OF DUCKS, AND MOBS, AND SUCH

It says a lot about me, I suppose, that I'm less irritated about the leftist college student anti-free speech phenomenon than I am about my music cloud app's insistence that saxophonist Red Prysock's name is actually Red Presoak. Or that New Orleans session veteran Herb Hardesty should really be named Herb Hardest. Why, why, why, this persistent overcorrection of non-mistakes? And why, why, why, am I about to pretend the two things are related? 

  The last question need not detain us, as I'm about to forge ahead as if I didn't just hear myself say that. 

  Over the weekend, I tied myself up in knots trying to respond to an Internet friend's suggestion that Tom Alderson and I had misunderstood and unfairly characterized the thinking of conservatives on our Hot Plate! political discussion. Following the kind of delicate negotiation process that is becoming my specialty, this Facebook disagreement was amicably resolved, but it still left me feeling I should beat up on the left a little today as a good-faith gesture. (It would be nice, however, if any conservatives reading this could weigh in just long enough to convince me that I have more than the one conservative reader. I'm not asking for a bunch of lugubrious backslapping here; even just a quick show of hands would be fine. It seems to me that if I can suffer through a bit of the National Review each week, Republicans on Facebook ought to be able to read me once in a while. At one point I had a trickle of conservative comments on my threads, and some very civil exchanges, which was nice. On the other hand, one guy kept flying off the handle at the least little suggestion on my part that Trump reminded me of Hitler. I miss our lengthy chats from that time, when I would type lengthy clarifications of my point, which he wouldn't read, and then I'd read his prolix angry responses, and I'd try again, and he would get angry again, etc., and the whole affair was like a jolly carousel ride where the carny operating the thing had gone for a smoke just prior to electrical failure, pink horses coming alive and committing mayhem, and so forth. 

    ARE CONSERVATIVES AFRAID OF BIG COLLECTIONS OF WORDS? THEY WEREN'T IN SAMUEL JOHNSON'S DAY. OR AM I THINKING ABOUT SAMUEL GOMPERS?

When it became clear that no more comments from the right were forthcoming, I found myself uncharitably assuming that my logorrheic tendencies had driven them away. In my more lucid moments, I don't think it's at all fair to assume that right wingers are more cowed by an excessive use of words than left wingers would be. (I'm also reminded, not for the first time, that I avoid using the terms left winger and right winger because they remind me of the band Winger.) 

  Lo! My point approacheth! 

  Let's talk, in serious voices, about the college situation. I looked at Richard Cohen's piece about this today, and found once again that he annoys me even when I agree with him. (The suffering I suffer while plowing through National Review, and that includes even their comedic malfunction, is nothing compared to the hair shirt I have to put on to experience Richard Cohen. What a blowhard that guy is. I know I can run on, but I try to keep my tone in the zone of quiet, and I'm convinced that my worst excesses are still like the pleasant babbling of a brook, rather than the egregious honking of a duck.) 

  
  THAT'S QUITE ENOUGH WIT FOR NOW. LEAVE US GET DOWN TO CASES

Serious voices, now. I've said many times through the years that free speech is unpopular across the spectrum, contrary to the near-constant assertions from people on all sides that THEY are in favor of it, while the other side is not. 

  Let's try to be honest about this, my friends of the left. I know the atmosphere today is poisoned, and I know that many of you like to wrap yourself in the notion that people not speaking up is the reason we had a holocaust. But even if that were entirely true (and it's a premise I don't buy), it doesn't justify the sort of virulent nonsense I keep hearing about. Pretty much every week the Review has another article about the self-indulgent behavior of college liberals, and I think that it's fair to say now that it's become a large problem for left wing credibility. 

  I don't even support it when colleges are pressured not to allow demagogues to speak on campus, and I certainly can't respect it when young people resort to the physical bedeviling of Nazis, race baiters, blonde Stalins, etc. The other day i was very dispirited to see a newly minted Facebook friend taking people to task for arguing that white supremacists shouldn't be punched in the face. Not only was he in favor of the roughing up of assholes, he was quite impatient and indignant about liberals who hadn't ALREADY come around to his way of thinking. His logic, naturally, was that Nazis were bad, so it was ok. 

  There are various problems with this, of course, and the one that should be most compelling but won't be is that this kind of thing won't help. Even if roughing up were moral (it isn't), it's not practical. In a democracy, you can't punch your way to electoral victory. 

  Years ago, when I was at Howard, I watched a very left wing professor fail utterly to convince a class that violence was sometimes a necessary evil. Not that they objected to his premise; oddly, they had a problem with his use of the word "evil." Even in a purely hypothetical discussion, they couldn't accept the idea that some hypothetical violence of which they hypothetically approved wouldn't be lauded without qualification. 

  This wasn't the most boneheaded moment I participated in at college, but it was certainly the most disturbing. 

     HYPOTHETICAL SMACKDOWN

  I'm nauseated by my sightings of the dubious term "social justice warrior," which has become trendy on the right (often people get tired of having to type it over and over, and they resort to the doubly annoying SJW abbreviation), but some of y'all are giving aid and comfort to the enemy by indulging in the kind of rhetoric where you fantasize about what you would do to, say, Richard Spencer, if you had him alone in a room for a few minutes. (I'd be inclined to ask him if he really preferred Kraftwerk to Al Green, but that's just me.) 

  Let's please try to remember that just as a policeman's job is only easy in a police state, protest is only easy and fun when protestors metastasize into a mob. And I'm resolutely against mobs and mob thinking, even when we're on the same side. I think I'd actually be against a mob that was carrying pitchforks and torches in favor of things I absolutely believe in, like literacy, or subtlety. "Nuance is sometimes valuable!", shouted the skinhead, as he rolled up his sleeves before slapping an Oregonian. "Use of colorful slang need not make you sound like a buffoon!", the ugly crowd muttered, while some of their number forced a flyover stater to eat a menu from a Guy Fieri casual dining establishment. "How do you like the bus to Flavortown NOW, motherfucker?" read the sign held as high as a toddler could hold it, causing some at the melee to wonder how the youngster had known in advance to spray paint these specific words.