Baby Boom Influences
BABY BOOM INFLUENCES Some of our brightest young writers pay tribute to their mentors and describe the milestones in their intellectual coming of age. DAVID ASMAN In the summer of 1969—about a...
...The fog lifted, and I have been unable to shut up since...
...Go to Reed College like you plan to and you won't ever feel stupid again...
...Formally, the Party of the RightPOR for short—was a subdivision of the Yale Political Union, a dullish college debating and speaking society...
...A democratic socialist then, I'd spent the preceding weeks boning up on my Harrington, my Heilbroner, my Thurow, at the ready with the latest salvos of collectivist ideology...
...Dave Shiflett is a writer living in Virginia...
...Bruce Bawer is TAS's movie reviewer...
...But this story does have a happy ending...
...Soon, I began to feel better...
...She was also, coincidentally, the first Reaganite—this was back in 1976—and probably the first Republican any of us had ever met...
...FRED BARNES Senior Editor, The New Republic "The very best introduction available to the many faces of evangelicalism and fundamentalism as they emerge today on the political and social scene...
...The list of POR members now out in the movement is eerily long...
...Do America's mutual defense treaties with more than 40 nations make us safer or increase the risk of war...
...I decided to hang around...
...But by night, I would crouch beside my little AM radio and soak in the words of Barry Farber...
...you were either with the Viet Cong women, or you were against them...
...Forget nuclear freezers and yuppies...
...Mark Hatfield, Sen...
...DAVID BROOKS I used to wonder if I lost that debate with Milton Friedman because the University of Hawaii women's volleyball team lounging around the pool of the Palo Alto Holiday Inn distracted me as I was studying up on the virtues of socialism...
...CA)1-800-451-4440 (USA)1-800-782-1600 *120 Montgomery Street, Suite 1270, San Francisco, CA 94104* se111 ct asn'titt THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 85 like someone's rich aunt halfway through a bottle of sherry, bragging about her compassion and brains...
...The people who called themselves liberals all sounded 1986 ANNUAL REPORT RKOVTELEVISION Broadcast to over 12 million viewers RKOVRADIO Broadcast to over 8 million listeners RKOVPICTURES Produced 6 feature films RKOVBOTTLERS Produced over 30 million cases of Pepsi and Dr...
...How, he asked, could they teach values if they broke the stealing Commandment in order to do it...
...Five weeks later a sheriff in another town, a man of broad shoulders and truly red neck, told me I'd need a sales license...
...Martha Bayles is television critic for the Wall Street Journal...
...The' Chancellor of Cards and Games, the note concluded, would serve port and sherry, "as is traditional...
...The Register was Orange County, California's largest newspaper, and there were lots of burgeoning cities with lots of school boards, planning commissions, city councils, and cop shops whose proceedings I struggled to represent in the old inverted pyramid...
...is editorial and commentary director of the Orange County Register...
...It had push-button drive and a rusting right fin...
...Hobbes, Adam Smith...
...Wash., D.C...
...I hadin fact been writing for years...
...In Mexico on the folkloric buses going to town center Saturday afternoon the poor local girls dressed up in the same despised bourgeois colors—pink, yellow, green, and white—that preppie American girls wore, and for which one could get assaulted in Cambridge...
...He was some sort of Midwestern Scandinavian socialist, or an errant product of the Maryland Free State, I forget which, but he took a shine to me, lone confessed journalist in a class of pre-law and pre-med students...
...part familiar and hospitable, part menacing, a silent suggestion of danger seemed always hidden in the bare, beautiful hills...
...Not only would "the Jews" have to go, but the liberation of all of Palestine was only a step in the war against American imperialism and Arab monarchism...
...My senior year he put me on a crash intellectual dietwhich included James Burnham, Irving Kristol, and the greatly underestimated Willmoore Kendall...
...If he asserts the sky is blue, deny it against all reason...
...On such sophistries are concentration camps built...
...It's Fun To Practice A Second Language For Business Or Pleasure A Home Video Cassette Just $49.95 French • Spanish • English EYES...
...Gordon Jackson is managing editor of Policy Review...
...TIM W FERGUSON Before there was a Rand for me, before Hayek and the Austrians, way before I'd heard of neoconservatives, I'd gotten the gospel according to Hoiles...
...R. C. Hoiles was, until he died in his 90s in 1970, the publisher of what is now the Orange County Register...
...Sycophancy, fear, and duplicity are rewarded with limousine service, television appearances, and pretty gooddough...
...I think that the political trajectory of many members of my generation has followed the arc of Winston Churchill's dictum: if you are not liberal when young, you have no heart...
...We talked God, culture, history, sex, philosophy, music...
...date Signature Name Address City State Zip Mail to: Linguex International, Ltd, 900 3rd Avenue, New York, NY 10022 © Copyright Linguex International, Ltd...
...Conclusion: Conservatives may be eloquent enough about the need for decentralized government, which is to be infinitely preferred over the command economies everywhere else, but somebody has to look out for the bastards at City Hall, who can be as badge-heavy as any party functionary in Kiev...
...Irving Kristol's advice to a friend of mine who wanted to know how to prepare to become a writer: "A writer writes...
...Nor, naturally, would American journalists, those occasionally useful idiots and lackeys of capitalism...
...I emerged a libertarian, albeit one who, like R. C., took his principles from such "moral guides as the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence...
