Two Gallants

 

The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city, and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below, which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging, unceasing murmur.

Two young men came down the hill of Rutland Square. One of them was just bringing a long monologue to a close. The other, who walked on the verge of the path and was at times obliged to step on to the road, owing to his companion's rudeness, wore an amused, listening face. He was squat and ruddy. A yachting cap was shoved far back from his forehead, and the narrative to which he listened made constant waves of expression break forth over his face from the corners of his nose and eyes and mouth. Little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his convulsed body. His eyes, twinkling with cunning enjoyment, glanced at every moment towards his companion's face. Once or twice he rearranged the light waterproof which he had slung over one shoulder in toreador fashion. His breeches, his white rubber shoes and his jauntily slung waterproof expressed youth. But his figure fell into rotundity at the waist, his hair was scant and grey, and his face, when the waves of expression had passed over it, had a ravaged look.

When he was quite sure that the narrative had ended he laughed noiselessly for fully half a minute. Then he said: " Well!... That takes the biscuit! '

His voice seemed winnowed of vigour; and to enforce his words he added with humour: 'That takes the solitary, unique, and, if I may so call it, recherché biscuit! '

He became serious and silent when he had said this. His tongue was tired, for he had been talking all the afternoon in a public-house in Dorset Street. Most people considered Lenehan a leech, but in spite of this reputation, his adroitness and eloquence had always prevented his friends from forming any general policy against him. He had a brave manner of coming up to a party of them in a bar and of holding himself nimbly at the borders of the company until he was included in a round. He was a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles. He was insensitive to all kinds of discourtesy. No one knew how he achieved the stern task of living, but his name was vaguely associated with racing tissues.

'And where did you pick her up, Corley? ' he asked.

Corley ran his tongue swiftly along his upper lip.

'One night, man, ' he said, 'I was going along Dame Street and I spotted a fine tart under Waterhouse's clock, and said good-night, you know. So we went for a walk round by the canal, and she told me she was a slavey in a house in Baggot Street. I put my arm round her and squeezed her a bit that night. Then next Sunday, man, I met her by appointment. We went out to Donnybrook and I brought her into a field there. She told me she used to go with a dairyman.... It was fine, man. Cigarettes every night she'd bring me, and paying the tram out and back. And one night she brought me two bloody fine cigars— O, the real cheese, you know, that the old fellow used to smoke.... I was afraid, man, she'd get in the family way. But she's up to the dodge.'

'Maybe she thinks you'll marry her, ' said Lenehan.

'I told her I was out of a job, ' said Corley. 'I told her I was in Pim's. She doesn't know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she thinks I'm a bit of class, you know.'

Lenehan laughed again, noiselessly.

'Of all the good ones ever I heard, ' he said, 'that emphatically takes the biscuit.'

Corley's stride acknowledged the compliment. The swing of his burly body made his friend execute a few light skips from the path to the roadway and back again. Corley was the son of an inspector of police, and he had inherited his father's frame and gait. He walked with his hands by his sides, holding himself erect and swaying his head from side to side. His head was large, globular and oily; it sweated in all weathers; and his large round hat, set upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out of another. He always stared straight before him as if he were on parade, and when he wished to gaze after some one in the street, it was necessary for him to move his body from the hips. At present he was about town.

3. RECLAIMING THE " L" WORD by Mark Steyn

 

Five Years Ago

Sunday, 29 July 2007

from The National Post, August 6th 2002

I was at an airport for two or three or nine hours the other day and so, having exhausted USA Today, The Pocatello Indicator, and Utah Bondage Contacts Monthly, I gave in and bought The New York Times. The news section had a profile of Colin Powell by Todd S. Purdum, who had been given special access to the Secretary of State. All seems to have gone swimmingly, except that evidently Mr. Purdum was so star-struck that he found it somewhat difficult to write while standing there open-mouthed as Monica:

As one of the world's most admired celebrities for more than a decade, with approval ratings that rival President Bush's, Secretary Powell has special status -- and singular political value - in a Republican administration supposedly eager to demonstrate its commitment to compassionate conservatism.

Any idea what that means? It's " compassionate" to make " one of the world's most admired celebrities" Secretary of State? And what's that " supposedly" doing in there? Is Todd saying that the Administration's " eagerness" to " demonstrate" its " commitment" is fake? That they're just pretending to be eager about demonstrating their commitment but in reality they'd rather be undemonstrative about their commitment? No matter. The point is Republican motives are always suspect. Whether it's the compassionate conservatism that's suspect or their commitment to it or their demonstration of their commitment or their eagerness to demonstrate it, it always helps to have a " supposedly" in there somewhere.

I must confess I'd initially confused Todd Purdum with his near namesake Edmund Purdom, who starred in The Student Prince (MGM, 1954) with his singing voice dubbed by Mario Lanza. Like Edmund, Todd has an uncanny ability to stand there open-mouthed while the old favourites just pour out effortlessly:

Mr Powell's approach to almost all issues -- foreign or domestic -- is pragmatic and nonideological. He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has supported abortion rights and affirmative action and is a Republican, many supporters say, in no small measure because Republican officials mentored and promoted him for years.

