The Enemies List by P. J. O'Rourke

Author:P. J. O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1996-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

VI

Commies—Dead but Too Dumb to Lie Down

The American Spectator, November 1992

This year: dirty-money groups and individuals who fund neo-, proto-, crypto-, demi-, semi-, and plain Ben & Jerry’s vanilla Communism in the United States—plus the special “Peter Ueberroth Gold Medal for 100-Meter-Dash-Carrying-a-VCR” awards to those who did the most to provide L.A. murderers and thieves with moral, political, and philosophic justification for all the fun they had.

Let us commence without preamble what that unmourned sixties radical Danny the (Now Better Than) Red called “The Long March Through the Institutions.”

We have two Supercontributors to this Enemies List. First, there is the lovely (ah, the joys of being a middle-aged Republican and thus allowed to compliment the ladies with a clear conscience and, even, a twinkling eye) Kimberly O. Dennis. Ms. Dennis is the executive director of the Philanthropy Roundtable, an organization that promotes the astonishing idea that charity ought to help people (320 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis, IN 46204, in case you’d like to make a donation). Ms. Dennis directs our attention to the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts. Founded by the owners of Sun Oil and once a model group of charities giving money to churches, schools, museums, homes for the retarded, and other such worthy causes, the Pew Trusts have come down with Ford Foundation Syndrome. A diseased itch for social engineering has replaced a healthy instinct for social service. According to the April 26, 1992, edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Instead of continuing to fund neighborhood centers to help poor people with their heating bills, Pew gave $5 million in a joint effort with three other big foundations to set up an Energy Foundation to provide grants to promote energy efficiency.

Instead of expanding local child-welfare programs, Pew gave $2.5 million to a New York research corporation to develop a demonstration project “to improve the earnings of absent fathers, the effectiveness of the child-support enforcement system and the financial well-being of poor children.”

You get the picture.

Foundation News, one of the hand-out industry’s professional journals, crowed that the Pew Charitable Trusts “eliminated almost all of their right-wing grantmaking and embraced a broad range of projects, including some that manifestly oppose the business interests the old Pews held inviolable.” In other words, the Pew trustees haven’t actually killed the golden goose but they are chasing it around the yard with an axe.

Of course, no one suffers from Ford Foundation Syndrome like the Ford Foundation, which has in the past done the nation such favors as underwriting public television, creating pilot programs for LBJ’s “War on Poverty,” and providing post-assassination grants to Robert F. Kennedy’s staff to help them overcome their grief.

Ms. Dennis sends us a package of information on the Ford Foundation’s current activities. Ford is paying to create “advocacy centers” for children in Nigeria—not giving them food or health care, mind you, but giving them a place to make complaints about the lack thereof. Ford is “explor[ing] the obstacles to settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict”—expecting a few New York double domes to accomplish with one study grant what God Himself has not been able to do in five thousand years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.