One of my oldest and best friends sent me, via e-mail, a joke
about Elian Gonzalez, back when the six-year-old Cuban refugee led
most newscasts. I do not remember the joke, but knowing Bob, who’s
a bright and witty guy, it must have been a good one, as jokes go.
I e-mailed back, however, that I didn’t find much in the Elian
Gonzalez case to laugh about.
Via e-mail (once again), Bob went apoplectic, demanding that I
remove his name from my column mailing list and never communicate
with him again. He said a number of things in that purple e-mail
rage that I’m sure he regrets now. We have established touch once
again. Bob assures me that he has “pretty much gotten over” what
made him so mad in the first place.
Checking over my column mailing list responses a few weeks back,
I noted that one address got bounced regularly, this one from a
fellow I did not know well, the father of one of my son’s former
classmates. The bounce message informed me that my missives were
being blocked as “porn.”
We are losing friends, left and right. We have fallen under the
sway of enforcers, left and right, who forbid us to think in
certain ways, on pain of expulsion from one society or another.
In the situation conservatives know best, we confront
conventional liberalism — not apparatchik, activist liberalism,
but take-it-with-your-coffee-and-newspaper everyday liberalism —
in the business establishment, academe, the media, public
education, and most of daily discourse in our major cities. Most
people keep a weather eye out for what most of decent society
thinks, and adapt their thinking accordingly. Right and proper:
Most people like to be comfortable.
But the enforcement habit holds sway, however genteelly. So what
is perceived as the wrong point of view can cost you a job or
otherwise cripple your career, or get your child’s application
rejected from a good school, or lose you the warmth and comfort of
your oldest and best friendships.
It got bad during the Clinton impeachment, and didn’t stop
thereafter. It’s gotten worse with the Iraq war.
Here, for example, is a blog (to which I have mercifully
misplaced the URL and domain name; it’s some “comedy” writer
associated with Al Gore) written about two weeks after journalist
Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq. The blogger criticizes
Washington Post religion writer Hanna Rosin’s eulogy of
Kelly.
“…she writes as if Kelly’s public work — the work that
made him seem like a ‘crank’ (Rosin’s word) — was less important
than his private behavior. What really matters? Not Kelly’s work.
What really matters to Hanna Rosin is the way Kelly treated her and
her friends — not the damage he did to his country.”
Kelly, you see, had edited some establishment magazines,
including the New Republic, a liberal organ, so he knew
and had worked with lots of mainstream journalists. Meanwhile, he
wrote witty, passionate, mostly conservative columns for the
Washington Post. (And since his death, the heart has gone
right out of the Post’s op-ed section.) Most of his
liberal colleagues simply couldn’t believe it. Mike was such a nice
guy; how could such a nice guy write things like that? In this, the
anonymous blogger has a point. But that those columns damaged the
country?
This is enforcement, dripping Dowdian acid: “Yes, Little Hanna,
you can now admit it — and Americans can now recoil in horror to
see how addled our press really is.” I.e., Michael Kelly ought to
have been drummed out of polite society.
There is enforcement on the right, too, not nearly as common.
Most prominently, David Frum’s extended indictment of the
“paleoconservative” movement in National Review compelled
attention for its historic account of the development of a set of
unfortunate ideas. The article concludes:
“The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must
choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on
their country. Now we turn our backs on them.”
However correct Frum’s indictment of the paleos is — and it’s a
good one — this is enforcement.
But all that enforcement? It’s all politics, an insider’s game,
even for a bit player like me who would really rather write like
some combination of my boyhood hero Ernie Pyle and Dave Barry than
like Charles Krauthammer. And that’s where enforcement should be
kept, in the tiny political world. Sadly, where Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks used to duke it out in dusty rooms and obscure journals,
you now have knockout party palookas throwing haymakers in 24/7
media.
One wonders if King Solomon had cable TV in mind when he wrote,
“Do not make friends with a hot-tempered man, do not associate with
one easily angered, or you may learn his ways and get yourself
ensnared.” (Proverbs, 22:24-25)
That brawling has spilled over like a boiling poison. In the
real world, you have to have friends and colleagues. In the real
world, people need people.
So if a political idea gets you a knife in the back at the
office, in a vestry meeting, or before an admissions committee, you
really do make the wiser decision not to say it.
