April 28, 2013
Michael Mayo
The Sun Sentinel

RE: I’ll bet Lucy bamboozles Charley Brown again. I’ll bet she yanks the football out just as he is going to kick it. I’ll bet he winds up on his ass again, as he always does – Some comments on you achingly familiar, absolutely priceless and timeless column in today’s Sun Sentinel.

Mr. Mayo,

“How sad of all the things that men endure
how few laws or kings can cause or cure.”

An eternal line from Dr. Johnson – Samuel, not Lyndon. Hold your thought. I’ll get back to him.

I got to the end of your 3rd paragraph

“Once again, the poor are cannon fodder
for someone else’s fight.”

when it came to me in a flash.

Eureka! I had found it.

In the good old days, the days when the New York was a righteous paper, the days when Mrs. Schiff ran it like an ink stained soup kitchen, the days when publisher James Wechsler valiantly tried to stop D.A. Frank Hogan from turning Manhattan into a Stalag while remaining neutral on the vexing question of Gulags, the days when Pete Hamill wanted to Agent Orange poppy fields and carpet bomb heroin factories, the days when Jimmy Breslin said the Post had to survive because the city needed its “voice”, the days when Murray Kempton left his readers scratching their heads, the days before the arrival of K. Rupert Murdoch there was a columnist whose lamentations made Jeremiah sound like Jerry Lewis.

The perpetually outraged Harriet Van Horne never saw a Republican – with the exception of John Lindsay - that she liked or a tax that shouldn’t be raised. She had a mindset that was fueled by a continuous “Balloon Juice” enema. She was in favor of early springs, balmy summers, crisp falls, and snowless winters. Naturally, as the prototypical modern American Liberal, she thought these things were rights and that the legislature in Albany should guarantee them. She was an early volunteer in Lyndon Johnson’s wildly popular War on Poverty [49 years after it was begun would it make me mean spirited if I were to ask for a status report on it? Has an exit strategy ever been decided on? Can’t we just say “We Won” and go home?

To me, her most memorable line came at the end of a “de profundis” call to have Nixon kidnapped by the early version of Somali pirates, to give an annual ticker tape parade for Castro, to turn our weapons into plow shares and our plow shares into tofu, to have William F. Buckley flayed, to have eggs benedict for school breakfasts and New York rib-eye for lunch when she said that, absent the above, it would be

“another lash on the backs of the poor.”

As God is my witness she actually wrote that

How long did it take to find a worthy successor?

Far too long.

You, sir, are the first recipient of the

Harriet Van Horne
“ANOTHER LASH ON THE BACKS OF THE POOR”
Dunce Cap

It will shortly rank with my other rewards:

HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK
POMPOUS FART O F THE MONTH
SMARMY BASTARD OF THE YEAR

It will be given from time to time as earned. Preference will be given to anyone with a New York City frame of mind.

In lieu of a cash purse the recipient will be pleased to know that the grantor [me] will retire to a public house well stocked with single malt whisky. He shall reflect on why, yet again, the great Dr. Johnson is our guide, our fixed star, when he spoke of

“the triumph of hope over experience.”

Looking forward to enjoying this year’s Summer of Recovery, I remain








KEVIN SMITH
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET