Posted on 05/25/2003 11:48:02 PM PDT by nickcarraway
You've got to hand it to the New York Times. Reeling from the Jayson Blair scandal and now the suspension of Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg, the Old Grey Lady needs a shot in the arm. What better time, then, to run another sneering piece on young conservatives in the Sunday Magazine?
The latest entry is "The Young Hipublicans," a cover piece by Rolling Stone editor and novelist John Colapinto profiling a group of conservative students at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Colapinto's young conservatives are hip because they occupy a role once played by the New Left in the 1960s: campus rebels against authority. They are also more informal in their presentation, and generally at peace with popular culture. From this perspective, Colapinto has a grudging admiration for them. But it's an admiration that, as his title suggests, has more to do with style than substance. Read the article and you'll find the Times's usual glib treatment of conservatism, replete with a condescension so sweeping it can be mistaken by the uninitiated for objectivity, even affection. As the article's teaser puts it: "No taxes, no gun control -- but these days, blue blazers and gay bashing are not required."
Colapinto opens the article with a visit to the dorm room of Charles Mitchell, editor in chief of "The Counterweight," Bucknell's conservative student newspaper. Colapinto notes the images of Ronald Reagan and the American flag that adorn the walls, and the doormat that features the caption "wipe liberally" with the image of Hillary Clinton. "The temptation," Colapinto writes, "is to assume that he's kidding." Notice Colapinto does not say that he was tempted to think that Mitchell is kidding; rather, it is a universal to feel this way when encountering such shocking images. This is the standard critical posture of the Times -- the writer positioning himself as an indifferent observer of events, an impartial oracle from whom highly partisan conclusions somehow flow.
Unfortunately though, Charles Mitchell isn't kidding, and so Colapinto is forced to descend from his Mount Olympus of faux detachment. He warns us, "It would be a mistake to assume that [Mitchell's] décor reflects only a sophomoric search for self-definition. Having just completed his sophomore year, Mitchell is a dead-serious political ideologue..." He describes Mitchell's girlfriend, Denise Chaykun, as a "fierce college activist," "combative and hard-core," though she seems far more easygoing than ferocious. In the usual sidewinding, subtle manner of Times journalism, Colapinto consistently sounds warnings about these young conservatives the way one might expect if he were writing about, say, student members of the Aryan Nation.
Besides the odiousness of their beliefs, Colapinto's main issue with campus conservatives is his contention that they are merely the mouthpieces, if not the pod people, of conservative think tanks and leadership groups. He alleges that conservative activist organizations -- including Young Americans for Freedom, the Leadership Institute, and the Independent Women's Forum -- are corrupting the blissfully nonpartisan atmosphere of open intellectual inquiry at Bucknell and other universities. At no point does he acknowledge that Bucknell also has a College Democrats club and an Animal Defense League, or that the Left almost always has greater presence on college campuses, to say nothing of its hold on the curriculum. Instead, he focuses on the Right's attempt to influence gullible, vulnerable young minds. For support, he trots out David Brock, a journalist more reputable than Jayson Blair only by virtue of his having reported accurately once upon a time. Brock gives Colapinto the quote he needs: "They have a theory of getting them while they're young," he says of the conservatives. "This is what happened to me."
Colapinto is taken with Brock's notion of conservatism as cult. At times, his tone is that of a reporter describing a group of misled souls who end up in terrible trouble. "Still searching for their identities," he writes, "many of these kids are not yet prepared to declare a particular political affiliation. That is where the conservative campus activists come in." Cue the spooky music. Students become conservatives because they're lost and unhappy, too miserable to do the serious, challenging thinking required of the Olympian liberals.
About as much as Colapinto is willing to concede is that the Left has brought a stultifying climate of political correctness to campus life, such as the speech codes that prevail at Bucknell and other colleges. But that is about as far as he can go; when it comes to political activity, he views the Left's efforts as honest, the Right's as devious. For example, here is Colapinto describing the post-September 11th impact on conservative groups at Bucknell:
When a small coterie of students and professors organized vigils against the American bombing of Afghanistan, the conservatives club staged a counter-rally in support of the troops -- a kind of strategy encouraged by the Beltway-based interest groups that not only helped finance the students' activities but also helped shape them. "Pro-troops" and "pro-America" rallies were staged, simultaneously, at colleges across the country. The tactic brought results. "Kids started coming up to us," Mike Boland [another campus conservative] says, "and asking how they could join up."
Notice how Colapinto uses scare quotes for the terms "pro-war" and "pro-America." The phrase "vigils against the American bombing in Afghanistan," however, is allowed to stand on its own, its connotations unchallenged. Notice, too, that the Left's events are led by a small group of students and professors -- the underdogs, swimming against the national tide of jingoism -- while the conservative rallies are "staged" with the encouragement of the conservative groups. And what of these rallies themselves, which, like similar rallies around the country, featured emotional expressions of patriotism and solidarity in response to a shattering national event? A mere "tactic" to foster recruitment to the conservative cult.
