A Liberal Trademark [Excellent Read]

Tech Central Station ^ | 06/03/2003 | Frederick Turner

[Carolina]

I have smelled the stink of fear in the most unlikely places.

In polite liberal gatherings of very nice academics, well-paid writers, journalists, even lawyers (who need fear nothing, surely) I have sensed a special kind of fear. It resembles, but is subtly different from, the unease that I dimly remember from my communist youth in the old British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, where if one said the wrong thing it might contradict the party line as it came down to us from time to time from Stalin's Moscow, together with the disguised funds that kept the office going.

It also resembles the fear I was taught to feel in Prime Minister Daniel Malan's South Africa, where as a boy I nearly got my parents arrested for saying loudly in a bus that "Malan is a bad man. He won't let the Africans have their own country." More recently I felt it visiting the PEN Club in Budapest before the fall of the Iron Curtain, where you had to watch what you said because there were still Soviet tanks in the countryside.

But what is this whiff of fear doing in the good old USA? I was at a party in the Northeast recently with the nicest people you could imagine. The conversation got on to Bush and Iraq, and at first it looked and sounded as if it was unanimously liberal. Bush was "scary," Texas was a dark and terrible place, the Iraq war was a catastrophe, it was all about oil, it boded the most terrible consequences for world peace. I started innocently asking awkward questions and citing awkward fact. At first people just tried to put me right, as if I hadn't understood. Then it looked as if the subject would be dropped; I had no desire to pursue it, preferring literary or scientific or philosophical questions anyway. I really didn't want to spoil the mood of the party, and people were beginning to look uneasy.

But then something odd happened. Somebody else started doing the same thing as I had, asking awkward questions, reminding people gently of facts they had forgotten; and then it turned out that this man's wife, who'd been silent, was quite fiercely in favor of the war and of free markets and democratic government. This couple had earlier struck me immediately as the most confident and intelligent guests present, though they were very quiet; and they were not yahoos at all, indeed they looked impressively Ivy League. The unease grew in the room. People shifted in their chairs and looked anxiously at the door.

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[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[sunshine state]

BUMP!

[BlindedByTruth]

I know about liberal snobbery in the universitie, Iam a college student, studying both journalism and political science and my profesors in both forums of knowledge are extremely liberal and model what is being said in this article, just yesterday, I told my poli sci professor about how I, don't laugh, voted for Gore in the last election, but realized my mistake and started liking G.W. Bush and nowI completely like him and his ways, etc, my professor told me I was brainwashed, I just chuckled and went on my wy, but that just shows how liberal collegiate elite that ar liberals think and feel.

[secretagent]

"Today man believes there is nothing in him, so he accepts anything, even if he knows it to be bad, in order to find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone. . . . But suppose one should try to live without Ketman, to challenge fate, to say: 'If I lose, I shall not pity myself.' Suppose one can live without outside pressure, suppose one can create one's own inner tension; then it is not true that there is nothing in man. To take this risk would be an act of faith."...

"Suppose one can create one's own inner tension".

Note to self: remember that one!