When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country

In this colorful right-wing screed, the Watergate felon and conservative radio talk show host bemoans the politically correct gulag that is the United States. Liddy pillories the usual suspects-environmentalists, ""killer air bags,"" gun-control advocates, women who think they can do anything a man can-and gnaws on old enmities in a tedious appendix full of Watergate ephemera (something about ""the notorious rat John Dean,"" plus clippings of a call-girl ring, etc.). Liddy's hyper-masculine prose celebrates weapons, the massive, gas-guzzling ""torque"" of his automobiles, and Julius Caesar, a ""great leader"" who wisely ""slaughtered all the males remaining alive"" among his foes and ""sold all the women and children into slavery."" In his Nietzschean worldview, life is a ceaseless struggle for power among men and nations, channeled and structured by the sado-masochistic bonding rituals of warriors. But as his title implies, Liddy's most poignant writing dwells on the vanished liberties of youth: going hunting with a pal, making his own fireworks, burning leaves on an autumn afternoon (now, sadly, banned by ""global warming""-a term he always uses with quotes-alarmists). His is essentially a boy's view of freedom as the absence of responsibility and constraint. His many fans, of course, will love it.