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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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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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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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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 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 

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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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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On Thursday, April 27, the Yale Daily News reported the ten Yale majors in which women are most underrepresented...

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For some reason, there are no revealing photographs that show exactly what the situation looked like in the streets of New Haven on Friday. The few photographs I can find are carefully balanced -- taken at the few places where anti-Communist protesters nearly matched the Commies in numbers. The following photo, from the Yale Daily News, is one of these. Unfortunately the news media have not done a good job (par for the course): they are uninterested in the state of the streets. As for myself, I was seeing red all day.

I woke up at 7:30 this morning, planning to make it to the 8:00 minyan at the Yale Hillel. I walked bleary-eyed into the bathroom, and suddenly became aware of music, wafting in through the open window. I thought that someone on an upper floor was listening to opera (at 7:30 in the morning?) but this music had more of a military sound to it.

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Passover has just ended, which means that I can now get back to blogging and let you know what’s going on at Yale right now:

100 classes originally planned to meet tomorrow have been rescheduled or relocated, Yale’s largest dining hall won’t be serving anything tomorrow, hundreds of additional security officers are about to show up, our view of Cross Campus is ruined by two ugly plastic tents and two even uglier satellite-dish trucks, and a huge swath encompassing much of the central campus is going to be closed to students.

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Yale stands poised to give history department tenure to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, an outspoken and anti-Semitic radical who calls Israel “the most dangerous regime in the Middle East.”

An excellent op-ed on Mr. Cole by Eliana Johnson and Mitch Webber appears in today’s NY Sun.

This Monday (the 10th) I attended a lecture by Francis Fukuyama, the well known former neo-con and author of “The End of History and the Last Man”. Professor Fukuyama now believes that neo-conservatism is dying, and that it led the Bush administration to a number of incorrect decisions which in turn led to the current situation in Iraq, which Fukuyama is not satisfied with.

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Disney has announced that they’re going to rework their $1-billion-a-year Winnie the Pooh formula – and it’s a move for diversity.

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A brand-new radio show called “The Right of Way Show” is now podcasting for collegiate conservatives. The ROW show is like a radio version of this blog – with the same mission of connecting politically lonely conservatives and doing our best to keep the universities accountable to the real world.

From their site: “ The Right of Way Show (The ROW Show) is a completely student run network that exists to help voice the young conservative thought. The ROW Show is both a podcast (internet radio show) and an online community that exists to connect young conservatives all across the nation. We welcome young people from all political backgrounds to share their thoughts on both the show and the web site.”

Give them a listen.

By Dan Gelernter

The newest concern of the socially conscientious (left) seems to be environmentally friendly fashion design. An email sent out to all Yale students trumpets “a conference on sustainable fashion” called “Wearing Social Change.”

This ‘conference’ will include lectures like: “Summer Rayne Oakes [apparently a real name] on modeling, style, and social conscience.”

Believe it or not, this event comes along with a website that trumpets: “From organic cotton to local factories, the apparel industry is witnessing an increasing awareness of the potential for sustainability at all levels of production.”

Perhaps the efforts of these noble individuals will insure the existence of t-shirts for future generations.