Right is doing all right in best-seller lists

On behalf of all liberals - living and dead - I'd like to apologize to Adam Bellow. In 1976, Bellow was at a Michigan State University writing workshop when a radical feminist publicly rebuked him for saying she had 'balls.” He says he meant that as a compliment.

In a recent piece for National Review, he recounts this hurt as exhibit A for why the right needs to launch its own literary movement to tell its own stories.

'I didn't see why I should be called out in front of the group and angrily chastised as though I were merely an embodiment of the white male heterosexual power structure,” complains Bellow, son of the great novelist Saul Bellow.

I don't see why, either, but how about a larger picture? More recently, right-wingers disrupted town hall meetings, shouting down the elected representatives trying to address their constituents. Might that be 'a bare-knuckled attempt to enforce an ideological orthodoxy by policing the boundaries of acceptable speech,” an accusation Bellow chucks at the left?

Such examples would cloud the simple tale of mannerly conservatives battling the 1960s hippies. So down the memory hole they go.

But the long-term memory still works fine. For boomer conservatives, the 1960s remain fresh material. It matters not that most of today's students barely remember the 1990s, much less the 1960s.

Anyhow, Bellow complains that when he joined the culture war in 1988 as an editor, 'conservatives had little to read.”

Bellow acknowledges that on the non-fiction lists, the right is doing OK. Actually, more than OK.

A quick check shows that No. 1 and No. 7 are by conservative movement authors. No. 8 is by an evangelical Christian, and No. 10 by a Republican strategist. The only liberal in the lineup is Hillary Clinton at No. 3. The author at No. 7 is Ben Carson, a hero of the right. He's published by Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group. Perhaps, just perhaps, the objective of the media conglomerates now publishing books is to sell books.

But their business interests don't reach into fiction, according to Bellow.

The publishing houses must have been asleep at the switch when they let conservative Ayn Rand through the barricades. Her novels rank No. 1 and No. 2 on the Modern Library reader's list of 100 best novels.

Well, imagination is a good thing. And in that vein, I can almost hear the feminist meanie telling Bellow to 'man up.”

And don't anyone ask me to take that back. One apology per column.