...They also tended to cower before the Communists, who are, as far as the intellect goes, the biggest threats around...
...Descending from this epiphany ever deeper into the pit of reaction—indulging in National Review subscriptions and other perversions—I eventually made my way to law school in Indiana where my regimen included administering weekly thrashings on the handball court to the editor of this esteemed journal...
...He is currently a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff DAVE SHIFLETT Politics tends to take the mind away from the big questions: the mystery of love, the nature of God, the reason for ideas...
...This young man was taking no prisoners...
...He was an intellectual if I ever saw one but would never have referred to himself as such in a million years...
...Sidney Hook was not the only remarkable personality I got to know at Hoover...
...JOSEPH SHATTAN I first met Sidney Hook in the fall of 1978...
...Other crimes followed...
...There I was, three, maybe four, years Goldwaterized, editor of my community college newspaper, and R. C. Hoiles wanted to break me in as a cub reporter...
...They didn't like to hear that the poor were so depressing...
...The show could have been a disaster, because most of the young people selected—Richard Vigilante, Lee Lieberman, Steve Calabrese, Harry Crocker—didn't have moronic economic ideas...
...FERNANDA EBERSTADT As a student, I was equal parts ignorant, pigheaded, and know-better, a trait which first emerged in kindergarten when I told my teacher that "hut" began with an "o" and refused to back down...
...Send me the Linguex Home Video in quantities checked below: — Spanish English for Spanish - French speakers ^ Check enclosed for $49.95 plus $3.00 shipping (payable to Linguex) New York residents add sales tax Or charge my ^ Visa ^ M/C ^ Amex THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 81 South Side of Chicago, and gradually I discovered that he was right about a lot of things...
...He hit ideas back and forth as swiftly and deftly, and with as good a spirit of sportsmanship, as he did tennis balls...
...But I also had a residual belief in pluralism and democracy, and I was not prepared for the totalitarianism of these groups...
...the managing editor picked the miserable bourgeois up by the lapels and gave him a progressive shaking...
...But disenchantment with the New Left did not immediately send me to the other side of the political spectrum...
...I was somewhere in-between...
...I had recently turned for the first time to a serious study of American family trends and came to understand the true horrors of modern American liberal dogma...
...Contributors include Carl F.H...
...More important, it presented history as grand things that happened to live people, not as random, dead details...
...Later on, I became something of a class dummy in the very clever and very conscientious New York girls school I attended...
...That sense of continuity and purpose has sustained me throughout my Washington sojourn...
...Over the years I've met, worked with, and been influenced by Bill Buckley, Frank Meyer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Michael Novak, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Chuck Colson...
...This, then, is the first task in a certain kind of mind's development: to stop loving one's ignorance, and listen...
...And so he became for me something of—not exactly a model or a mentor, but an incomparable example of what a writer, at his best, could hope to be...
...But R. C., then about 90, and a crusty advocate of what he called "close reasoning," wanted me to refine my thinking beyond a mere appreciation for capitalism and federalism...
...Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer...
...My roommate and I rented a room in Perry...
...This is the most complete analysis I have seen anywhere on the evangelical movement—and the best...
...From his writings I imagined him to be a severe and imposing figure, the kind of man who doesn't suffer fools gladly...
...It's true what they say about mixing lust and industrial policy: messes up your career plans...
...WHIT STILLMAN My political turning came in 1971 when I took a leave of absence from my sophomore year at Harvard to go to Mexico "to write...
...Reactionary Palestinians, of course, would not be allowed to stand in the way of the revolution...
...He took all their arguments head-on and devastated them—with a sense of humor, too...
...And he always did so with wit, unaffected charm, and a natural graciousness...
...Buckley took off...
...Thankless task...
...I grew up with the Register and later wrote and edited there for about five years...
...But he didn't try to pander to them by making the sort of "well-you-have-a-point" statements that a lot of "establishment" characters were making at the time...
...None of them has failed me, and none of them is taught in college...
...Had I crushed Friedman, in front of a television audience no less, I certainly would have been Big Pinko On Campus back at Chicago, and solicitations from Dissent and the Washington Post Outlook section would have had to reserve space in my mailbox...
...If he didn't like FDR and that gang, he wasn't any easier on the local "schoolmen," as he called them...
...Joseph Shattan has served as a special assistant to Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Bennett, and Elliott Abrams...
...Somehow I managed to get him to stop as he wheeled down a dirt road, and I lit out through a cornfield as he pulled to his lips a half-drunk quart bottle of beer...
...I tried to follow Rose Friedman's off-camera advice that you should never concede anything to Milton, no matter how rudimentary...
...Micah Morrison is deputy director of the Committee for the Free World and editor of its monthly publication, Contentions...
...C. was as interested in making profits as in making converts), the Register would do what no newspaper should and run a long, gray tract on liberty...
...That means there's time left free in the evenings to read Yeats instead of Laisser's tax guide...
...So I became a journalist...
...I wish I'd known,that at the time...
...One evening after taping we all went out to dinner and Mr...
...Scattered here and there among the desultory-definitions of the Sovereign and the State of Nature, I find lists of songs with "angel" in them, an address for a bar that was torn down years ago, and the beginning of a short story, "The Perfect Weekend," whose first line was ". . . you little bitch...
