Wednesday, February 16, 2005 :::
 
Why Liberals Are So Hard To Like.

When a certain pudgy, balding English teacher was an undergraduate, in...oh, well, nevermind, but Commentary was just finishing its turn to the right...the only game in town for intellectual conservatives was really The National Review, of happy memory. He would occasionally find on the campus of a certain legendary, red-tile-roofed, West Coast university a literate leftie who admitted that he had once picked up a copy, but invariably said lefty would add, "then I read X and stopped reading."

Why are leftists such Sensitive Plants? (There actually is a plant whose name is "Sensitive Plant." ) They stop reading when they run across things they disagree with? You cannot be educated if you do not sit still and work your way through things that you do not agree with on first blush. A Mind That Suits, who counts Isaiah Berlin among his intellectual guides, actually had to set aside Essays on Liberty. (Formerly Four Essays on Liberty, but before Prof. Berlin died he added a fifth and an (opaque) introduction, making it six.) Something right at the front upset said English teacher terribly, so he set it aside. When, later, he picked it up again and began at the middle--often advisable, if a book is worth reading--he realized he had misunderstood the other statement and went back to the beginning. That is the way of the educated person, and catching the vapors at the first sign of anything disagreeable is silly beyond words.

It's also stupid, and makes you bad company.

But leftists who read anything even toward the center are precious commodities, if they even exist at all.

DC, which is home to A Mind That Suits and the Weekly Standard, the true successor to the National Review under William F. Buckley, Jr., is--how shall we put it?--full of rich, unendurable, whiny leftists.

Which fact was driven home this afternoon when A Mind That Suits went to his post office, which is so close to the offices of The Weekly Standard that he could pick up a loose brick in the sidewalk on L St NW and hurl it at the head of William Kristol. ( Not that he would want to.) He absently reached into his mailbox without looking and pushed something back out the other side onto the floor. There was a man waiting for an postal worker to give him some large package, which meant that the delay in retrieving said object would be short. Indeed, said postal worker put the mail back in the box on the way to opening the service door. In the brief interim, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher pulled out the other item in the box, although he almost pushed it out the other side as well. The other gentleman, espying the cover of this week's TWS, with the inspiring picture of the veiled Iraqi woman with the purple finger, blurted out, "Too bad it wasn't the junk mail (that you pushed out the other side.)"

A Mind That Suits, who eschews confrontation, looked blandly at the cover and said, "Oh, that's not junk mail; I subscribe to it."

But what he was thinking was: "You !@*(&#) closed-minded, provincial, !@#)(&* !@#*!@#!"

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 5:14 PM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.