Capitol Ideas/Lonesome Highways
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS LONESOME HIGHWAYS by Tom Bethell It took four days to drive across the Coast to the West: 1-80, via Omaha, tion Agency; a bureaucrat escaped of the Strange New Respect Award and ...
...By the time I arrived at Palo Alto 1-40, via Memphis, Oklahoma City, dlesome vacation checking up on "re- believe that Republicans should first in my weary Rabbit the odometer re- and Albuquerque...
...Four-fifths of the professoriate he surveyed were registered as Democrats, ten percent as independents...
...The real distance, any such signs on the highway...
...The delicious irony is that Rebholz has been perhaps the university's most vociferous critic of the Hoover Institution, tirelessly denouncing its alleged political bias, its ties to the Reagan Administration, and so on...
...Professor Alfonse Juilland of the French Department, as far as I know one of the few conservatives on the faculty, tells me that there is actually quite a sizable pro-Western resistance movement within the various departments...
...We'll give up St...
...For some reason TAS 's Washington correspondent...
...T t is interesting to note that among 1 the (partial) defenders of the Western Culture requirements is none other than Professor Ronald Rebholz of the English Department, the university's resident Shakespeare expert...
...One or two of Losing Ground...
...Can anyone think of exceptions to this rule of popular culture...
...Rebholz will be granted asylum in some lofty corner of the Hoover Tower, where he will be permitted to keep his Shakespeare books in safety, and students still surreptitiously interested in such matters will be granted safe conduct to his classes through some secret passageway...
...To date blacks have borne the stopped only when necessary, con- see...
...They don't want to jeopardize their chance of advancement or run the risk of unjust accusations for opposing minority "demands...
...The southern route gional compliance...
...Their strategy (not a promising one) has been to make preemptive territorial concessions in order to preserve the central redoubts of Western Culture...
...This suggests that what has been go10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 ing on at Stanford is not so much a thoughtful and timely reassessment of its undergraduate curriculum as a quiet capitulation to newly powerful minorities armed with de facto accusation privileges...
...One would have more confidence in this opinion if Kennedy himself had not stood up before a Rainbow Agenda Forum on Racism at the university last spring and preemptively conceded the charge of "institutional racism" on behalf of us all even before the "Rainbow" representatives on the podium delivered their inadequate indictments...
...I don't know why this should be, any more than I know why it is called "country" (there is nothing bucolic about it...
...Further billboards violated any number of regs, interstate highways), and with the ex- Wrath...
...Apart from one brief detour there is not much to see along 1-40...
...cions, I noticed...
...a bureaucrat escaped of the Strange New Respect Award and country, starting in Washington, Cheyenne, and Salt Lake City...
...Terrorist" and "witch" are mere labels affixed on the unsuspecting by their political opponents, he said...
...At night on some of the more bar- laboratory because, in addition to the on the lonesome road listening to vari- ren stretches in the West you have a sen- "generic" federal welfare programs, ous "country" music hits on (mostly) sation of being at sea, with surprisingly they also receive specifically Indian FM radio...
...For long stretches in New Mexico, an occasional light visible on the hori- pothesis is that unearned handouts Arizona, and California you are out of zon, nothing audible on the radio, oc- cause family breakup, unemployment, range of all FM stations and get noth- casional signs reading "Next Gas 100 poverty, and crime, one might predict ing but silence no matter how much Miles...
...Augustine if we can keep Shakespeare—that kind of thing...
...imagination I had already traveled cowboy hats on while they ate...
...Lewis said his pillow had remained unstained by tears as a result of last minute, secret Senate maneuvering against Murdoch's ownership of papers in New York and Boston...
...senator, now governor of effects of welfare on these Indian reserto the Petrified Forest (overrated) I stopped at motels in Knoxville, Tennes- the state, Bellmon was the first winner vations...
...A number of them want to do away with the "core reading list" of the university's Western Culture requirement—replacing it with feminism, pluralism, Ancient Heresy, and the like...
...Therefore, if one's working hycult...
...thony Lewis of the New York Times, who uncontroversially defended the First Amendment...
...No doubt it always was the latter...
...Lenin implored his cadres to defer to experts...
...This sometimes proved diffi- little traffic, stars out all around you, welfare...
...The best American music now seems to be white, and of "working class" provenance...
...Henryetta, Oklahoma...
...What we have at our elite universities today is a kind of left-wing McCarthyism, and few there are who will speak out against it...
...The planted a few feet from the highway, The speed limit is now 65 mph the down Route 66 at a more leisurely pace, man from OSHA was keeping a close advertising Indian goods...
...Well, one can see why he would be a defender...
...Grants, brunt of such attention...
...They would welcome a credential-based restoration of privilege...
...I former U.S...
...These whole way across the country (on the with Ma and Pa Joad in The Grapes of eye on them, you can be sure...
...If this really has been nothing more than an "ongoing debate" intended to "broaden what Stanford offers its freshmen by way of a common intellectual experience," as Donald Kennedy says, why are some faculty members afraid to speak up...
...It is quite clear why they are afraid...
...In my the men in the restaurant kept their endless, closely spaced billboards I believe, was close to 2800 miles...
...Johann Sebastian Bach they can live with, hierarchical and sexist though his times may have been...