...Many of these have proved to be words of such grand simplicity and good sense that they should be cross-stitched on samplers in 24-karat gold...
...Hey, wait a minute, Thomas Jefferson ain't beanbag" just goes so far...
...The summer was wild...
...But at the time her book of essays, Mystery and Manners, was having a healthily astringent effect on various intellectual inflammations I had acquired at Harvard, and I was especially struck by her account of why most of her characters were poor: "I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction, for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself...
...I had seen the great Buckley/Vidal TV encounter the year before and kind of respected Buckley —as an enemy, of course...
...I had spent four years trying to become as tough and patient as the teachers I admired, but all I had become was bored and misanthropic...
...The day in 1971 when I first read a poem by William Butler Yeats, and realized you could love the English language without understanding it...
...Nothing provides a constant testing of accepted notions so much as travel...
...He wanted to hear your opinion as much as he wanted to present and defend his own...
...Gilder demonstrated that both my instincts and the traditional order could be defended with cogency and eloquence, and I honestly hadn't realized that was possible...
...I was out in Palo Alto for a taping of "Tyranny of the Status Quo,-" a sequel to "Free to Choose," which featured Mr...
...If I never cast a vote or read a newspaper again, I will still live my life in the echo, fading but persistent, of that four-year conversation...
...You were either part of the problem, or part of the solution, and the solution was Viet Cong women who carried guns and presumably knew how to use them...
...R. C. was a libertarian—a Bible-based one at that He liked the Golden Rule but not many of man's laws...
...Many of us have had the time of our lives, and doubt anyone will miss us when we leave...
...20005 Piety & Politics Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World IS15114.140W4e011445...
...GEORGE SIM JOHNSTON The sudden evaporation of the New Left in the early seventies still mystifies —unless, that is, you happen to have been there...
...DONNA RIFKIND The biggest influence on my intellec, tual development was a book first published in 1924 and now long out of print called A Child's History of the World, by an American schoolteacher named, V. M. Hillyer...
...You follow a young business man on a trip and learn how to hail a cab, check into a hotel, use the phone, make appointments, close a deal and go to the bank...
...This situation forced a reappraisal, which eventually led me to Washington...
...For the first time in my life I felt part of a scholarly community, a long and distinguished intellectual tradition...
...These questions will be addressed by such distinguished analysts as Sen...
...Habash is a radical Marxist terror warrior who over the years has turned his instruments of arbitrary violence against a variety of ruling classes, including the Israelis, the Americans, and assorted Arabs...
...I politely smiled and took notes...
...Cohen outlines the story of the clash between two emerging nations, giving the facts of the case and the mistakes of both sides as objectively as possible...
...RICHARD BROOKHISER The invitation appeared under my door the first week of freshman year at Yale, on blue paper...
...Peter Onuf of Columbia...
...So they came to me when a book by Pearl Buck was missing...
...I saw plenty of them...
...His concern with poverty is with a poverty fundamental to man...
...A, 224 Second St...
...Here's how to order (VHS only) Call Toll-free 1-800-835-2246 ext...
...Now I have my own editorial page, preaching daily to the sybarites of the "Orange Riviera," who remind me right back that the world spins along nicely without much of an assist from Washington...
...The cafe was small and hot and the door seemed very far away...
...My sixties-generation friends still called my motives 80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 "idealistic," but only because I had quit telling them about my job...
...After Farber it was but a short step to malicious hooliganism...
...Sadly, during its moment of ascendancy the conservative movement seemed less inclined than before to honor its thinkers and prose stylists—the Gilders, Tyrrells, Sobrans, and Buchanans—who were most responsible for gaining conservatism whatever stature it now enjoys...
...We started out, in other words, like "Agronsky & Company," and ended up"The McLaughlin Group," with master Onuf at times intoning, "All right, let's get out," positing a notion, and asking for a show of hands...
...A few of its facts are imprecise and, in addressing its original audience of wealthy schoolboys, it has a patrician and sometimes nearly bigoted point of view...
...And, what to soy if you fall in love...
...With that the audience began to whistle, snort, hiss, and generally make any further comment by anyone on stage impossible...
...A Cato Institute Conference • December 2-3, 1987 • Washington, D.C...
...MICAH MORRISON For young Americans raised in those halcyon days of liberalism, an especially important part of intellectual growth probably should be the cultivation of the ability to see what is bogus and mean and what is true and good in the world...
...The emergence of the evangelical voting block is the most important political development of the 1980s, and Neuhaus and Cromartie tell everything you need to know about it...
...KENNETH S. KANTZER Senior Editor, Christianity Today "Excellent and broad ranging . . . I reconimend it to anybody who is attempting to understand the evangelical Christian upsurge in our time...
...Full refund in 10 days if not satisfied...
...Conversion of a sort followed, when a friend placed in my hands a copy of The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek, Myrdal's heretofore mysterious co-recipient of the Nobel economics prize...
...I saw the kitchen tables of America...
...University of California Press Berkeley 94720 84 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 book, factual or fictional, that I've sat down to read since...
...He was small for a 13-year-old, so I seized him by his collar and hurled him against the nearest desk, which tipped over, spilling greasy food wrappers and drippy soda cans across the already tacky floor...
...Reading it was a scales-falling-off-theeyes experience...
...if you are not conservative when older, you have no mind...
...When I was 19, I began to think...
