Critical Mass

On Wednesday May 16, 2007 I was honored to attend the third annual Norman Podhoretz Lecture, hosted by the great New York-based neo-conservative magazine, Commentary. My record of attendance at the Commentary Podhoretz Dinners has been perfect so far, and in writing this piece I am deftly positioning myself as the unofficial Commentary Dinner Chronicler, who sees all and writes about everything he thinks he understands.

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The Supreme Court’s recent decision in the matter of Gonzales v. Carhart, which upholds the federal ban on partial-birth abortion, is undoubtedly a victory for pro-lifers and unborn Americans. More than three decades after the Court invented the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, its newest members have begun the process of restoring the difficult question of abortion to the American people and their elected representatives. Granted, this recent ruling only shows modest deference to the voting public, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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On Wendesday night, defeated ex-candidate for the US Senate in Connecticut Ned Lamont came to the Yale Political Union to give an opening speech in favor of the resolution that “Congress should force the President to withdraw from Iraq.”

The remarkable thing about the debate was that Lamont lost: after his speech and the five student speeches that followed, the YPU voted 26 to 44 with nine abstentions against the resolution: a defeat so resounding that even I was surprised.

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Now that I have returned to weekly posting, it seems appropriate that I return as well to my former custom of reporting on each week’s Tory Party debate. This is the week before the kickoff of Yale’s Spring term, and so I’ll use it to give you an overview of the Yale Political Union.

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In 1995 Yale had to take the unprecedented and exceptionally embarrassing step of returning a $20 million donation. Lee Bass, who graduated in 1979, had made the gift in 1991 with the stipulation that the money be used to create a Western Civilization program. The “Western Civilization” part was the problem.

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When Yale’s Tory Party debated “The Yale Man is Dead, and the Yale Woman Killed Him” last year, the resolution failed by a large margin. Some believed the Yale Man was still alive (I was one of them) but a larger group voted no because they agreed that the Yale Man was dead but not that the ‘Yale Woman’ was responsible.

I had asserted in that debate that so long as one man at Yale applauded chivalry, the Yale Man lived. Since then I have changed my mind, because a tiny minority of Yale men who are gentlemen cannot outweigh the large majority who are not.

And so I must report that the Yale Man is dead of assisted suicide -- assisted by the Yale feminist, a special kind of woman-hating pseudo-man.

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Britain is apparently dissatisfied with the results of their confiscating every privately owned handgun in the UK (in the first year after the ban, London’s gun crime rate tripled). Unable to understand why this policy has had so bizarre an effect, the British Government has finally found a solution: take away knives too.

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Dear Readers,

We’ve come to the end of a brief vacation from blogging, and we’re now back online with new changes to our layout, designed to convey the most information in the simplest manner.

We will be conducting a unique experiment – running three blogs simultaneously, side by side. Check this features section every few days for new magazine-style articles by the editors.

Read the Back Talk section for the type of piece you were reading before – posts sent in by a growing body of students at universities from across the country (we run from Yale to U. Alaska). The one difference is that now you can write for us too – if you’ve got an idea that touches on the college conservative, by all means send it to us.

Our third section, The Quad, will provide trenchant, rapid-fire updates throughout the day. It will be written by the editors, and a select group of Quad Bloggers – check our Writers’ page to see who’s become a Quad Blogger and to read their bios.

Hope you’ll stick with us as we get ready to enter our second academic year. We ask you to help us give college conservatives the chance to talk to each other – and to the world.

Sincerely,

The Editors

I was looking around on the internet yesterday, shopping for a new knife. I usually carry a folder on my person – chalk it up to a general interest in pointed objects. After settling on a knife I wanted to buy, I switched over to perusing the Connecticut knife laws. My question: would this 3.5” blade be illegal? The answer: maybe.

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Last week, from June 27 to June 30, the Critical Mass Blog had its first annual editors meeting, where two of the founders (Dan Gelernter and Peter Johnston) gathered with two newly appointed editors (Guy Benson and Maynard Hutchins) to discuss upcoming changes and updates that will soon be made to the Critical Mass Blog (see below).

Mr. Johnston and Mr. Hutchins flew into Massachusetts all the way from Chicago. Mr. Benson met them at the airport, picked Mr. Gelernter up along the way, and with Rush Limbaugh on the radio the four evil conservative minds moved in on the Benson family’s summer home for a half-week of baseball, feasting, and plotting.

The highlight of the trip was a midnight barbecue accompanied by an attempted screening of the musical 1776 (“see John Adams sing!”). After no less than three phone calls a copy of the movie was located, and the sympathetic Mr. Benson’s mother roared out to rent it while the four editors were en route to a baseball game. (Mr. Benson spends his summers as a radio broadcaster for the Chatham A’s)

After a dramatic and nearly rained-out 10^th inning victory by Mr. Benson’s home team, the party managed to abscond with the VCR from the press box at Chatham field, and returned to the Benson estate, where an HDTV and a cable box were waiting.