...In answer to a question, Lewis's enthusiasm for the First Amendment seemed not to extend to such users of it as Rupert Murdoch...
...I repeatedly scanned the spectrum for black stations but could find nothing outstanding to listen to there...
...The general seediness of the Navajo was suggested when I drove past several West of Oklahoma City 1-40 used to be In Henryetta it was biscuits and reservation in eastern Arizona came as "measured mile" markers in Califor- called Route 66, but there are no longer gravy with the regular breakfast, and a surprise, as did the garishness of the nia's Central Valley...
...tags I sometimes felt a study to Charles Murray, the author learn that, apart from the far north and a little alien, too...
...The president of Stanford, Donald Kennedy, has criticized this interpretation of events as a "cynical and irresponsible form of simplification...
...In fact, a recent study by George Marotta of Hoover showed an overwhelming political bias at Stanford, not Hoover...
...The hot number as I drove across the continent—drove through Nashville, in fact—was K. T. Oslin's "Do Ya" (still love me), then climbing to #1 on thecountry charts...
...I don't know how to account for the continuing vitality of the Nashville scene, but it must be taken as an encouraging sign for the country...
...Lewis in person is much more moderate than Lewis in print...
...It's Waylon Jennings and George Strait they can't stand...
...His talk was a bit behind the times, I thought, anachronistically worrying about excessive executive power (wallowing in Watergate), at a time of excessive legislative power...
...He said it would insouth, and omitting back roads, there truck drivers, I thought, were trying to deed be useful but that it wasn't for are really only two routes from the East read the newspaper lying on my back him...
...But was recommended in the winter truck drivers did nothing to allay suspi- crats...
...But as in the country at large their main media (Stanford Daily) and "government" (student senate) bodies are captured by liberal activists who are not representative of the students as a whole...
...this was surely an instrument error, as months, and that is the way I went...
...The next day I saw the Nation's Christopher Hitchens strolling across campus...
...It is the faculty, more noticeably than the student body, that harbors the malcontents—and of course they are for the most part the same old malcontents from the 1960s, now tenured...
...A Someone should do a study of the each way...
...on down the road, still in Oklahoma, but of course they are off limits to buception of several urban areas the road The imagined road was perhaps a billboard read: "Had Enough Higher reaucrats because protected by treaty...
...Hitchens wittily claimed that terrorists, like witches, don't really exist...
...I began to suspect they thought the task...
...It's a small gem of the type that has been produced in abundance, like natural pearls, by the popular culture throughout this century...
...But I am sure that he will be permitted to remain a registered Democrat...
...But the resersumed 86 gallons of gasoline, which New Mexico...
...Impeach Henry Bellmon...
...Perhaps a liberal will volunteer for seat...
...One evening I attended a talk by AnTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 11...
...these conditions to be even more wideyou twiddle the dial...
...In a way these people object not so much to the aristocratic, privileged nature of the Western tradition as to the basis of that privilege: heredity rather than intellect...
...spread on the reservation than they are Before leaving Washington I visited in the inner city...
...The performers that create these things appear out of nowhere and almost without exception peak immediately...
...Tom Bethell is the John M. Olin media of me as the man from the Occupation- When within radio range I heard fellow at the Hoover Institution and al Safety and Health Administration, plenty of good music...
...What the malcontent professoriate really objects to is not a society based on status so much as a society based on contract: the democratic market order...
...W ell, it was a relief to emerge from the Mojave Desert into California's Central Valley, where rain had briefly greened the Golden State...
...I once suggested such the AAA office, and was surprised toW ith my D.C...
...Within it they are unable to exert much influence and are conspicuously dependent on taxpayer handouts (over 40 percent of Stanford's budget comes from the federal government, for example...
...I like to think that in the years ahead, as the tide of intellectual barbarism rises around him, Prof...
...In return, no doubt he will be expected to reduce the frequency of his anti-Hoover statements, perhaps eliminating them entirely...
...Hoover is far more evenly divided...
...As last year the undergraduates are basically studious and quiescent (what the left calls apathetic), very little disposed toward rebellion...
...Black music seems to be far less creative than it once was, and by "once" I mean as recently as a decade ago...
...And notice that just such a social transformation is wrought by Communist governments...
...And so to Stanford, where last year's campus chant, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture has got to go...
...or perhaps the Environmental Protec- the "country" idiom is now the vehicle THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 9 for the best of American popular music...
...A pro-Western resistance movement has coalesced within the faculty...
...and from Washington and spending a med- is one of those politicians who sincerely D.C...
...The generalthrust of the conference was to question whether there really is any such thing as terrorism...
...But, Juilland added, significantly, a number of these people are fearful of being identified and certainly wouldn't go so far as to speak out openly, especially if they don't have tenure...
...has reached the front page of the New York Times (you read it here first, folks...
...and Bakersfield, Califor- vations could make for an interesting cost $77, and I whiled away the hours nia...
...He was due to address a conference on terrorism at Cubberly Auditorium that afternoon...
...was never more than four-lane (two more interesting than the real one, for Taxes...
...I objected that some women now really do call themselves witches, but I fear my contribution to the proceedings went unheeded...
...then proceed on down the long downhill slide...
...Friendly waves to of all safeguard the agenda of Demo-corded a journey of 3001 miles...
Vol. 21 • April 1988 • No. 4