...Onuf taught Contemporary Civilization, one of Columbia's core of required classes, and filled with all the heavy lumber in the attic of the West: Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau...
...Now, "human limitation" is the sort of concept every bright collegian can readily grasp and apply to other people...
...Once he gets you to admit the sky is blue, he'll force you to the conclusion that federal aid to education is counterproductive...
...Something, anything had to be done...
...That was the work of George Nash, no stranger to TAS readers...
...As everyone knows, Sidney Hook is a man of towering erudition and intellect...
...Around the same time, I discovered all four of my totemic figures: H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe, Jean Shepherd, and Heywood Hale Broun...
...edited by Richard John Neuhaus Michael Cromarne THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 83 they retorted that they were simply exercising their own "freedom of expression...
...William A. Schambra, on citizenship and partisanship, when I asked him before the 1980 election to spend five minutes trying to convince me to vote Republican: "It's not worth my time...
...theologically, it's made him an atheist...
...For most of the summer Iliad no car, hitching rides around the country .and riding a bike I "rented" from a customer for $10...
...My inquiries have led me to believe that politics is often the first refuge of the second string, a benchwarmer's paradise...
...We started out timidly at first, and then, when the lines were drawn (Gustayson and Reed being the only others in the class on the right), high in oath and in full gallop...
...Born a moderate Republican (I was for Scranton in 1964...
...Rousseau was evidently not to my taste...
...The closer I looked into political life, the worse it seemed...
...Finally...
...For a time, it seems,, he was a journalist himself in, of all places, Orange County, California...
...The first time we met I was nineteen, and wanted more than anything else to be a writer...
...It was my first "0" day...
...When confronted with the fact that they had denied a person freedom of speech, —ANNOUNCING Politics Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World Edited by Richard John Neuhaus and • Michael Cromartie • After nearly half a century in exile, American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists have returned to the political arena...
...On that spring day in the mid-seventies, I thought, nothing of the incident...
...Whit Stillman is The American Spectator's New York editor...
...At one point in our conversation, the student abruptly tore Ha-bash's picture from the wall, demonstrating how quickly he could make it vanish if the soldiers approached...
...Ben Stein on the enemies of achievement: "Perfectionism is a greater crippler of young adults than multiple sclerosis...
...If this was the best rejoinder my comrades could come up with before turning into a nasty, spoiled mob, I figured it was time for me to rethink my alliances...
...Piety and Politics includes a wide range of perspectives on this growing religious and political development...
...We were at Bir Zeit University, a center of Palestinian nationalism...
...Disgusted by politics in general, my friend said "the hell with this" and left...
...At the time, I was amazed at how many of my peers were ready to heave the Constitution overboard, burn the Declaration of Independence, abolish the Magna Carta, and choose life in some tyrannical Utopia...
...So write something...
...He was wonderfully learned and well-read but never pedantic...
...But they were sentinels, not social scientists...
...I think I was about seven or eight when I first read it but it has stayed with me as some books do...
...I've had my own radio program, done two stints in Washington journalism, filed dispatches from various spots around the globe, published a small group of newspapers (part of Hoiles's chain) in upstate New York...
...There were Hayek, Mises, Chodorov, Meyer, Read...
...in the top left, a double-headed eagle...
...Unlike many people in Hollywood he knew what art meant...
...In the top right corner was a list of names with improbable titles...
...My brain slipped into gear, albeit as slowly as a loaded B-52 taking off for Moscow, and Professor Onuf did not let his inclinations get in the way of awarding me a solid B-plus...
...What struck me in Mexico, where rich and poor often live next to each other, was not Poverty but poor people, something specific not abstract—and the inappropriateness to them of the emotion-laden socio-political constructs of Cambridge...
...Scarcely a day goes by when I don't silently thank Mr...
...The new literature on family sociology resembled a great sewer composed of bald lies, clever deceits, manufactured data, and ideologically charged interpretations...
...the Jewish state, and wanted a Palestinian state next to Israel...
...Their collective influence on My intellectual development was decisive...
...Sidney was indignant...
...I glanced toward the bright, sunlit doorway...
...In private and off the record, some of the teachers expressed grave doubts about Arafat's ability to cut a deal with Israel...
...And then there was the day, long ago, when I got my first respectable job, got my first respectable paycheck, and realized that if I went on earning a decent living I was going to be systematically robbed for the rest of my life by the IRS...
...Politically, this made him a relentless enemy of totalitarianism...
...BRUCE BAWER I wish I could say that I knew the late novelist (Edgell's Island) and screenwriter Robert Presnell very well, but I didn't...
...Occasionally we reached conclusions...
...I learned about liberty, and I learned not to hitch-hike...
...Sidney's on-going quarrel with God pops out at the oddest moments...
...Though I lived in Jerusalem at the time, each trip into the territories was a journey into a zone of ambiguity, a place part Israeli, part Arab...
...JOE MYSAK It is axiomatic that adult males are maturing later and later...
...While in the past one could hold left-liberal views while enjoying a "bourgeois" college existence, such contradictions were no longer acceptable...
...Miss C. was the school terror...
...CLAUDIA ROSETT There have been a few searing moments...
...Under the labels of "new family forms" and "changing mores," politicos disguised as social scientists were rapidly advancing an agenda designed to destroy the decent, natural institutions of American life...
