But I wasn’t athletic or handsome or a Sigma Chi legacy. And I had a feeling that, even if I were, getting such girls into bed would involve attendance at mixers and dances, romantic chat-ups, fumblings under coats in the shrubbery while house mothers tsked out windows, bestowals of one’s fraternity pin or even an engagement ring, and lots of talk about “our future.”
The girls on the other patio were fetching as well, in their black leotards and peasant blouses, denim skirts, and sandals. Their long, dark hair was ironed straight. They strummed guitars, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and drank beer straight from the bottle. I thought, “I’ll bet those girls do it.”
They did. I went home at Christmas break with my hair grown long, wearing a blue jean jacket with a big red fist emblazoned on the back. My grandmother said, “Pat, I’m worried about you. Are you becoming a Democrat?”
“Grandma!” I said. “Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon are both fascist pigs! Of course I’m not a Democrat! I’m a communist!”
“At least you’re not a Democrat,” said Grandma.
Having donned the clown costume I found it easy to honk the dogma nose, squirt the progressive seltzer, and pile into tiny cars (VW bugs). Soon I really was a communist unless I really was an anarchist or an anarcho-syndicalist or a Trotskyite or a Maoist. I never read any work of political ideology unless by accident, because it was assigned in class. And then I studied it as perfunctorily as any Sigma Chi in the lecture hall. Nothing ensures an obliviousness to theory like the need to get a passing grade on a quiz about it.
I have ex-leftist friends who recall long, intense, fractious political arguments during their university years. But I was at Miami of Ohio, not Berkeley or Columbia. My college friends and I may have begun such discussions, but then the rolling papers were brought out and the debate became over where to get Mallomars.
However, inchoate ideas are often more deeply held than any others. Emerson, for instance, believed intensely in his conception of metaphysics even though, on inspection, he didn’t have one. And it’s often forgotten what instinctive communal levelers and utopians kids are. After all, they’re raised in the only successful Marxist economic organization on earth, the family. Outside the home, children spend their formative years under authoritarian, antimaterialistic regimes at school, catechism, summer camp, and Little League. They’re taught sharing and caring and “fairness” and a kind of toadying social equality (“... it’s how you play the game”). They’re given employment consisting of involuntary volunteer work to fulfill their Boy Scout, or church, or school, community service requirements. Maybe they get a job doing some mindless sorting at dad’s friend’s FedEx store. They are “part of the solution” and/or they experience proletarian alienation. Then they’re sent off to college to learn about freedom and responsibility—freedom to get naked and stoned and responsibility to turn down their stereo after one a.m. It’s a wonder that anybody under twenty-five is even a Mikhail Gorbachev.
In my day there was also the war in Vietnam. Proponents of the present war in Afghanistan (myself included) should consider the effect that certain armed conflicts can have on the ideologically impressionable (whether at Berkeley or a Kabul madrassa). Wars need clear arguments of justification, clear strategies of execution, clear objectives. P.S., they need to be won. And the impressionable can’t be left wondering just who the winners were. World War I was a dilly in all these respects with ideological consequences less trivial than those of the 1960s.
The Vietnam War’s military draft lent extra solipsism to the self-cherishing melodrama of being an adolescent. The government was intent on interrupting my fun to send me to some distant place with a noxious climate to shoot people I didn’t know, and, what was worse, they’d shoot back. I had a stepfather at home whom I was perfectly willing to shoot while he snored on the couch. But the government was insensitive to my needs.
I stayed a left-winger for more than a decade. This despite at least three Road to Damascus moments when I should have been converted to better views. During graduate school in Baltimore I worked on an “underground” newspaper. We shrilly denounced war, injustice, and this and that. One evening our office was invaded by a group of young people more radical than ourselves who felt that our denunciations weren’t shrill enough. They called themselves, and I am not kidding, the Balto-Cong. They accused us of being capitalist roaders and said they were liberating the oppressor’s private property in the name of the people. We explained that they were welcome to it, the private property consisting of about ten thousand dollars of debt, three typewriters, and an old row house from which we were about to be evicted. (Radicals are rather worse than Democrats; they not only rent but are in arrears on their rent payments.) We were held at knuckle-point and made to undergo a consciousness-raising session that might have gone on who knows how long if a couple of “the people” hadn’t stopped by. These were two teenage black kids from the neighborhood. They asked, “What the hell’s going on here?” and scared the Balto-Cong away. The neighborhood kids were honors English students who hoped the underground newspaper would provide a venue for their poetry. And I’m glad to say that, thereafter, it did.
A fellow ex-staffer at the newspaper (now also a Republican) tells me that I spent the rest of that night slamming my fist into a beanbag chair and saying, “Spiro Agnew was right!” But I got over it. I had realized there were bad people on the left, but I hadn’t realized I was one of them.
Then my student deferment ran out and I was drafted. Standing in my underwear at the draft physical I noticed that I and all the other hirsute children of privilege were clutching thick folders of doctors’ letters about asthma, neurosis, back problems, and being allergic to camouflage. The poor kids, with their normal haircuts and the discount store Y-front briefs that came up over their navels, were empty-handed and about to be marched off to war. This told me something about what my radicalism was doing to benefit the masses. But I forget what, because the army doctor told me something more interesting. He told me to get out of there. The army had no use for drug-fuddled hippies.
