This is the last two-page "Beat the Devil" you'll be reading. Victor Navasky and Katrina vanden Heuvel want me to write a one-pager like other columnists in the Nation stable and do six features a year as well.

As I've told them, I think the proposal is an idiotic idea. It means the end of "Beat the Devil" as it has been, namely a discursive two-page column capable of accomodating anything from a single long story to five ot six items. Of course, anyone could see the writing on the wall when the latest redesign made it start out on a right-hand page and then turn over. The old way, you had a slab of yours truly across a spread, which you could either stop off at and hang out for a while, like a rackety tavern set amid the placid suburbs of liberal discourse, or hurry past, holding your nose. Well, there's plainly no room for that sort of thing in the new Nation. On a one pager you step up to the plate and bung your thought of the bi-week at the reader and then you're gone. No space for the hairier pensees. And they've finished off the old letters page too, my other favorite stamping ground.

You'll have to look for the old "Beat the Devil"-type items in "Counterpunch" or in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. As I said to Bruce Anderson, the A.V.A. editor, the other day, they're closing in and soon we'll have nothing to write on but the lavatory walls.

Bob Scheer, now deliriously, wonderfully, gloriously in love with Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington after his earlier passionate flings with Richard Nixon and Oliver Stone, has chided me in the past for being keener to attack the Clinton crowd than Newt and his gang. Navasky and vanden Heuvel taxed me with the same supposed sin a few months before the '96 election, when the All-Out-for-Bill drive was in full spate. Well, there's no keener pleasure in life than giving liberal pretensions a sound kick in the backside, and besides, a lot of enduring damage is done by liberals and by liberal culture of which this magazine--which Navasky and vanden Heuvel carefully call "independent" rather than "left"--is an increasingly sedulous exponent. I think the shift truly set in after Andy Kopkind died.

Of course, Gingrich and his contract were an absolute godsend to the liberals, who raised bales of money and sold truckloads of subscriptions by touting him as the most dangerous thing in American culture since the Ford Pinto (which, if you read all those Mother Jones ads, was the most dangerous thing since Joe McCarthy). But Gingrich combusted, just like the Pinto, and indeed just like Senator Joe. The liberal institutions endure and do a lot of the damage.

Lenny Bruce said back in 1968, "Fascism in America is kept solvent by the left-winger hunger for persecution. Liberals will buy anything any bigot writes. If Norman Thomas, the senior American Socialist, were to be elected President, he would have to find a minority to hate." Of course that's a bit extreme, possibly a bit over the top, but you can see what Bruce was driving at.

Just so long as they don't lock me up in a cell with nothing to read but Mother Jones and the Utne Reader. Adam Hochschild should sell a Mother Jones issue featuring Paul Hawken as a cheap substitute for the airbag. Department of Transportation tests show that it is highly efficient, though some test "victims" complained of feeling "suffocated" as the "Hawkenbag" enveloped their faces. "I felt I was being drowned in cotton wool," was one typical response.

Aside on Trotsky

Josh Mason, culture editor of In These Times, has received the order of the boot from Jim Weistein because he was "too far out of the mainstream." What did Weinstein mean by that? Mason had commissioned and accepted an article by Russian left oppositionist Boris Kagarlitsky that had dared raise the name of Leon Trotsky. At the dreaded mention of Stalin's old foe, Weinstein, who embodies a not un-familiar conjuction of old C.P. hatred of Trots with the nonprofit left's yearning for respectability, finally showed Mason the door.

Among Mason's crimes had been to publish a criticism of liberal philanthropy by Gina Neff. This is, indeed, the Crime of Crimes. He capped his career of infamy at In These Times by being rude about Thomas Jefferson. In Weinstein's eyes, anyone consistently critical of capitalism of the Democratic Party is either a Trotskyist or a Leninist or an infantile leftist. In any event they are not welcome at In These Times.

W.P.J. Syndrome

Turning to the administration shilled for by the foundation liberals, you will find a truly appalling piece of gasbaggery in the fons et origio of gasbaggishness, the World Policy Journal, a publication so potent in its hypnagogic impact that many subscribers actually fall asleep while plucking it from their doormats in their apartments in their apartments on the Upper West Side, incurring grievous contusions known to medical emergency teams in the area as W.P.J. Syndrome.

Some weeks ago I got a fax from an aged relative in Washington, D.C., with the word "Aaaargh" scrawled across the top. The flier, for such as it was, advertised a meeting at the New School, opposite Nation premises on Fifth Avenue, on March 11 sponsored by the World Policy Journal, titled "Present at the Solution? The Clinton/Albright Foreign Policy Ambitions," with scheduled speakers Sidney Blumenthal, described as "special political correspondent" of The New Yorker, and Martin Walker, U.S. bureau chief of the London Guardian. The moderator was James Chace, a k a the Electric Rabbit, editor of W.P.J.

