National Review: The Misanthrope's Corner - Brief Article

I've given you a peek into the files I've been throwing out, but there's still one left: my NOT file. It's where I've kept notes for what I initially thought would make good columns, but which, for one reason or another, did not work out. You're better off not knowing about some of them, but I found a few that are suitable for polite company, so here they are, along with my reasons for spiking them.

1. Ayn Rand. I abandoned this one for the simple reason that she exhausts me. That unrelenting intensity and repetitive bludgeoning, that preference for the battle ax over the rapier, that disdain for grace notes and the occasional jeu d'esprit. She's even worse than Alan Keyes -- either one of them could kill you. Just thinking about doing a column on her was like thinking about defrosting the fridge or cleaning the oven; I kept taking my notes out and putting them back, telling myself "next time," all the while knowing that next time would never come if I could help it.

It's an odd way to feel about a writer with whom I thoroughly agree, but it's merely a clash of temperaments, not philosophy. One of the bones I have always picked with conservatism is its total rejection of Ayn Rand because of her atheism. To me, there is much more to conservatism than religion, so I cherish a passage from The Fountainhead that speaks to one such issue. Everyone who shares my revulsion against the touchy-feely, emotion-drenched, low-class, womanish mush that America calls "compassion" will appreciate Rand's description of Howard Roark's office:

He did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never inquired about their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer's benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self- respect within every man in that office.

2. Elliot Richardson. Now you know my secret crush: a Northeastern liberal Republican, almost as bad as having a secret crush on Nelson Rockefeller or Christie Todd Whitman. I knew a lot of readers would take umbrage if I praised him, but what really kept me from writing about him was that I didn't have enough material -- just my memory of his refusal to fire Archibald Cox and his subsequent resignation as Nixon's attorney general, plus one column by Mary McGrory, of all people, who evidently had a secret crush on him too.

She called him "the ultimate public servant" and said he had "an exalted sense of office and duty," but it was her description of him as "incurably high-minded" that really struck home. She knew him well, while I had only seen him on TV, but it was love at first sight. I sensed a reassuring stuffiness in him, an old-money, George Apley quality reminiscent of threadbare Aubussons.

It was also love at first sound. Maybe it's because I was a Roosevelt baby, but I am forever listening for a voice with the power to reassure me. Richardson had it; something about the "r" and the "a". . . . I don't know, but it was the voice of a man with a code, like the old- world aristocrat who paid his gambling debts promptly but let his tailor wait. It might not have been fair, or made sense, but it was his code, and he followed it.

3. Civility. I didn't write this one for two reasons: Everybody and his brother was already writing about it and I didn't want to join the crowd; and it contained disparate elements -- movies and personal experiences -- that I couldn't get to segue as seamlessly as I like.

Two movies express my ideal of civility, both of them, ironically, about savages. The Naked Prey, starring Cornel Wilde, is about a white man tested in a deadly trial by African warriors, who strip him of weapons and all clothes except a loincloth, and force him onto a survival course with themselves in hot pursuit. It's a game of "May the best man win," and he does, by outwitting his pursuers, killing revolting food with his bare hands, and fashioning weapons out of nothing. At last, as the colonial fort comes into view, his pursuers stop. Looking back at them, he sees the admiring chief raise his hand in a brusque salute, which he returns in the same spirit.

The other movie is Zulu, starring Michael Caine, the true story of a vastly outnumbered British force who successfully defended their remote outpost against endless swarming hordes of South African tribesmen. At the end, the Zulus serenade their triumphant enemy with a song of congratulation, and the Welsh Guards respond with an equally respectful rendition of "Men of Harlech." If you need antidotes to the Enron era, watch these two movies.

My most memorable personal experiences with civility involve my parents. Once, my father needed a dime for something and asked my mother, who said, "Look in my pocketbook." But he wouldn't. Instead he picked it up and brought it to her. That's all that happened, but it was enough for me.

The other incident occurred when I was nine. My aunt was having her first baby and my uncle promised he would send us a telegram as soon as it came. Since I had never even seen a telegram, I begged him to address it to me, and he promised he would. He did. It came while I was at school and my mother signed for it. It lay on the table untouched until I got home. She was dying to know about the baby but she would not open it because it had my name on it.

4. Queen Mary. The present Queen's grandmother, she was a fixture of my childhood whose remembered stateliness fills me with such a sense of loss that I couldn't bring myself to write about her. Suffice to say she was so regal that at the Princess Royal's wedding in 1922, nearsighted E. M. Forster bowed to the elaborate towering cake in the belief that it was Queen Mary.