I remained determined that wealth should be shared with everyone, especially me. But the silent majority tacitly refused to agree and I had to get a job. The pay was $150 a week. I was to be paid every two weeks. I was eagerly looking forward to my check for $300 dollars (as was my landlord). But when payday came I found that, after withholdings for federal, state, and city income tax, Social Security, health insurance payments, and pension plan contributions, I netted about $160. I’d been struggling for years to achieve socialism in America only to discover that we had it already.
Usually when I’m asked what made me a Republican I tell that story. But it isn’t true. I mean the story is true, but it didn’t really change my mind. I went on for years considering myself to be at least a nominal leftist.
I was too busy to be involved in left-wing causes anymore. I had that job. And, truthfully, all causes are boring. They are a way of making yourself part of something bigger and more exciting, which guarantees that small, tedious selves are what a cause will attract. Plus I was finding my work to be about as big and exciting a thing as my own small, tedious self could handle.
And I had begun to notice something else about left-wing causes. Radicals claim to seek what no one claims to want. The collective has been tried in every conceivable form from the primitively tribal to the powerfully Soviet, and “the people” who are thus collectivized immediately choose any available alternative, whether it’s getting drunk on Indian Reservations or getting shot climbing the Berlin Wall.
I’d enjoyed all the left-wing rioting. Better yet had been the aftermath back at the crash pad. “We’ve got to get this tear gas off us. We’d better double up in the shower, Sunshine, to conserve earth’s natural resources.” But the rioting, along with the Vietnam War, was petering out. Still, I was a man of the left. That was the sort of person I admired. Rick, in Casablanca, was a man of the left, and, uh, Rick in Casablanca..
. Anyway, nobody gets misty-eyed singing “I dreamt I saw Bill Taft last night/As fat as he could be...”
In the end it was silliness, not sense, that turned me back into a Republican. One day in the middle 1970s I was walking along a street and my reflection was caught at an odd angle in a store window so that I saw myself without realizing who I was looking at. I was wearing dirty jeans and a work shirt with mystic chick embroidery on it and a thrift shop peacoat, and my hair was all over the place. I thought, “That guy’s looking pretty silly for somebody his age.”
Silliness made me a Republican, and boredom helped too. My aging hippie friends were boring. They continued to be convinced that everything was going to be shared soon, so they hadn’t gotten jobs. They hadn’t gotten married either, although wives were the one thing that did seem to be getting shared. Occasionally they had a kid. They didn’t let the diapers freeze. There weren’t any. These children, though provided with remarkable freedom from discipline and conformity, didn’t seem to give much thanks for it, or ever say thanks, or please, or even “How are you?” My friends were living the lives of unfettered bohemian artists. Except the lack of fetters seemed to tie them to dumps on the Lower East Side. (Rented, not owned.) And where was the art?
These people not only had a great capacity to be boring, they had a great capacity to be bored. Imagine a talent for ennui so well developed that you could be bored by God. It’s futile for a political radical to believe in God because politics has all of God’s power to shape life and then some. God recused himself in the matter of free will. Radicals do not. Then there’s the egotism of the idealist. If the problems of the world can be intellectually solved by me, what’s the intellectual need for Him? Furthermore, the wicked world is so full of wrongs, which radicals are trying to right, thereby making radicals better than that no-good God who created the wicked world. Or would have if He existed. God’s like, you know, a square.
My own lack of religious faith persisted even after I’d renewed my faith in other things such as buying instead of renting. If I could summon enough faith to vote for the average Republican, which, by the early 1980s, I was doing, I certainly should have been able to summon enough faith for the Apostles’ creed. But the selfish leftist habit of doubt stayed with me. In 1984 I was in Beirut writing an article about the Lebanese civil war. My friend Charlie Glass, ABC’s Middle East correspondent, dragged me out into the Beqaa Valley to interview a terrifying man named Hussein Mussawi, head of a violent fundamentalist Shi’ite militia called Islamic Amal. Mussawi looked at me and asked—in English, which he had theretofore shown no signs of speaking—”Do you believe in God?” I remember wondering if I was fibbing when very quickly I said yes.
Then one day it seemed futile not to believe in God. Maybe existence was pointless, though it did have its points for me—writing books, fixing up the house I’d bought in New Hampshire. I’d started hunting again. I’d learned to ski. Maybe I was just too small a part of creation to understand what the larger point was. But if I was so small that my comprehension was meaningless, what did that make my incomprehension? Also, although I could imagine that existence was pointless, I couldn’t imagine that it was accidental. Existence seemed too intricately organized. Having led an accidental existence for years I knew that such an existence was intricate, maybe, but organized? Never. (Note how often leftists need to admonish themselves with the slogan “Organize!”) If the random forces of quantum physics were all that was in play then these forces had dropped butter and eggs and mushrooms and cheese and a Zippo on the kitchen floor and gotten an omelet. Whether I like omelets was neither here nor there.
