“There is a three-level, handcrafted, soft-lighted waterfall cascading into the pool behind David Horowitz’s house in the chic Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. Moviemaker boulders retain the soft earth hillside behind and above the waterfall as streams trickle steadily from one carved stone basin to the next. It cost David Horowitz a lot of money to install his waterfall after he bought the home. He won’t say how much, but when he agreed to cooperate in the writing of this profile, the waterfall was one of the first things he chose to talk about. He wanted to explain it, to have it understood why he had built this magnificent toy with lights and pipes and pumps and switches.”

So goes the unlikely lead of Frank Browning’s landmark profile of David Horowitz in the May 1987 issue of Mother Jones. The other day Jonathan Schwarz inaugurated IslamoHorowitzism Awareness Week by digging up a shot that ran with the profile of a defiant Horowitz posing by what appears to be the very same waterfall. Now, using my journalism archive-searching and image-scanning skills, I’ve discovered whole new dimensions of scary in the man, the myth, the .... nouveau riche social climber? You bet. As Browning relates, perhaps the most telling symptom of Horowitz’s far left-to-far right conversion was his self-conscious adoption of truly awful taste:

...But the waterfall behind his house, like the $85 musical teakettle on his kitchen range [that’s $156 in 2007 dollars], were attachments about which Horowitz wanted not to be misunderstood—just as once he had wanted his attachment to V.I. Lenin’s idea of individual action not to be misunderstood. These new attachments, he explained, were not simply the baubles of recent success: they were the manifest signs of his own liberation from the dark self-negation of his past, from the brittle Stalinism of his Communist parents, from the murderous karma of the Panthers, from the global self-hatred of the international radical movement which he now believes to be the very child of evil itself.

A musical teakettle! If only self-actualization were so easy on the left! Meet four more Horowitzes you never knew, plus see the photo, after the jump.

From the 1987 profile, reproduced without malice for cultural historical purposes only (sorry D-Ho), introducing,

1. Horowitz the literary critic:

An obscure fourth book, published in 1965, ... Shakespeare: An Existential View is made up of two long essays almost completely devoted to Shakespeare’s treatment of redemption in his middle and late works. The critical play is Antony and Cleopatra, in which Horowitz finds the antithesis of the rigid, power-bound Roman state in the fluid transformational fecundity of Cleopatra, a being who makes “defect, perfection,” who is herself grace. Writing of the love between Antony and Cleopatra, he says “that they have transformed the world with their presence. When they leave it ... it is a vile world that they leave, not worth the staying in. It has been redeemed from its vileness, ennobled, made non-vile, only by the grace of their presence,  by their own ‘nobleness of life.’”

2. Horowitz the apartheid-era racial commentator:

“Why is all the passion out about the South African government? If you look at Africa, one of the things I’ve thought about, [you] look practically at the lot of black people in Africa and you have to say that the worse thing that’s happened to them, or a great tragedy, was decolonization. They were better off as colonies.” 

3. Horowitz the wild child:

[Writer and former Horowitz friend Kate Coleman said] “Then he got into lots of parties. He saw himself as the Pearl Mesta of the Berkeley hills. There’d be all these women, and then there’d be all the old Berkeley detritus, including myself .... He’d get involved in psychodramas every week with a different woman. Then he had an affair with a woman across the street who was living with a guy. He’d get himself in terrible situations. He was out of control.”

4. The confessional Horowitz:

“You don’t change who you are,” Horowitz told me toward the end of our conversations. “Whatever made me go on the left makes me get high on the other side. I want to do battle with my other self.”

And, finally, well, I’m struggling with this ... throw caption ideas in the comments: