Fury and fun.

So The New York Times called the other day. Correspondent Peter Applebome was doing a story on the militias, and he wanted me to talk about the connections between the far right today and the New Left in the 1960s. I didn't take the bait. I told him that the militias had really nothing in common with the civil-rights and anti-war protesters. I urged him to examine such facile paternity claims, and he'd see that the militias are the true heirs not of the New Left but of the white-supremacist and nativist movements of the late Nineteenth Century.

I hung up the phone in a fury. I wasn't particularly eloquent, and I was mad at myself for that, but I was even angrier because I sensed that the Times was about to publish a piece on the far right that would pin their violence on us, the left. I was even more worried, an hour later, when I got a call from June Jordan, who said she'd just had a similar conversation with Applebome and was having trouble disabusing him of his theory.

Sure enough, on May 7, Applebome's front-page story ran, entitled, An Unlikely Legacy of the Sixties: The Violent Right. The thesis of the massive piece was helpfully spelled out on the jump-page title, The Radical Right has an Unlikely Soulmate in the Leftist Politics of the Sixties.

It was obscene. The leftist politics of the 1960s were about peace, justice, and participatory democracy. They were not about bigotry, paranoia, and violence. But everything's the left's fault, even the grotesque bombing by the far right, which claimed 167 Americans.

Applebome's theory is a favorite of George Will and his ilk, and no wonder. It deflects responsibility from the far-rightists and their conservative cousins, who've been providing ideological cover for them. The far right despises the government: blame Abbie Hoffman. The far right takes up arms: blame Huey Newton. The far right spews bizarre conspiracy theories: blame Oliver Stone.

Never mind the direct historical links with Tom Watson, Father Coughlin, and the Grand Dragons. Or the current links among the militias, the Klan, the Aryan Nations, the NRA, and a passel of Republicans. Nah, blame the militias on the left. Awfully convenient, isn't it?

One more thing. If some wayward member of the left had murdered 167 people, and if 40,000 armed leftists were training to overthrow the government, you can bet that Congress wouldn't be holding hearings about the validity of our cause.

I had fun this month. One of my favorite sections of The Progressive, month in and month out, is the interview. I enjoy hearing leading activists and writers explain in their own words why they do what they do. I can pretend I'm sitting in on the conversation, privy to the insights and experiences of people who are making this world a better place.

As an editor, I like the interviews because I think it's important to have real flesh-and-blood people in the magazine. Years ago, when we didn't have interviews, The Progressive would occasionally fly at such high altitudes you couldn't make out the people below.

This month, I'm especially pleased to be publishing the interview with Dorothy Allison, author of the extraordinary novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. Last summer, I'd assigned the interview to Minnie Bruce Pratt, herself a distinguished poet and essayist (for a sample, check out her piece, "One Good Mother to Another," in the November 1993 issue of The Progressive). I knew she and Allison were colleagues in many civil-rights, women's-rights, and lesbian-rights campaigns over the years. I thought they'd have a lot to say to each other. After nine months of logistical arrangements, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Dorothy Allison finally sat down for the interview.

Being let in on their conversation was the most fun I've had editing since I worked with Katrina vanden Heuvel, now the editor of The Nation, on her interview with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which we published in our April 1987 issue. This one with Minnie Bruce Pratt and Dorothy Allison gave me the same sense of doors opening, and I urge you to read it.

I also had fun looking out my window. I've set up a bird feeder six feet away from my desk, and I fill it twice a day with sunflower seeds. I'm rewarded with steady visits from house finches, cardinals, mourning doves, and chickadees. I've become a bird evangelist in the office, berating other staff members to worship at the feeder.

And I'm reminded of a conversation I had in college, when I was an industrious smart aleck. I was walking to the library and I saw a friend of mine lying out in the sun with a book on his belly.

"Your efficiency's down 50 percent," I chided him.

"Yeah, but my suntan's up 100 percent," he retorted.

Well, I don't know about my efficiency, but my birdwatching's up 100 percent.