...Then he exclaimed, "All these lonely women...
...This opinion seems to be shared by many so-called conservatives, who don't consider themselves infantrymen in a movement but more like snipers, shooting rats at the dump...
...It's another proof of God's non-existence...
...But "stupid...
...Donna Rifkind is assistant managing editor of the New Criterion...
...Your printed translation is keyed to numbers on the screen for easy reference...
...The script is based on a computer-assisted selection of over 1000 basic words plus 60 verbs in all tenses...
...Ever the good Christian, Bob Tyrrell turned first one cheek then the other to these indignities and bestowed upon me many of the insights he had gained from years of looking directly into the fearsome visage of the lunatic left...
...Southwestern taught us to work six days a week for at least 75 hours, and to work like the mailman, through rain and everything else...
...This guy ain't half-bad," I thought to myself...
...Signature s Make check payable to UPA...
...Our morning hours were thus spent talking about the books we had (in most instances) just read, and mainly about individual liberty and the state...
...The audience really hated Buckley...
...Latin America has been the left's favorite terrain, since it is easy to exaggerate the crimes and inequities of some authoritarian regime to the point that world opinion decides something, anything must be done...
...STRATEGY The Logic of War and Peace Edward N. Luttwak This landmark work is the first ALLAN C. CARLSON One afternoon in 1978, I left the Library of Congress literally sick to my stomach...
...America has socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor...
...I don't mind taking this opportunity, just once, to smirk at my old classmates who went ahead and copped their "communications" degrees from Cal State Fullerton...
...Terry Eastland is director of public affairs for the Justice Department...
...Or, just send in the coupon at right...
...K. E. GRUBBS, JR...
...MONA CHAREN I spent my •formative years in the Gucci Archipelago known as-northern New Jersey...
...I think I stopped going to libertarian conferences when I saw one too many peach-fuzzy faces atop one too many tie-dyed T-shirts stretched over one too many premature paunches...
...Fernanda Eberstadt is the author of a novel, Low Tide (Knopf), and a frequent contributor to Commentary...
...After all, if God really exists how can He let all this suffering go on...
...People think that writers are misanthropes who like to closet themselves away, but whenever you were with Robert you knew how untrue that was...
...Robert was the first professional writer I ever knew...
...The sheriff caught up with me as I came out of the clerk's office, and advised me not to sell in his town, which by that time I'd just about finished selling anyway...
...Friedman gently explaining to seven young people that their economic ideas were moronic=a kind of monetarist "Father Knows Best...
...I could enumerate the things I learned from that brief encounter, but this is a comment on travel, not arrival...
...Victoria Sackett is deputy managing editor of Public Opinion...
...These bits of wisdom I prize above rubies...
...I was fresh out of graduate school and had been awarded a year's fellowship at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace...
...Nor did he ever cease to love writing—the act of writing, the art of writing...
...A maverick legal thinker named Bernard Siegan was getting a lot of ink...
...I also found solace and renewed faith in the true power of social analysis through the work of Robert Nisbet...
...It may seem a stretch from an inner-city classroom to Flannery O'Connor...
...Waspwaisted and pretty as a china doll, she taught math in a voice so piercing and so caustic you could hear it—and quake—five stories below...
...He wanted me to witness firsthand the petty tyrannies of the local "planners...
...MARTHA BAYLES Perched on a wide windowsill with a view of the school parking lot, Michael had refused several entreaties and commands to climb down and take his seat...
...But interspersed among the right-wing warhorses of the opinions section was 82 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 a distinct school of thought, one anchored in natural rights...
...The next day the town clerk told me none was needed...
...the slogan "Viet Cong women carry guns" had been painted everywhere by some opinion-maker...
...I guess his passion as a teacher, his eloquence, and the truth of his arguments finally had some impact, because I finished the show a little more open-minded...
...And he was a humanist, a man who never ceased to be fascinated, frustrated, and amused by the ways of the human animal...
...and he could have drummed it all into his charges, I suppose, with all the standard impedimenta to learning—voluminous notes, memorization, frequent quizzes, weekly papers...
...I believe that the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation...
...There was something electric about the situation that excited me...
...Then one day in a Tucson, Arizona bookstore I picked up what looked like a pretty racy title, Sexual Suicide by George Gilder...
...Fresh out of high school, I had traveled from my native Dallas to Nashville, the company's home, for a week of "sales school," before moving south to my designated "territory," which was Houston County, Georgia, just south of Macon...
...He explained how Women's Lib has actually hurt women by providing men with a pretext for cruelty...
...I knew that Sidney was out at Hoover, but I'd never met him...
...S.E., Washington, D.C...
...There were several others—Ella Wolfe, Lewis Gann, Milorad Drachkovitch, John Bunzel, Robert Hessen—and I treasure their friendship...
...I digested them all...
...a place where the ideas and practices of Israeli democracy stumbled against the hard realities of a military occupation...
...Probably someone ought to be thanked for all this, but I doubt it's the government...
...Please allow 2-3 weeks for delivery...
...Thus began my life as a dissident...
...I have hoped for the same sense of vitality in every A brief, intelligent, even-handed analytical account of the origins of the Arab-Zionist conflict, and its history from 1920 to 1948, when Britain ruled Palestine under mandate from the League of Nations...
...on the shaping of an understanding of the world, not the conclusions we each must draw from such an understanding...
