Guns don't kill people, books kill people

Running Scared points us to this little peek into the neocon psyche: A list, compiled by Human Events Online, of the "10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries."

The first three are obvious, though I find it kind of interesting that Mein Kampf is #2 to The Communist Manifesto -- which sort of gives you an idea of how the neocons think: better fascist than communist. And yet Quotations from Chairman Mao comes in at #3, which I guess means that there's business to be had from the Chinese, so we don't want to piss them off too much.

But in case you had any doubt that the conservatives' biggest obsession is sex, #4 is The Kinsey Report. Let's stop there for a moment. Everyone pretty much agrees that Hitler was a pretty bad fellow. The neocons certainly regard Communism as the great evil of the 20th century, to the point that they've advocated support of some pretty nasty operators, like Osama Bin Laden, simply because they were anti-Communist. But isn't it interesting that right after the Big Political Theory Books comes an opening door on America's sexual activities?

Here's the rest of the list:

5. Democracy and Education, John Dewey

6. Das Kapital, Karl Marx (please note again that Kinsey is a bigger enemy in the neocon eyes than Marx)

7. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy, August Comte

9. Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes

The "Honorable Mention" list is even more eye-opening, and includes such works as -- yup, you guessed it -- The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, by Charles Darwin (gotta keep the fundi-nuts happy); The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich (see also: The Feminine Mystique -- gotta keep the women at home popping out babies); Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson (too opposed to allowing major corporations to poison the air, soil, and water with impunity); and for some strange reason, Coming of Age in Samoa, by Margaret Mead.

Frankly, this list tells us a lot more about the conservative mindset than it does about anything else.

In the early 1980's, I worked as an editorial assistant to the late Erwin Glikes at Simon & Schuster. Glikes was an icon of conservative publishing at the time, perpetrating on the American public such authors as Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Allan Bloom, and Dinesh D'Souza. He was a very nice man, and I never understood how he could buy into some of this crap. Later on, long after I'd moved on to a job that might pay something approaching a living wage, he published at The Free Press (his imprint at Macmillan) David Brock's book about Anita Hill. I suspect that Erwin would have been among this group of ideologues coming up with this list, if he were still alive. And I would be just as baffled today as I was then about how an otherwise intelligent person could buy into this stuff.