On the other hand, it was just such an incredulity about things somehow organizing themselves that kept me from embracing all the implications of the free market. “Laissez-faire” was a personal attitude long before I gave it larger significance. Then I remembered a lesson of my leftist days: “The personal is the political.” And I began leaving other people alone not only in my life but in my mind.
By the early 1990s my political philosophy was completely elaborated. I didn’t have one. I simply thought—and I continue to think—that it is the duty of every politically informed and engaged person to do everything he or she can to prevent politics.
But I was not yet a conservative. I was a Republican and a libertarian. The mutual exclusivity of those two political positions was, I thought, one more proof of the self-negating nature of politics, which should be allowed to take its course until politics is regarded as such a nugatory enterprise that people have to be chased through the streets and tackled and forced to serve as senators, representatives, presidents, and Supreme Court justices. Or maybe, I thought, there should be a game of governance tag where someone has to stay a congressman or senator until he’s able to catch someone else and make him “it.” If this means legislative halls filled with the helpless and crippled so much the better.
I still think it’s a good idea. But that is not conservatism. I became a conservative at 11:59 p.m. on December 4, 1997, the way many people become conservatives. My wife gave birth. Suddenly I was an opponent of change.
Every change was filled with danger. If the temperature in the baby’s room changed, I worried. If the temperature in the baby changed, I agonized. Changing my shoes became a matter of great anxiety. Better go to work in my slippers—any noise could wake Muffin. I was tortured by the change from a child who sat up to a child who crawled. Was her speed of development too slow? Was her speed headfirst into the table leg too fast? The change from crawling to toddling was terrible. I wanted to stand with William F. Buckley athwart the tide of history shouting, “Don’t swallow the refrigerator magnet!”
Things that once were a matter of indifference became ominous threats, such as refrigerator magnets and homosexuality. I used to consider erotic preferences a matter of laissez-faire. Then I realized, if my children think homosexuality is acceptable, it could lead them to think something really troubling, that sex is acceptable. Daddy has been down that alley. It took me years to figure out how to be a Republican again. There will be time enough for my kids to learn the facts of life from the priest during Pre-Cana counseling. As for public education’s “tolerance” curriculum, the heck with Heather Has Two Mommies. How about Heather Has Two Nannies. There’s a book that could teach children something worthwhile in the way of values.
I have lost all my First Amendment principles about rap songs lyrics. I am infuriated by them. Because I cannot understand a word that hip-hop musicians say. For all I know what’s spewing out of their mouths is, “We need a single-payer national health care system,” or, “Home mortgage interest tax deductions subsidize suburban sprawl, increase the burden on transportation infrastructure, and lead to greater production of greenhouse gases.”
I am appalled by violence on TV, specifically the absence of it on PBS. “Which perfectly harmless thing is Caillou terrified of today?,” I always ask my six-year-old, Buster. “Why isn’t Caillou ever terrified of something sensible like a pit bull? Why don’t his parents just give him a whack when he whines?”
And what if a purple Tyrannosaurus rex shows up in my backyard? The kids will run outside expecting to play games and sing songs and they’ll be eaten. What kind of lessons is PBS teaching our children?
Being a parent means suddenly agreeing with Pat Buchanan about everything except immigration. For Pete’s sake, Pat, nannies are hard enough to find. Not that I want to do away with Barney, Snoop Dogg, or love (whether it can’t speak its name or can’t shut up). I am a true conservative. I hate all change.
The most recent presidential campaign was won on a campaign of “hope and change.” I was appalled about the change part. We had just, finally, gotten Buster out of diapers. Change is not a good word at our house. Or anywhere else. Change a tire. “You’d better change your ways.” Change of life. Any change in a wart or mole.
And hope’s no better. You remember your Greek mythology. The box that hope comes in is Pandora�
��s box. After Pandora opens that box and death and disease and all the ills that plague mankind have been loosed upon the world, nothing is left in the box but hope. Is it a good thing when you’ve got nothing left but hope? How about when you’ve got nothing left but hope for a government bailout?
Conservatives want things to remain static, to stay just the way they are, not because these things are good but because these things are there. When I have to deal with things I know where they live. Conservatives are opposed to change not because change is bad but because change is new. It’s as modern and confusing as the metric system or the BlackBerry. I don’t know how to count the change. And I can’t find the OFF button for the hope.
One last thing about change—it’s different. No one without children knows how fraught the word “different” is. When used about your child it’s never good news. When used by your child it isn’t either. If a kid says, “You’re different,” he means you’re crazy. If he says, “I don’t want to be different,” he means he’s going to skip school and shoplift. And when “the spaghetti tastes different” he’s about to throw up.
Radicals wish to make a difference. To the born-of-parenting conservative this sounds as sensible as wishing for head lice.
The conservative parent feels the same way about those small, itchy things called ideas. Radicalism is the pursuit of ideas. (A pursuit that, for me, was made all the more tantalizing by the fact that I never came close to grasping one.) Any conservative can tell you that ideas have consequences. Who wants consequences? Conservatism is a flight from ideas. As in, “Don’t get any ideas,” “What’s the big idea?,” and “Whose idea was that?”
Don’t Vote Page 17