So supporting " internationalism, " " multilateralism, " abortion and racial quotas means you're " moderate" and " nonideological"? And anyone who feels differently is an extreme ideologue? Absolutely. The New York Times is rarely so explicit, at least in its " news" pages, but the aim of a large swathe of the left is not to win the debate but to get it cancelled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways - busting up campus appearances by conservatives, " hate crimes" laws, Canada's ghastly human-rights commissions, the more " enlightened" court judgments, the EU's recent decision to criminalize " xenophobia, " or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the " moderate" and " nonideological" position. As Elizabeth Nickson pointed out in her magnificent column on Friday, if you're a Minister of the Crown in Ottawa the preferred tactic for dealing with the mildest criticism is to denounce your opponents as Klansmen and Holocaust deniers. This is somewhat cruder, as befits Da Liddle Guy's style of government, but is in line with the general trend - different tactics but the same aim: to rule certain issues beyond debate, and thus render the conservative position if not illegal than at any rate unmentionable.

Miss Nickson, in noting the number of right-wing bestsellers, also reminded me of why I loathe those small bookstores we're all supposed to prefer over the big-box impersonal chains. I used to date a gal in Burlington, Vermont. She was swell, but the one bookstore in that quintessential latte burg drove me nuts. There's a whole category of books they ought to call " Bestsellers That Are Entirely Unavailable In American College Towns": Rush, Dr. Laura, anything by anybody on Fox News. You might as well be asking for " One Hundred Great Yak Recipes From Bhutan" in the original Bhutanese. Actually, it's worse than that. You might as well be asking for " One Hundred Great Bhutanese Catamites Under Nine" for the looks you get if you enquire about any book on Ronald Reagan that doesn't assume he was an economic illiterate and nuke-crazy airhead.

Fortunately, in Burlington, Barnes & Noble opened up on the edge of town, and the small personal bookstore attuned to the needs of its customers closed down almost immediately. So now, instead of the allegedly charmingly quirky independent bookseller with his idiosyncratic tastes, everything's ordered by some computer in New Mexico or Bangladesh or wherever the hell it is. Result: not only is the gay and lesbian section much bigger but you can get Rush and Dr. Laura, too.

That's all I ask, really. That the left stop pretending all these things have been settled, and anyone who disagrees is a racist sexist homophobe hater. Take Todd Purdum and his Powell paean. Now I'm sure Todd sincerely believes his views on everything are really non-partisan, and it's only the other side who are being partisan. But the majority of Americans are not " internationalist" or " multilateral, " at least not if that means letting Kofi Annan and the EU have a veto on the next moves in the war of terror. The majority of Americans are opposed to racial preferences. They're about evenly divided on abortion in general, but 86% oppose third-trimester abortion, and 82% favour letting the parents know before allowing a minor to have an abortion.

Yet if you're a Bush judicial nominee who's ruled in favour of parental notification you'll be denounced by Planned Parenthood as an " anti-choice extremist." It's you and the rest of your 82% who are extremist and ideological and hopelessly out of step with the moderate, nonideological, pragmatic 18%. Amazingly, this line - attacking the messenger not the message - works very well for the left north and south of the border and across most of western Europe. That's why conservatives so often have winning issues without actually winning.

Meanwhile, the left has an hilarious bumper sticker: " Celebrate Diversity." In the newsrooms of America, they celebrate diversity of race, diversity of gender, diversity of orientation, diversity of everything except the only diversity that matters: diversity of thought. In Canada, the ruthless homogeneity of diversity is even more advanced. Someone asked me recently why I hardly ever write about domestic politics these days. As James Baker said of the Balkans, I don't have a dog in this fight. The " gay marriage" argument sums up Canadian politics very nicely: All the action's between the Liberal government and an even more " progressive" court. The court stakes out its turf, the government adopts a position a smidgeonette to the right of the court, and thereby claims to be pragmatic, moderate, a restraining influence on judicial activism. The role of the conservative movement in all this is totally irrelevant, though from time to time some obscure western backbencher will sportingly offer some off-the-cuff soundbite enabling him to be denounced as a homophobic cross-burning Holocaust denier.

As I understand it, Stephen Harper's strategy is mostly a negative one - to avoid getting demonized in the hope that Chretien and Martin and the rest of the gang will eventually turn on each other in some Quentin Tarantino-like bloodbath. Then he'll be left standing and he'll be able to institute his extreme conservative agenda of, er, holding the tax rate under 60%.

Harper has a point. The cultural isolation of the right in Canada, Europe and even America is such that we mostly have little choice but to wait for the left to collapse, as the Marxists used to say, under its own internal contradictions. But that's going to be a long wait. On everything from Indian policy to education, ideological purity now trumps even the most obvious failures in practice. Environmental groups devastate the environment: prohibit logging and you lose far more trees to forest fires than the most maniacal clearcutter could chop down. But the eco-nuts are still the good guys. Political coverage is a soap that never gets beyond typecasting.

You'll notice, incidentally, that I haven't used the word " liberal" to describe the left. " Conservative" has been carelessly appropriated by the media to mean no more than the side you're not meant to like. John Ashcroft is a hardline conservative, but so, according to the press, is the Taliban and half the Chinese politburo and the crankier Ayatollahs. So I think we conservatives ought to make an attempt to reclaim the word " liberal." We believe in liberty, and in liberating human potential. I don't know what you'd call a political culture that reduces voters to dependents, that tells religious institutions whom they can hire, that instructs printers on what printing jobs they're obliged to accept, that bans squeegee kids unless they're undercover policemen checking on whether you're wearing your seatbelt, etc., etc. But " liberal" no longer seems to cover it.