...I am no longer surprised...
...Attracted philosophically to the poor, I was now in a rut made of my own limited ability to help them with their problems...
...Elliott Abrams again, this time on how to differentiate one regime from another: "Any country that has 'democratic' in its name probably isn't...
...Most of the students and teachers we spoke to supported Yasser Arafat's al-Fatah (the dominant group in the PLO), accepted the existence of...
...He was a one man Radio Free America...
...A small magazine photo of Habash was tacked on the wall...
...But there was this stunning volleyballer (a spiker, I think), sunning herself on the diving board, and I could swear she winked at me as I ogled her over Robert Lekachman's Greed is Not Enough: Reaganomics...
...To be fair to myself, my disquisition on the evils of economic growth did leave him temporarily speechless...
...She taught me, by sheer force of will and intelligence, how to think and how to make mental connections—between math and music, math and ballet, math and painting—and proved to me I could do something I was stubbornly determined I could never do...
...Trying.to explain his loyalty to Habash's bloody record, the student told us that he was a Palestinian "from the camps, not from the villages...
...and one too many copies of Intellectual Digest stuffed prominently under one too many wimpy arms...
...It spent a lot of time flaming—one of its Vietnam-era songs, to the tune of the "Ode to Joy," began, "Bomb the towns and kill the peo-ple . . ." It spent more than a lot of time politicking—the longest meeting I have ever sat through was one memorable executive committee session which lasted sixteen hours...
...Prof...
...Richard Brookhiser is managing editor of National Review...
...the moment came to represent a turning point, a revelation that instead of lifting these deprived kids to a higher level, I was sinking to a lower...
...AS2 LINGLIE3Cot COLLECTIVE SECURITY or STRATEGIC INDEPENDENCE...
...You don't write, you'll never be a writer...
...I knocked on another 20,000 doors over the next seven summers, in North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Illinois, and Iowa...
...I went to Woodstock that summer and had a lousy time sharing the rain and mud with thousands of freaked-out acid-heads, most of whom were so stoned that they could barely stay awake for—let alone remember—the music...
...Penetrating the thick soup of childhood locked into my even-thicker skull was the signal accomplishment of Prof...
...They secreted an atmosphere of rancor and intolerance over the entire campus: you could not escape it in the darkest depths of the library stacks...
...We chanced into a shabby cafe and met a young supporter of George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine...
...Once a drunk gave me a ride and offered to take me "where you need to be taken...
...Nor was he using smug Agnew-isms to shoo away the radical boogies...
...The favored example of his principled stubbornness (and courage) is his opposition to the round-up of Japanese-Americans in 1942...
...When I arrived as a freshman on an Ivy League campus where SDS, PL, and other radical groups were active, I was vaguely sympathetic to their ideas...
...Even back then I probably wasn't reading much from R. C. directly in the editorials—he'd given up his signed column and mostly turned over the publisher's space to his colleagues...
...Deep in the recesses of my soul I had always felt that the feminists were bitter harridans intent on emasculating a society, but I'd repressed such thoughts as manifestations of my dark, sociopathic side...
...Allan C. Carlson is president of the Rockford Institute...
...Because he loved life...
...From study of and conversations with the unlikely source of Gunnar Myrdal (the subject of my dissertation), I had learned to appreciate the volatile mix of economic, cultural, and ideological developments that lay behind modern social change, and to understand the need to peel back the surface manifestations of political acts, in order to examine the dynamics beneath...
...Now, there were many things one could have said about Buckley...
...Well, it wasn't pretty...
...But even during my four-year re-education sentence at Camp Barnard, they couldn't break my spirit...
...That's why he was such a good writer, such a good man—and such a good example to one young admirer...
...If you seek your truth in the future, you're also asking for trouble...
...20003...
...A friend of my parents, he lived three thousand miles from me, and I saw him only when I was in California —perhaps no more than a dozen times in all, over the years...
...At the time, of course, I had some ammunition...
...From R. C.'s Register I got an education in the nearly lost literature of the Old Right—Frank Chodorov, Rose Wilder Lane, Felix Morley...
...TERRY EASTLAND I first sold books for the Southwestern Company during the summer of 1967...
...Instead, he chose a sort of crypto-Socratic freewheeling discussion format...
...He said he had run out of A-minuses...
...To paraphrase Hemingway, a built-in bullshit detector should be part of our intellectual baggage...
...The Chairman and the Executive Committee of the Party of the Right," it read, requested the Honor of my Presence at a debate on the topic, Resolved: Democracy is the best form of government...
...Her specialty was tormenting those students who hide in back rows and daydream...
...But what drew me to him was not his scholarly attainments, but his character...
...When a full-page ad fell through (and only then—R...
...The moment of crystallization came when the radicals organized themselves to shout down the South Vietnamese ambassador when he tried to speak at a forum sponsored by the university...
...Name Institution Street City/State/Zip Please return to: Ethics and Public Policy Center Department AS 1030 15th St., N.W...
...My specialty was failing math courses...
...What Barry Farber had begun, the vast machinery of the liberal establishment could not undo...
...Mao TseTung...
...Claudia Rosett is editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...
...the first hint I had of conservative tendencies was the unsettling pleasure found in reading anthologies of early nineteenth-century Catholic political thought, especially essays by Joseph de Maistre...
