Posted on 05/29/2003 8:04:53 PM PDT by Burkeman1
I was recently watching a BBC wildlife documentary on the Discovery Channel. The narrator — a British fellow with an accent like Gandalf the White — described the scene:
The male approaches the pack. His intentions are clear: assert dominance, conquer, rule. Sensing trepidation from the younger males and curiosity from the bitches — who at this age are in a perpetual state of heat — the would-be leader-of-the-pack seizes his opportunity. He puffs out his chest and lets loose with a booming roar: "Hey, have you read the latest issue of National Review?"
Okay, I'm lying. Or, as Steve Glass or Jayson Blair might say, I'm "fabulating." (My couch just yelled from the other room: "Actually, Jonah, technically speaking Blair would say he's 'stickin' it to Whitey!' but I get your drift.") But, my point is, whenever I read liberals reporting about the goings-on of conservatives I always get the nature-documentary vibe. A liberal reporter puts on his or her Dian Fossey hat in order to attempt to write another installment of Conservatives in the Mist. I've followed this particular brand of reporting for years, it's almost a fetish of mine. Most attempts fail. Of these lesser varieties, there's fear ("Troglodytes!"), mockery ("Irrelevant troglodytes!"), condescension ("I had to explain to them they're troglodytes."), bewilderment ("Why don't they understand they're troglodytes?"), astonishment (Dear God, they're not all troglodytes!"), and a few combinations of all the above.
But sometimes they even succeed, to a point. Thus, like the real Dian Fossey, they manage to saunter into the leafy thickets of conservatism, and are welcomed into a band of gorillas. They hold out the equivalent of a banana or maybe a fistful of grubs for long enough and eventually we come sniffing around. We're intrigued by the creature lavishing attention on us. And the reporter eventually begins to feel as though he has been accepted into the band. Eventually, we conservatives grow comfortable enough around them to return to our old patterns. We scratch and fight and do our gorilla things and the chronicler dutifully takes notes. The notes eventually make their way into an article for the New York Times or The New Yorker or Vanity Fair.
"Who knew?" the readers will say over their morning bagels and coffee in Southampton or Fire Island, "I had no idea conservatives were such intelligent creatures. Why they even have the capacity for emotion and even some rudimentary forms of kindness."
Okay, this metaphor has gone on too long already. But there are a couple of points worth making before we abandon it. No matter how hard Dian Fossey tried, she was never actually a gorilla. Second, no matter how much attention she paid, it's doubtful she understood what the gorillas were doing the way the gorillas themselves did. She may have gotten it right that BoBo was trying to woo Sally (or whatever the apes names were). But she probably could never understand the quality of the affection BoBo felt for Sally, in much the same way that an anthropologist or biologist can assert that you got married out of a natural human instinct to procreate but can't tell you how you feel about your wife.
Oh, and one last thing: Conservatives aren't gorillas, damnit!
HIPUBLICANS — GET IT? I guess this is as good a time as any to introduce the article which got me going on all of this. In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, John Colapinto wrote an article, "The Young Hipublicans," focusing mainly on the conservative kids at Bucknell University.
It is difficult for me to convey how much I dreaded reading this article. First of all, there's the title, "Hipublicans," which is so simultaneously derogatorily ironic and unclever it merits no further comment. Then there's the cover: five students, grey-skinned and unsmiling, shot from below with a bank of clouds riding in behind them as if to warn: "Something wicked this way comes." Each kid wears an identical George W. Bush T-shirt. As David Frum noted Tuesday, the Times has kept alive its tradition of undermining any text flattering to conservatives — should there be any — by depicting conservatives as joyless jerks or psychos. David says the Times made these kids into clones, a la The Boys From Brazil. They look more like Children of the Corn to me, but on this point reasonable men may differ. The effect is the same: Conservative kids are automatons — creepy automatons.
Then there was the teaser tagline:
No taxes, no gun control — but these days blue blazers and gay bashing are not required. College conservatives have learned that by acting like everybody else, they can sway their peers and become the most influential political act on campus.
You know those pictures of Indians or Pakistanis crammed into, onto, and on the sides of a train? You know, with hundreds of them clinging to the roof? The above line is like the locomotive in one of those pictures, but instead of poor third-worlders, the train is festooned with B.S. Let's see, can someone tell me when gay bashing and blue blazers were required? I know that anti-Communism really was required for most of the last 50 years — because anti-Communism defined conservatism — but just because the Times and the Left generally have decided that sexual orientation and gay rights are the more important and interesting themes of the 20th century, please don't rewrite the past to fit it. Then there's the assertion that conservatives "learned" that "by acting like everybody else" they can achieve their goals. I see. In other words, if conservatives had their druthers they'd still be fag-bashers who shop at Brooks Brothers, but instead they have to wear the uniform of the lumpen liberals.
Is it so inconceivable that maybe, just maybe, they aren't "acting like everyone else" so much as simply being "like everyone else." No, these kids are like missionaries wearing the garb and aping the lingo of the normals, simply to convert them. And, once they do, they'll put on some chinos and slap around the local florist just like the good old days.
This is how I felt before I read the first word of the article.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
It was a loooooong time ago.
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