Inevitably, I ran up against the liberal orthodoxy. It most strikingly occurred in 1994, when Outlook ran, at a full page, an op-ed of mine about saving the Howard Theater, one of the oldest historically black theaters in America. I went into detail about the history of the Howard, yet something strange happened to my copy when I got to the 1960s. I had referred to the “moral and cultural collapse” that had destroyed the Howard and the surrounding neighborhood — the drugs, rioting, and black racism that had brought down that part of town. The night before the paper came out, I was called and told that the phrase “moral and cultural collapse” had been changed to “social upheaval.” This was an editorial in the editorial section.
One album I reviewed reminded me of Easter, I wrote in one piece. Rejected. When it bounced back, I simply removed the Easter reference and sent it to a different editor. It was published two days later in Style.
To think what could have happened had I sucked it up, sold out, and gotten hired there. To think, I could have been a Dana Milbank. Better to blog for an audience of three than that.
Back at the White House, the pro-lifers started getting taken in by police.
“You done?” the policeman, seeing me fiddling with me camera, asked. In fact I was just changing lenses.
“Nope,” I said. “I’m just gettin’ warmed up.”
Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
