WE ARE STARDUST, WE ARE GOLDEN. YOU, ON THE OTHER HAND, ARE AN IDIOT.

Stamping his foot, Ron Rosenbaum declares in this week’s New York Observer that he will have nothing more to do with the Left (and its “idiocies”) because some contemporary leftists ill-advisedly compare the United States to murderous totalitarian regimes.

Well, funny thing -- this sort of talk on the part of leftists apparently amused Rosenbaum greatly in 1968, and continued to win his admiration as recently as a few years ago.

Rosenbaum was “in the streets,” as they say, during the 1968 Democratic convention, where he heard Chicago referred to as “Czechago.” Rosenbaum recalls this in a 1996 essay with the wince-inducing title “The Unbearable Sadness of Tear Gas”; in the essay, Rosenbaum, who describes present-day leftists as “people who are unable to make moral distinctions,” expressed no outrage at the fact that leftists of his golden ’60s youth compared merely thuggish Chicago cops to the genuinely totalitarian Soviet repressors of Czechoslovakia. To the contrary: Rosenbaum ’96 admiringly credited the “Czechago” pun to “one of the brilliant Yippie agitprop masters” then abroad in the land.

Apparently Rosenbaum believes that only modern leftists should be judged on the logical rigor of their words. Here he is in 1996, writing about his groovy generational peers: “For better or worse, 1968 was not so much about ideological consistency as it was about the spirit of rebellion -- at its best, anarchic, antinomian, even Blakean in its radical innocence, on the side of dissent in general against oppressive authority in general. At its worst, misguided, sectarian, and willfully ignorant, but certainly no more willfully ignorant than those sending hundreds of thousands to die in a misguided war.”

I guess the fact that we are about to send tens if not hundreds of thousands to possibly die in another misguided war doesn’t give contemporary leftists the right to be innocent in their Blakean anarcho-radical antinomianism. Or whatever.

(“The Unbearable Sadness of Tear Gas” appears in Ron Rosenbaum’s book The Secret Parts of Fortune.)