Then ensued a series of technological fiascos, resulting from the HDTV’s wall-mounting, which obscured its external inputs. The editors made a heroic effort to route the VCR signal through the cable box, which failed at first due to the AV cables not being plugged in at both ends.

A full half-hour was spent trying to figure out how to use the AV inputs on the front of the cable box. Mr. Johnston then spent a further half-hour on the phone with the Comcast People, at the very end of which it was revealed that the cable box’s external inputs serve no purpose whatsoever, and are merely there for decoration.

Following our barbecue and aborted movie screening, the editors went into conference for three hours, and have decided to make the following changes to the blog layout:

• The main blog will run a weekly features section, with full-length articles of the sort you’re used to seeing.

• We will open a second page called “The Quad” which will be updated frequently with short posts from our inner circle of writers.

• A third page will be created (“Submissions”) which will run posts from any of our readers (whether they attend college or not) on any topic. This will be the most informal of our sections and we encourage anyone who has a favorite political subject to submit a piece.

• Finally, be sure to keep track of a new biography section as writers earn the right to write for the “Quad” and post biographies and later photos of themselves.

We will be instituting these changes over the course of the summer (during which time we will, of course, continue blogging). Stay with us through the fall for our fresh layout and a new batch of collegiate contributors.

Peter Sanders’ June 23 Wall Street Journal piece, “Takin’ Off the Ritz,” reports that the Ritz-Carlton hotels, in a quest for modern-day relevancy, are scrapping their time-honored set of 20 guide-rules for staff, and replacing them with 12 “service values.”

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I would like to make a bold prediction: The advent of MySpace, facebook and other social networking sites is going to push the American political scene to the right in about 20-30 years.

With the rapid development over the past 15 years of internet technology, the traditional privacy of life has eroded just as quickly. Photo albums are obsolete; pictures are now kept on hard drives, ready to be instantly copied and emailed to friends and families or posted online. Home movies no longer require bulky equipment, but can be taken with a cell phone and shared with millions within minutes.

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 Here are a couple of photographs from a Tory toasting session at Mory's.

The first photograph shows the Tories' Spring of 2006 chairman raising a cup in a toast. Green-covered Tory songbooks are on the table, ready for action.

This is the final stage of finishing a cup. After the cup-finisher (in this case, the pink-shirted and just graduated Senior Sometime Chairman at Yale, Eric White) has drained the cup to the best of his ability, the cup is overturned and smacked down on a napkin so any disgraceful stains will be instantly visible.

For more photos of the Torys at Mory's (and elsewhere) go to our newly refurbished website, at www.yale.edu/tory 

- Dan Gelernter 

Knowing I am not usually around a radio or the internet while I work, my mother asked me last night if I'd heard any news yesterday. When I replied that I had not, she said with some jubilation, “We got him. We got Zarqawi.” To my retort that the media had reported similar stories several times earlier, all obviously falsely, she said that Zarqawi’s body had been positively identified, and this time by American officials.

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Since all of us young, energetic college conservatives are now on summer vacation, working summer jobs, postings on our blog will be somewhat less frequent -- though at the beginning of next year we will have more writers at more colleges than we did this year. In the meantime we will post as frequently as we can.

Since a number of people have expressed interest in Mory's (as it has been mentioned rather inaccurately in a number of books and at least one movie) this will be the subject of our summer kickoff:

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From The Maroon: Media, not economy, to blame for negative perceptions

Unfortunately, the most insightful part of this piece is the headline. However, it does make a very good point, and one I think many people on both sides of the aisle overlook. In addition to the job market, a plethora of other economic indicators (stock markets, interest rates, GDP, etc.) reflect the strength of our economy. If only Senators spent less time dealing with what people think, and more time with the way things actually are. Curse you 17th Amendment!

On Wednesday May 17, 2006, I was honored to attend the second annual Podhoretz Lecture, hosted by Commentary – “the most distinguished magazine in the country.” * I was especially gratified to make the guest list two years in a row (though I had some help this time – my father, David Gelernter, was giving the lecture).

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As readers of my personal blog Believing In Thinking know, I am currently on a road trip of the east coast with my brother, a recent college graduate. We started in Texas and went down to Florida, and have made our way up the coast, visiting a number of historical sites along the way. The experience has been absolutely fantastic. I have traveled through much of Europe, but nothing compares to the historical richness of this great country. This, my first visit to Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, has overwhelmed me in my appreciation of my country's culture and background.

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I (Dan Gelernter) take care of the Yale Tory Party website, and in working on getting the site ready for freshmen next year I've put up what is known in the Yale Political Union as an "org speech" -- at the beginning of each term, the newly elected chairman delivers an organizational address to the entire YPU, explaining the worth of his party to everyone else. This is a particularly excellent speech about my debating party, given by Daniel Theis, who was chairman in the Spring of 2005:

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