1988. Hard to remember how deeply into the PC (Political Correctness) wars we had fallen. Very deeply. This was of course moments before the Soviet bloc fell and yet anticommunism was still very much an animating force behind attacks on multiculturalists and scholars of race/class/gender.
"[E]ven though we are nowadays closer to the naivete of the 30's that saw Communism as '20th-century Americanism' than to the 50's view of it as absolute evil, there is still a taboo against mentioning [ties between a liberal and a radical]."
So complained Peter Collier and David Horowitz in an essay for Commentary in the January 1988 issue of that conservative magazine on McCarthyism as "the last refuge of the left."
Get struck, and struck hard again and again - only to find oneself accused of striking out in the first place. By 1988, McCarthyism is the last refuge of the left. Ponder it.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