Walker (who never showed for the forum) has been a syncophant in the Clinton Court from the start, chairing a Guardian-sponsored confab of pro-Clinton Blairites back in 1993. His recent The President We Deserve was one of the more foolish political chronicles published in 1996. Travel through Walker's piece in W.P.J. for a few sentences and we come to the sort of language that has made his name a mock among the nations. Walker reverently quotes the unspeakable Albright's remark that the State Department will spend barely 1 percent of the Federal Budget "but that will be used to write 50 percent of the history and legacy of our times." Then Walker exclaims in awed tones, "Here was the clearest signal of the conceptual grandeur that informs the administration's second-term ambitions in foreign policy. Bill Clinton and his new national security team are now experienced and comfortable with the uses of American power....They have stayed up late at night in the White House situation room waiting for the reports on their air strikes against Bosnian Serbs, their cruise missile strikes against Baghdad." The Baghdad strike killed one of Iraq's foremost artists, Leila al-Attar, an event that Tony Lake said caused him no loss of sleep. And of the sanctions that have killed 500,000 Iraqui children, Albright said, "We think the price is worth it." Experienced and comfortable indeed.

Pacifica Nightmare

Onward with the sagas of repression and control. The basic trend at Pacifica over the last few years has been the inexorable extermination of dissent, and the overall desire of the directorate, another ex-CP God that Failed crowd led by Pat Scott and her coffle of Pacifica Foundation board members, to eviscerate all traces of regional programming autonomy and impose the bland idealogical and programming regimen that has made NPR the hideous listening experience that it is today.

Pacifica has hired, at a reported cost of $30,000, a notorious union-busting firm, the American Consulting Group, which had strategized previous union-busting efforts at Fortune 500 firms including Union Carbide. At Pacifica, management has now been in receipt of a National Labor Relations Board decision against it. Pacifica management also hired Burt Glass, a tout from the Clinton Justice Department, to do pr work. Glass went from the Justice Department to pr functions at the League of Conservation Voters during the 1996 presidential campaign when the League was engaged in a particularly elaborate piece of agitprop on behalf of the Clinton/Gore campaign and Congressional Democrats. (see "Beat the Devil," January 27). Pacifica also retained the costly services of David Fenton Associates to carry water for them. I myself was once a recipient of a lobbying call from the oily Fenton on behalf of his client.

The latest Pacifica atrocity -- and I strongly urge any donors to the Pacifica system to pose probing questions to management before turning over another penny -- concerns the weekly show of the admirable Mario Murillo, who has been at WBAI for many years, most recently as public affairs director. Murillo had written to national program director Gail Christian, complaining about her treatment of his weekly show on Latin America. Christian's elegant response now being circulated on the progressive radio Internet group goes as follows:

March 10, 1997

TO: Mario Murillo and anyone else who gives a shit.
FROM: Gail Christian
RE: Response to your letter.

Gee, Mario, I wish we were all as good as you are then there wouldn't be any problems.

I'm really sorry none of the stations wanted your program. Maybe if you put the time into the show that you spent on your ass-hole letter then maybe things would have been differently. (sic)

So as they say out West, "Screw you and the horse you rode up on."

I've held off for many months from discussing Pacifica's affairs on the grounds that some house-cleaning was necessary at the various stations. But the Scott crowd has run amok, will not permit any democratic debate on the behavior, holds what may be illegally secret board meetings and pulls the plug on all attempts to review Pacifica's upheavals on the public airwaves. I like Amy Goodman's show, and of course Pacifica without Bensky would be like Monument Valley without its venerable geological extrusions. But politically, Pacifica's news items are often indistinguishable from NPR's and could have been written by any of the commercial network news writers.

Roundup Time

As you can see, such sagas indicate that the whole nonprofit third sector that underwrites liberalism in America is marking out the limits of permissible discourse. Welcome to a political culture defined by the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment. You know, all the usual suspects, ever consumed with the task of policing political commentary. How polite, how caring they are as they trundle one toward the padded cell muttering, "Come along now. You won't cause any trouble will you, Sir?" I remember Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy describing how the screws would beat him up while one of them would grab him by the balls , swinging him to and fro, saying all the while, " Sorry, Sir, we won't take long, Sir, soon be over, Sir."

What's impressed me most about ideological supervision in America on the liberal end of the spectrum is how well engineered the control systems are. The model is the green movement, where all the environmental grantmakers meet once a year to take the lead offered by the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Pew. Veer out of bounds and your little green group doesn't get a dime.

Of all the rows I've got into in this column in recent years the one that impressed me most was the fight about juries and about jury nullification, supported by many groups commonly categorized as on the right. It turned out many liberals feared juries and jury powers and regarded the constitutional powers of the jury with profound suspicion! They didn't want to form common cause with anyone outside the magic circle. They couldn't, even for a moment, get off the reservation--even as they called for bold new thinking and fresh ideas, just like that Clinton clone Tony Blair, now pledging to honor Tory budgets, Tory schedules of privatization, the Thatcherite agenda more or less in toto, all under the approving endoresement of Rupert Murdoch. But dear me! I see I'm overshooting even the two-page limit. Sorry to run on so. It won't happen again.