Editorials/Is It Liberal Convergence?/Conservatives, Take Heart
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
CONSERVATIVES, TAKE HEART New York Fellow conservatives and other adepts of humane and normative behavior, take heart. Pay no heed to those popinjays among the intelligentsia who report with...
...and 4 p.m...
...It may be more inescapable today, blaring as it does into every corner of life thanks to broadcast media, but that does not make it any truer and should make it all the more tedious...
...higher taxes...
...Conservatism passe...
...I say laugh off the dirges about conservatism's demise and take heart from the 400-year-old wisdom of that suave Florentine statesman Sr...
...As the seven mediocrities now campaigning for the Democratic presidential candidacy are demonstrating daily, antiquated liberalism has nothing to offer beyond the array of extreme policies that almost knocked the Republic off its feet in the late 1970s...
...No, today's conservatives have no need to be saddened by the current wisdom...
...As for those sad sacks sedated in the current wisdom's idiot vapors, think of how unhappy their recent experiences have been...
...The bicycle was to 1970s liberals what the zeppelin was to turn-of-the-century German scientists, the vehicle of the future...
...I can cite facts...
...Yet to substantiate my position that conservative thought still has miles to go before it sleeps, I bring more than ancient pronouncements and contemporary polemics...
...Now he is moving against unruly cyclists in Midtown, many of whom doit for money as professional bicycle messengers (and here we see that conservative policy does not always side with the business interests...
...As has been the case for many years, the current wisdom is mostly flapdoodle, thrilling, compelling, and wrong...
...It seemed so appropriate to our present anxieties that I had to use it even if it meant braving the abuse Will endures for invoking the thought of one not now an eminence of the Washington press corps or the faculty of Harvard University...
...still more accommodations to terrorists and to the liberators of Afghanistan...
...Soon it is to be hoped that bicycles will be banned from the city entirely...
...Do not let the current whoop whoop fool you...
...Whenever Ihave reported on its dangerous brakes, its uncrashworthiness, the frightening bravura that comes over many cyclists when they grasp their handlebars, I have received the kind of hate mail generally sent by religious cranks...
...Recognition of the bicycle's inappropriateness to the modern city began to set in as early as the November election in 1980...
...If George Will has already used that quotation, forgive me...
...Doubtless they are superb recreational devices on country lanes, but in cities like New York they should be walked...
...There is much to be done...
...For nearly seven years they have believed that nuclear war would come on the morrow or economic collapse or the suspension of habeus corpus or worse...
...What will the politicians replace it with, a more extravagant welfare state...
...Then Mayor Koch began eliminating the dangerous cycling lanes that had been created in 1979 bringing with them congestion and chaos to many of New York's busiest thoroughfares...
...The universities, drugs, sex, and other objects of 1970s delusion must be returned to the domain of common sense...
...It became holy and the object of irrational devotion...
...In other times and other lands their forebears believed that the world was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, that a dirty old sock worn around the neck would cure illness...
...Come, come...
...Besides, 1980s current wisdom is usually incomprehensible to an intelligent mind, and no sooner has one familiarized himself with the bogus facts and faulty logic than the intelligentsia has moved on to new absurdities...
...At this very moment New York City is poised to undo still another of the 1970s' reckless enthusiasms...
...If you think about it carefully, you will find we do not have any true information about the present or about the things that happen every day in our own city...
...Its visionary Commission of Transportation is banning bicyclists from Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenues in midtown Manhattan between 10 a.m...
...Francesco Guicciardini, a counselor to princes and popes who upon inspecting the current wisdom of his day observed that one "need not be surprised at our ignorance of things that happened in the past...
...Sometimes Will's sources appear in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and that brings him even rougher treatment...
...Pay no heed to those popinjays among the intelligentsia who report with unseemly exuberance that the heyday of Reagan conservatism has passed...
...Conservatism is not dead, my friends...
Vol. 20 • October 1987 • No. 10
