Letters to a Young Conservative Read Free Page B

anti-Americanism they found delightful and exhilarating. At the time I did not know what to make of these things.
    I joined the Dartmouth Review for two reasons: one esthetic, the other intellectual. The first was that I found a style and a joie de vivre that I had not previously associated with conservatism. The best example of this was the paper’s mentor, Jeffrey Hart, a professor of English at Dartmouth and a senior editor of National Review. Hart was exactly the opposite of the conservative stereotype. He wore a long raccoon coat around campus, and he smoked long pipes with curvaceous stems. He sometimes wore buttons that said things such as “Soak the Poor.” In his office he had a wooden, pincer-like device that he explained was for the purpose of “pinching women that you don’t want to touch.” Rumor had it that he went to faculty meetings with his wooden-hand contraption. When a dean or professor went on and on, Hart would churn the rotary device and the fingers on the wooden hand would drum impatiently in a clacking motion, as if to say, “Get on with it.”

    Even more outrageous than Hart’s attire and equipment was his mind. He was a walking producer of aphorisms. “When I heard about the French Revolution,” Hart once said, “my reaction was that I was against it.” During a trip to Washington, D.C., a group of us saw an antiracism demonstration. One fiery-eyed black man wearing a Malcolm X shirt approached Hart. “Hey man,” he said. “Can I have two dollars for breakfast?” Hart replied, “Shame on you. You should be using the money to fight racism.”
    Hart’s writing was striking for its lyricism and candor. His most controversial column about Dartmouth was called “The Ugly Protesters.” He wrote it during the time of the protests against white rule in South Africa, when the campus green was regularly occupied by a horde of angry young men and women shouting, “End apartheid,” “Avenge the death of Steven Biko,” “No more Sharpeville massacres,” and “Divestment now.” Hart wrote that he was puzzled by the intensity of the protesters. What possible interest could they have in events so remote from their everyday lives? Observing the protesters, Hart noted that their unifying characteristic was their state of dishevelment. Not to mince words, they were, as a group, rather ugly. Exploring the connection between their demeanor and their political activism, Hart arrived at the following conclusion: They were protesting their own ugliness! Hart’s column caused a sensation on campus. Walking to class the next day, I saw a remarkable sight on the Dartmouth green.
In an attempt to disprove Hart’s characterization, the protesters had shown up in suits and long dresses. But they had made a strategic blunder because their suits were so ill-fitting that they looked even more ridiculous. Watching the scene from his office in Sanborn Hall, Hart blew billows of smoke from his pipe and chuckled with obscene pleasure.
    In part because of his political incorrectness, Hart was one of the few people I have met whose jokes made people laugh out loud. His sense of humor can be illustrated by a contest that National Review privately held among its editors following the publication of a controversial Bill Buckley column on the issue of AIDS. People were debating whether AIDS victims should be quarantined as syphilis victims had been in the past. Buckley said no: The solution was to have a small tattoo on their rear ends to warn potential partners. Buckley’s suggestion caused a bit of a public stir, but the folks at National Review were animated by a different question: What should the tattoo say? A contest was held, and when the entries were reviewed, the winner by unanimous consent was Hart. He suggested the lines emblazoned on the gates to Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
    I remember some of those early dinners at the Hart farmhouse. We drank South American wine