...Make checks payable to the Cato Institute, Dept...
...David Brooks is book editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...Public officials, having given up the larger quest in order to concentrate on bond referendums and gerrymandering, should be excused when they traipse after graft or a Senate page...
...Now, for the first time, I was forced to put into words—most of the grade was class participation—how I felt...
...Wearing light or bright colors apparently showed a lack of solidarity with Viet Cong women—and that could make people very angry...
...But this book early on put the world in order for me, and I'm grateful to it for that...
...But the POR was anything but dull...
...These days the paper is attractive and modulated, but when I was delivering it on a bicycle it was feisty and often cranky...
...Late in the summer I bought a beige 1961 Plymouth with 93,000 miles for $300...
...Robert loved writing because he loved people...
...I got through that summer, making about $3,000, enough for freshman year...
...he was a champion of the true, the good, and the beautiful, but never played the aesthete...
...All orders from individuals must be prepaid...
...I paid for college and more...
...To my infinite surprise and gratitude, he became both friend and mentor...
...At age 14, Grandfather Mysak decided to come to America and found the dynasty...
...George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...
...But I was only beginning to think of myself as a writer—as an adult, that is, who writes for a living rather than driving a truck or going to an office—and I was not yet comfortable in the role...
...86 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987...
...GORDON JACKSON Until well into my twenties I had never doubted the received wisdom of academia—that conservatism is nothing more than personality defect...
...The high school librarians knew that I was •the only student who had ever checked out the works of William F. Buckley...
...The policy drudges and politicos have their place, but they can't knock the scales right off the eyes of confused young people like these gentlemen' can and did...
...for years, my brother had been supplying me with National Review and a paper called The Alternative, with admonitions to "read this...
...An individualist, I was allergic to gatherings of three or more libertarians, who could quote their Rand but were otherwise stunted in their apprehension of the West's great heritage...
...One lowly staff member had the audacity to wear a yellow scarf into the Crimson...
...For information, call (202) 546-0200...
...Ho and Mao and blah, blah, blah...
...Registration is $175 and includes all sessions, two luncheons, and a reception...
...In retrospect, their stuff can seem shallow—too much sweeping philosophy and not enough dealing with the tough choices of public policy...
...Baldy" Harper, founder of the Institute for Humane Studies, appeared until his death...
...But the greatest influence remains: R. C. K E. Grubbs, Jr...
...Much of it came from the Foundation for Economic Education...
...It discourages me that so many of the conservative red-hots in Washington know so little of this tradition...
...Thank God I was there to pick up the slack...
...This was my view prior to the first Iran controversy, when Jimmy Carter, whom I liked, let the mullahs bugger Uncle Sam for 444 days without a breather...
...Indeed, he was...
...Elliott Abrams on intellectual self-esteem: "You're not stupid, Victoria, you're just uneducated...
...At home the ideological spectrum had extended from my father, a liberal Kennedyite politician, to my elder brother, a founder of Harvard's SDS who shared the political ideals of Mrs...
...and Kirk, Chamberlin, Chamberlain, Burnham, Buckley...
...He believed in the power of ideas and in the importance of art...
...C. was a "taxation is theft" purist...
...The VC ambiance pervaded much of the university...
...Sidney is someone who just can't stand seeing people suffer...
...We sold family Bibles, home medical encyclopedias, and the like...
...Come to their nineteenth-century conclusions or it's the slammer...
...I think he picked the chalk up once, and with warning...
...Finally, after all the barbs failed to crack Buckley's reasoning, one of the rads in the audience screamed out: "You're stupid...
...I failed to sell a single book on my fifth day out, a Friday...
...Before he died, some admirers made a short film about him called "Man Against the Tide...
...I did have an excuse—the Perry police irrationally kicked me out of town late in the afternoon...
...But later, I thought everything of it...
...You recall the litany...
...Friedman pushed aside his meal until he had finished explaining another of the virtues of the marketplace...
...Just to be in his presence was to be awed by his brilliance and infected with his enthusiasm for his art, and for his life...
...You live in the District of Columbia...
...This is true...
...Over the next two years, I did a lot of reading, I worked as a police reporter on the Acct # Exp...
...Who needs that...
...Everything was politicized, including colors...
...Bill my VISA __MasterCard account exp...
...I know him only from lore, but it's said he didn't care whom he roused...
...David Asman is editor of the Wall Street Journal's 'Americas" and 'Manager's Journal" columns...
...DAVID AIKMAN Correspondent, Time Magazine ORDER FORM Piety & Politics ^ Paper 0-89633-108-3 $12 95 ^ Cloth 0-89633-107-5 $23.95 Maryland residents: please add 5% sales tax Postage and handling: $1.25 for first book, 50¢ for each additional book TOTAL ^ Check enclosed...
...such furious stabs at discipline were an hourly occurrence in the luckless public school where I was teaching...
...You watch a funny, one-hour romantic movie, filmed in Hollywood with no subtitles...
...I should mention that I consider my intellectual development at this point to be at a rudimentary level, and anyone in a position of influence has a chance for a fair hearing if he or she tries to reach me now...
...But politics was the least of it...
...I even lectured once at Harvard...
...Unhappily for my biographers, this did not lead to taking the best notes...
...If you think things were settled before they ever began—that is, if you're a religious believer—they persecute you...
