Familiarity Breeds Conservatives

“Why do you have to go all the way to Philadelphia for a writing course?!” Mom wanted to know.

Because the writing instructors in the city are generally all jerks. They’ve turned my co-workers into propaganda-producing puppets – which is what public relations is all about.

“But you already know how to write!”

Some of my editors don’t think so. When told the class was about marketing writing, not the actual act of writing, she was happier and approved of the two-hour trip and its nearly $500 fee.

Much of what the instructor taught was mostly well-established theory: editors are lazy slackers who think writers are lazy slackers. Keep to the word count. Know the magazine and read any one of number of writer’s guide for each editor’s particular requirements.

The course was for marketing non-fiction freelance writing. All the students were public relations staff members experienced in executive speechwriting. The teacher asked each student what their interests were and she proceeded from their with suggestions for submissions.

What do you do when your only interest is politics - Conservative politics? Why, you interview the student sitting across from you who attended Vassar College as a “diversity” student, meaning she came from a middle class home and attended a public high school.

“A very good high school,” she noted. But still, it was not a prep school. Although she was an excellent student, she was not prepared for Vassar’s rigorous academic standards.

“My first year,” she said, “I didn’t get above a C in any class. The other girls had come from prep schools where they actually read the Greek philosophers. In my high school, they taught us the names and their basic history, but we never read Aristotle.”

She described the culture of the fashionable college in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. One girl was the daughter of the head of the American Communist Party.

“She arrived every day in a limousine,” the woman said. “You kind of expect to see limos at Vassar. But for the daughter of the head of the Communist Party to be riding around in one, just seems kind of odd.”

There was the lesson in a nutshell. The teacher said anyone who stuck to only one side of the political spectrum might have problems getting published, although she admitted they had a perfect right to do so.

The Connecticut woman’s Vassar experience stands as a perfect example of why we Conservatives need to bone up on our Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Rousseau, Washington and Jefferson, Smith and Marx, Hayek and Keynes, Alinsky and Buckley, and the U.S. Constitution and the Ten Planks of Communism. Don’t just repeat what someone else has told you about these philosophers and philosophies; read them for yourself, study them, know them.

The Progressives didn’t come up from the projects. They’ve only exploited people who have. They’ve gone to exclusive prep schools and colleges, riding to school in chauffeured limousines, no less.

The teacher spoke about organizing our time so we don’t waste any of it. “Do your research. Don’t waste time on blogs (this blog was the exception, she said, because it was so passionate). Write letters to the editor. Build up your bylines.

“Don’t wait,” she admonished. The Like Minds Conservative Book List, or syllabus, if you like, will soon be ready, just in time for the new school year.  Start catching up and start your kids on the philosophers.  The only way we're going to win this battle is to fight ideas with ideas, words with words, and revolutionary fervor with revolutionary fervor.