The young male conservatives are bad enough, but women conservatives bewilder Colapinto even more. Climbing back on Mount Olympus, he writes: "It can be disorienting to hear conservatism advanced as the ideology that frees women, but such is the skill with which the right has reframed the issues for the campus crowd..." Denise Chaykun tells him of her debates with other campus feminists, who accuse her of merely parroting her boyfriend's ideas. Colapinto does not bother to point out the soaring hypocrisy of Chaykun's adversaries, who call themselves feminists but resort to sexism the moment their own ideas are challenged. But he does quote Chaykun on the conformity of intellectual life at Bucknell, and for once lets the quote stand without the usual disclaimers. It's a succinct indictment, immediately recognizable to anyone who has attended an American university in the last 10 years or so:
"You come to college, and the message they give you is 'Your parents are racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, and we're going to take you and change that,'" she says. "A lot of the courses are mushy stuff about sex and gender and social relations. You can't take a class about a war. We don't have a military historian at Bucknell. Everything is so dumbed down because no one wants to offend anyone."
Hearing a conservative use the phrase "dumbed down" must make liberals wince -- to them, it signifies ideas outside of their purview. A case in point is the two Bucknell professors Colapinto quotes at the end of the piece. They worry that the upswing of conservatism at the university will "stifle intellectual openness." An economics professor says that the conservatives make other students less likely to think, "in a complex way, about all of the different ideas and evaluating them," by which he means liberal ideas. The professor worries that students are now more likely to suspect "that they are being indoctrinated" -- which sounds an awful lot like the development of intellectual skepticism. And how not to be skeptical when confronted by a social psychology professor who asks her class to discuss what Colapinto describes as "the theory" (no doubt the professor's own) that media coverage of the Iraq war might lead to an increase in homicides in the U.S.? "'I could see the students rolling their eyes,'" she laments. "I could just hear them thinking, 'Oh, there she goes again!'" In this case, intellectual skepticism is barely required; a functioning lunatic detector will do.
On Sunday, Mitchell and Colapinto appeared briefly on Fox News. Colapinto praised Mitchell for having a reasoned, tolerant style of debate, and again connected the young conservatives with 1960s rebels like Abbie Hoffman (while conceding that the conservatives don't destroy property). He was complimentary and gracious; you would never get the idea that this is the writer who alleges that the young conservatives are nothing but parrots for a well-funded, well-oiled rightwing machine out to conquer the American university. Again, the emphasis was on style.
It's unlikely Charles Mitchell and his colleagues have failed to see through Colapinto's hot and cold routine. One would think they're savvy enough to understand that being written up in the Times magazine will do them nothing but good, no matter how flimsy the portrait. The old New Left learned that lesson well -- use the media, even while it uses you. So while Colapinto and the Times editors may chuckle among themselves at having set up the young conservatives, they should remember that exploitation runs both ways, and that their side has much more to lose, given the pieties it is protecting. As Abbie Hoffman once said, "Sacred cows make the best hamburger."
LOL! How obvious when stated!. . . and the lunatic can bare her inner self to the intrepid Times reporter without fear of an 'Oh, there she goes again!' from him!
Once again, the Times editors let an incredibly slanted statement through their tight security apparatus. If you didn't, read that statement again. Unbelievable.
Oh, man - I WANT ONE OF THESE. If anyone knows where to get one, please...
Maybe Registered knows. In fact the doormat sounds a lot like our resident editorial genius' work.
Whatever you do, please do not fail to miss the connection between liberals' PC atrocity, hate crimes laws and the implications for restraining free speech. It's crystal clear that hate crime laws and PC cause social chaos and invite massive crimes against the culture, and protect liars as in the Times-Blair fiasco.
PC and hate crime laws have outlived their usefulness and must be abolished. They are this era's moral equivalent of Prohibition. Prohibition was necessarily repealed b/c it caused social chaos and a crime wave. Via Blair, we are now seeing the devastation wrought upon America due to hate crimes laws and PC.
The fact is astute conservatives have always seen right through these self-serving liberal phonies and their arrogant use of PC and hate crimes laws to stifle criticism.
The problem, like so many other of society's self-described "tolerant and compassionate types," is that their ego-driven "sense of entitlement" is so outsized and demanding that they cannot stand to have a discouraging word spoken about themselves.....thus they engage in the political correctness atrocity which abhors criticism.
Liberals revive the spectre of a despised monarchy (that a Revolutionary War displaced), by setting themselves apart from the commoners, and demanding to be coddled and cosseted at every moment.
Marie Antoinette's infamous, "Let 'em eat cake," is the moral equivalent of contemporary liberals' sense of entitlement which thay extort by political correctness and enforcing hate crimes laws. Liberals have indeed become a worthless class of whiners.
These self-absorbed liberal humanoids, like the conniving Clintons, with their exaggerated sense of entitlement, demand the common folk kneel in obeisance and comply whenever they indicate their wishes. Never forget that when commoners dared speak up about the Clintons crimes, Marie-Antoinette-Hitlery demonized them, and publicly labeled them a VRWC.
Leave it to the NYT to find an angle for homosexuality in there....somewhere.
The Times, by its own admission, has become about as gay as The Advocate.
Help me out. I'm confused here.
Is Brock discussing with Colapina his political views or the origins of his admittedly gay sex life?
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