...My uncle, Stanley Sackett, debunking the culture of narcissism: "No one had a happy childhood," and "Most of the world's greatest work has been done by people who don't feel very well...
...Tim W. Ferguson is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...Friedman—and the spiker...
...Will support for anticommunist rebel movements roll back the Soviet empire or draw us into a military quagmire...
...It's just like being there...
...The day in late 1979 when Jimmy Carter went public with the information that "The Russians lied to me," and I realized you could run a country without understanding anything...
...Each of us went door to door...
...In fact, he cared to rouse them...
...By day, along with my schoolmates, I was instructed in the prevailing dogma...
...Livingston: home of crowded shopping malls and closed minds (a sort of Allan Bloomsbury...
...He was sensitive —a man of delicate feelings who could read other people with amazing accuracy...
...I had spent a summer or two working in Walter Knott's "Freedom Center," a right-wing bookstore which displayed not only some kooky publications from Belmont, Massachusetts,but a multitude of volumes spanning the conservative movement in the late 1960s...
...Friedman bore the full brunt of my logical assaults, and often it took him as many as three or four words to thoroughly refute them...
...In Bloomsbury, New Jersey, in 1973, it seemed obvious that only an eccentric in the process of checking out the entire card catalogue alphabetically would read Buckley...
...We discussed all manner of things," wrote Bertrand Russell of the Cambridge Apostles, "no doubt with a certain immaturity, but with a detachment and interest scarcely possible in later life...
...Hardly anyone read them, I'm sure, but I did...
...It was also my only one ever...
...At Harvard I had joined the Crimson, which was then in Viet Cong hands...
...There was a profound lesson in this: Clearly the object was to have the most fun for the least salary possible...
...Sure, I'll go," said my friend, who didn't realize till we got there that the Buckley he had been thinking of was actually a folk singer whose first name was Tim, not William...
...I was also allergic to the state college system, from which—under the influence not only of R. C. Hoiles, but Russell Kirk on the right and Paul Goodman on the left—I dropped out...
...to a festival in Woodstock, New York—I called a friend of mine about an upcoming university lecture by William F. Buckley, Jr...
...But I spent enough time with him for him not only to make an indelible impression upon me but to make a real difference to my life...
...I didn't know how to climb out, until O'Connor's pithy apologia gave me a toehold's worth of understanding...
...Visa & MasterCard only...
...Henry, Nathan Glazer, Jerry Falwell, George F. Will, George Marsden, Ronald Nash, Charles Colson, George Weigel, Ronald Sider, Martin Marty, James D. Hunter, William J. Bennett, Sidney Blumenthal, William F. Buckley, and Grant Wacker...
...Still I remained anchored to the left by the idea of Poverty, of people suffering, and of the unequal distribution of wealth (that xo/o of the people owned xxolo of the wealth, while xx 07o owned only xo7o—and it was getting worse...
...At that time I didn't know anybody who made a living as a writer...
...One day a few years ago, I was working with a photographer on the West Bank...
...His example was one of constant good humor and joie de vivre while going about the laborious business of instructing the Zeitgeist as to its deficiencies...
...The world seen with unguilty eyes became a much more interesting place...
...Pepper products PERFORMANCE BY PROFESSIONALS RKOV GENERAL A GENCORP COMPANV 1440 BROADWAY • NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10018 cincnnail liA11111AVC MILM.M.1~111111 111%VMM/a to tir THE BEST HOLIDAYS BEGIN WITH FREEDOM 1988 DESTINATIONS: * San Francisco * Los Angeles * * * * Disneyland * San Diego * California Coast * Orlando * ALLS Mk CI% GOING ALL OVER DOWN UNDER* * * ** 1988 DESTINATIONS: * Sydney * Melbourne * Brisbane * * Great Barrier Reef * Perth * Ayres Rock * And All Of Australia * Jfkleit 4egFitxtv6iiiild See GIVE US A CALL...
...Today, editorial director Ken Grubbs keeps the old man's photo on the wall and his name and thoughts alive in the gussied up Register...
...The experience, though, had antecedents...
...The Origins and Evolution of the ARABZIONIST C by Michael J. Cohen $18.95 at bookstores or order toll-free (800) 822-6657...
...Mona Charen, former associate director for public liaison at the White House, is a nationally syndicated columnist...
...Property was a central tenet...
...But most of our time was spent in talk, endless talk, some of it over the pompous port and sherry, most over lunch, dinner, New Haven grinders and pizza, or circling the starlit quads...
...I remember a conversation we once had about a colleague at the Hoover Institution, a lady well into middle age, who had never married...
...Eugene McCarthy, Earl Ravenal, Eugene Rostow, Joshua Muravchik, Jonathan Kwitny, and Ronald Steel...
...Now that was stupid...
...My father, at age 18, won the war in the Pacific...
...VICTORIA SACKETT Great intellectual inspiration has come to me most often from great intellectuals uttering what they would regard as uninspiring homilies...
...Miss C. set her sights on me, and hiked me up to her advanced algebra course and the following year to advanced calculus, where she drilled into me with indefatigable sarcasm and insult the crystalline beauty, the imaginative complexity and breadth of higher math...
...DAVID ASMAN In the summer of 1969—about a month before I convinced my parents that a 15-year-old could survive a weekend trip from Washington, D.C...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
