Drinking illiberally? No, thinking delusionally

Congratulations, National Review’s David French! You’re the first to be tossed into the Oh Yeah?! ring. This blog’s Glass Joe, if you will. [Note to readers:  Mr. French being “Glass Joe” was not intended as a bad pun, but wasn’t it a happy accident?]

You made the list because of an interesting piece you wrote for the Review. (“Interesting” is still the polite euphemism for “bat-shit loony, but in an inane, non-threatening way,” is it not?) You’ve concocted the argument that kids in college feel compelled to drink and fuck each not because they’re college kids, or because it feels good, but just to piss off the liberals.

I’m sorry, David. I’m reading that back, and I’m sure I’ve misrepresented your argument. I’ll let you set the record straight.

Millions of college students have answered political correctness with hedonism, defying feminist and multiculturalist scolds with hoisted beer glasses and libraries full of Girls Gone Wild DVDs. If this is the current state of student rebellion (and it is), then it’s terrible news for our culture and a disaster for conservatism. It is the rejection of one form of vice (leftist thought control) for other, equally destructive vices that will have enduring, negative effects on our civil society.

Oh. Well, at least on a computer I don’t have to awkwardly nod while backing slowly out of the room.

You tell me there’s proof of this in the person of Tucker Max – drinker, man-whore, date rapist – and a lecture he gave at the University of North Carolina.

But wait a minute, David! Aren’t the liberals the ones who teach kids about The Sex and then send them out to have it sloppily and indiscriminately in our public places, while the clergy audibly weeps in the background? This guy would debate you on the point that students have sex to flummox the liberal establishment – he seems to think that the EVIL LIBERAL UNIVERSITY ESTABLISHMENT itself supports the scene with a wink-and-a-nod. You should tell him what’s up, being older and wiser and all.

Or did you metaphorically walk into that room, look at the smirking sleazeball and his frat legion on one side and the feminist protesters (“Sapphic PC-Nazi witches,” in your parlance) on the other, and make a snap decision that while black-and-white has its uses, sometimes you need a splash of another color that still contrasts with the black while blotting out the less-savory aspects of the white?

And so you’ve given us a splotch of Hedonist Red. It’s quite a savvy, bold color. Not some morally confusing shade of gray, Hedonist Red vibrantly announces that it’s completely separate from the pitch-darkness of the left and the glistening purity of the right, utterly mutually exclusive, apolitical except in the sense that it’s a neither-nor.

The Hedonists, you tell me, don’t vote or hold opinions on anything other than drinking and fucking. Neither the left nor the right, meanwhile, ever touches alcohol or the opposite sex, because of the right’s dedication to the baby Jesus and the schoolmarm glares of the dowdy, man-hating femi-Leninists on the left.

Now that you mention it, David, I do remember a couple of friends mentioning they pulled the lever for the Drunken Fornicator Party last November, because they passionately politically hated the parties and wanted to make a statement about their love of pub crawls. Then they humped in the voting booth. (I’m just kidding, of course. Voting booths are an anachronism. They totally did it on the registration table in front of all those blue-haired old ladies. Kids these days, huh?)

So what’s the answer, David?

The answer to both totalitarianism and hedonism is, of course, ordered liberty — the connection of freedom to moral responsibility and a sense of duty. Ordered liberty rejects the de jure limits to freedom so favored by the campus Left. No speech codes. No compelled speech. No mandatory thought reform. But ordered liberty also rejects hedonism.

…

There is no doubt that, as the advocates of ordered liberty charge the ramparts of campus culture, there will be cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them. After all, if there is one thing that a feminist and a hedonist can agree on, it’s that traditional virtues are a real buzzkill.

Ordered Liberty! I see it now! You just want to restore Liberty to the campus. Of course, as you freely admit, a small contingent of everyone on campus opposes and resents Liberty As Dictated By David French. Ooh, I can’t wait to hear the Why of students deserving to have their own worldview and personal freedoms trampled in the name of David French’s Ordered Liberty, and how it’s a good thing. And also how it’s not “social engineering” or “rightist mind control.”

David? Hello?

That’s it? Huh. Maybe somebody got him at the ramparts. And after that not-at-all shady associate professor the University fired for stealing and spying for the Iranians told him that he’d be greeted as a liberator-

-Oops, one rant at a time. Besides, I’ve got to be going. I’m a good leftist, and I’m off to Campus to crush the Rebel Alliance. Cue the Imperial March!

DUN DUN DUN DUH-DE-DUN DUH-DE-DUN!

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