AN OLD WIFE’S TALE

Former Harper’s editor Decter (The New Chastity, 1972, etc.) offers a memoir that displays her ability to cut through the blather of received opinion and her talent for cranky, narrow-minded attitudinizing.

Though she waves the flag of neoconservatism, Decter can be a peddler of the kind of horse sense that feels like a cooling breeze on a hot afternoon. The most valuable of such have to do with feminist dead-ends, like the idea of all men being the enemy—a notion toxic to the project of overthrowing sexism—or Betty Friedan’s woefully inaccurate take on the joy of being a male breadwinner. Decter has always believed that molds are for jello, not humans: Organizational Man? Second Sex? People aren’t so neatly compartmentalized. Decter plumps for personal responsibility, good manners, respectful language—who says no?—but then she skates onto thin ice with remarks about everybody having “made his or her own bed to lie in,” a sentiment denying factors such as class, race, religion, and the extremes of poverty. By the time she’s heading up the Committee for the Free World and associating with the Heritage Foundation, Decter (it seems) finds her neocon credentials more important than any native intelligence. She refers to George McGovern as coming from the “hard left” and alludes to our “national anxiety attack” over Vietnam as if the nobility of that war were a foregone, undebatable conclusion. Her memory becomes selective: She recalls images of South Vietnamese pleading to be evacuated with US embassy personnel but forgets those of children screaming in the aftermath of a US napalm attack. And who knows what to make of remarks such as “lesbianism being something it is possible to outgrow” or gay men actively courting AIDS “because society is putting up so little resistance to their demands”?

Decter is correct in saying that people are complex; she herself is a good example. At the same time, she’s not hard to pigeonhole: file her under right wing.