May 25, 2003
NO KIDDING
The New York Times encounters actual conservative students, and can’t quite believe what it’s seeing:
The temptation, upon entering Charles Mitchell's dorm room at Bucknell University, is to assume that he's kidding. The doormat features a picture of Hillary Clinton and the injunction, ''Wipe Liberally.'' A vast American flag festooned in red, white and blue Christmas lights adorns one wall, along with a faded Reagan-Bush '84 poster and a small photograph of the cowboy-hatted Gipper himself. The sole concession to any interest outside right-wing politics is a wall hanging of an African jungle scene. ''My nod,'' says Mitchell, an intense 20-year-old history major, ''to multiculturalism.''
The rest of the piece details the crafty psy-ops machinations behind the student-conservative trend.
Posted by Tim Blair at May 25, 2003 04:05 PMI wish I had a Reagan poster. I'd put him right next to this big one of Anna Kournikova and my decor would be complete.
Posted by: Yobbo at May 25, 2003 at 05:46 PMIt takes them 9 pages to explain that not every student believes the government will save the world....
Posted by: Scott Wickstein at May 25, 2003 at 10:25 PMAlthough this isn't as funny as the exact same premise when they did it a month or so ago (there were some priceless quotes in that one from tender-minded profs so crestfallen that their students actually... gulp... admire Reagan!), and it's considerably more blatant in its bias, I actually think it's a much better piece in that it draws a distinction the other didn't between flavors of conservatism and shows how much more libertarian these kids are than the D'Souzas of the 80s-- Falwell's "majority" and Disney's campaign donations in return for strangling digital media rights will both be anathema to these kids. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the years ahead.
Posted by: Mike G at May 26, 2003 at 12:27 AMI was more amazed by the condescension of the piece. The young woman "gushed," no one had an idea of their own, none of this could have happened without adult supervision from conservative groups, etc, etc.
Having been in academia in the late '60's, trust me, you could have written a similar story about liberal or left-wing students. It was my observation (as a vet and a libertarian/anarchist) that most of the guys in that movement were there for the sex.
Posted by: JorgXMcKie at May 26, 2003 at 02:45 AMJorg has that right! Being an 'activist' of the
left was the only way most of those narrow
shouldered wusses could get laid - by undergrads, I seem to remember. (The ladies in grad school all
seemed to throw themselves at the Alpha males just
back from Vietnam...which might account for my
overweening smugness ever since.)
The whole right = athletic, left = unathletic is a tired and fairly useless cliche.
Posted by: dj at May 27, 2003 at 05:23 PMWhat a hoot! I agree that one could have written a similar piece on the 60's movements (and many many did at the time). I know. I was there. But I never bought into the hippie stuff; it mainly served to disrupt an education that I was working full time to finance. I didn't appreciate it at all.
So, I've been enjoying the spectacle of watching those of my generation who failed to mature run helter-skelter in the ultimately futile attempt to avoid getting creamed by the swing of the pendulum. I find the justice of reality a saving grace of 9-11. I've always dispised the adaged about "good" coming out of evil; the only good that is possible is the lesson learned. But I find it an absolute good that the abject failure of the ideology of leftist statism has been exposed in almost every area of society - most especially in the media and academia.
It's the karma, dude.
Posted by: Dee at May 27, 2003 at 10:24 PM