge of the liberals.” And he hasn’t modified his views under pressure, he adds. “I think as a body of work it’s diseased and if that makes me an old fogey, so be it,” he said.

A Rare Agreement

It’s a rare--maybe even millennial--event when the Nation and National Review agree about anything. It’s doubly rare--on the order of finding intelligent, friendly life elsewhere in the universe, say--that the agreement is about a conservative, in this case British historian Paul Johnson, whose book, “Intellectuals,” has just been published in this country. Johnson probably is best known for his 1983 book, “Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties,” a widely praised revisionist history of this century’s big events.

In this latest case, however, reviewers for the right-leaning National Review and the Nation--light years left of center and proud of it--agree that Johnson’s book is lousy. Actually, that’s a mild description of what the Nation’s Christopher Hitchens and National Review’s Joseph Sobran do to Johnson’s disapproving profiles of 12 prominent highbrows, ranging from Karl Marx to playwright and author Lillian Hellman.

Hitchens, also a native of Great Britain, writes of Johnson with the contempt of familiarity.

Hitchen’s personal diatribe seems to be sparked by Johnson’s attack on the private lives of those he portrays, finding that many of the icons of the mind were louts to those closest to them.

In the last paragraph of his two-page lambaste, Hitchens broods about the reasons for the book’s publication. “It is a book so sordid and comical that it discredits even its ridiculous author,” Hitchens writes. “Yet apparently nobody--family member, colleague, publisher, drinking companion--told Johnson to pull the chain on it. It seems, then, that he can’t have a true friend in all the world.”

And this is only the quotable invective.

Meanwhile, in National Review’s April 21 issue, Sobran concedes that nearly all Johnson’s subjects “created misery around them, especially in their treatment of the opposite sex; but this isn’t the special prerogative of intellectuals.”

But Sobran, whose views have sometimes been characterized as too extreme, delivers a telling line when he comments, “There is something wrong with a writer who arouses in me the impulse to defend Lillian Hellman . . . liar, tyrant, crypto-Communist, self-deluded fool, yes. But is it fair to pile on the rumor that she once made herself the prize in a poker game?”

Perhaps surprisingly, Sobran concludes that Johnson’s attacks suffer from a lack of political balance. “Johnson’s bag is mixed, but not mixed enough,” he writes. “He should have complicated it with a few unpleasant ‘right-wingers.’ If he couldn’t find them, he wasn’t really looking.”