{"id":2189,"date":"2008-02-27T13:37:21","date_gmt":"2008-02-27T18:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2189"},"modified":"2008-02-27T13:37:21","modified_gmt":"2008-02-27T18:37:21","slug":"god-and-buckley-at-jamestown-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2189","title":{"rendered":"God And Buckley At Jamestown College"},"content":{"rendered":"

I may be the only person in the western world who can say this truthfully:\u00a0 I was converted to conservatism while an English major in college.<\/p>\n

My major advisor – Dr. James Blake (easily the finest among many, many fine professors I had at my obscure but talent-rich little college in the middle of nowhere<\/a>) was so far to the right, he described himself as a “monarchist”, with a straight face; he also introduced me to a series of writers that helped push me along on my journey from left to right; Dostoevski, Solzhenitzyn, Tolstoii, Paul Johnson, and even P.J. O’Rourke.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dr. Blake and I weren’t entirely <\/em>alone; the other upper-division major at the time was a guy named Scott.\u00a0 We’d been friends since high school; a year older than me, we’d played guitar together in any number of abortive bands; he wrote a column under the pseudonym “Madagascar Red” in the college paper that I edited which, with the hindsight and gauzy soft focus that two decades’ remove grants all things, was as funny as anything in The Onion<\/em>.\u00a0 Honest.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Scott was another conservative in the English department.\u00a0 And as my own journey to the right coalesced, the three of us became something of a conservative brickbat-throwing machine at Jamestown.<\/p>\n

The school’s library was run by quite a different specimen – a woman who was, in addition to the wife of my History minor advisor, a bit to the left of even the academic norm.\u00a0 A well-meaning sort, but…well…<\/p>\n

She had a “suggestion book” at the entrance to the stacks; if someone wanted to see a book or other resource, they could write it into the book.\u00a0 There was a column for the librarian’s response.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One chilly October morning, Scott and I walked into the library.\u00a0 He looked around, grabbed a pen, and wrote down “Please get a copy of God And Man At Yale<\/em>“.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The response took a week or two; finally, the librarian wrote something snarky and dismissive.<\/p>\n

Wrong move.<\/p>\n

In an exchange that resembled a blog comment section, fifteen years before blogs were invented, Scott and the librarian mixed it up – he making the case for including this key, vital book in the collection, she backpedalling and trying to justify (eventually) its exclusion.<\/p>\n

I think Scott graduated without seeing the issue resolved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The long and short of it being that the whole fracas was my introduction to the pure, simple joy<\/em> of being a conservative underdog, duking it out with the leaden, lumpen establishment.<\/p>\n

Just saying; without that dust-up on William F. Buckley’s behalf, this blog might never have existed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I may be the only person in the western world who can say this truthfully:\u00a0 I was converted to conservatism while an English major in college. My major advisor – Dr. James Blake (easily the finest among many, many fine professors I had at my obscure but talent-rich little college in the middle of nowhere) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,25,37,6,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery","category-history-and-its-making","category-language","category-mitch","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}