(When I say “Senator,” you know I don’t mean a member of the Senate, right? We’re talkin’ baseball . . .)
Okay, here’s a bulletin from higher education — from someone with close knowledge of Harvard Law School. Much food for thought here, and not all of it pleasant to chew:
Dear Jay:
Saw what you wrote about hissing at HLS, which used to be so common. It’s pretty much gone now. I think students today are less overtly political. But I kind of think it’s because the battles in academia have mostly been won by the Left.
Diversity as a goal is mostly an accepted norm [and by “diversity,” this correspondent means the strictly superficial kind — race, ethnicity]. Public-sector work and non-profit work are seen as inherently “better” than for-profit work. Gender studies and ethnic studies aren’t really under attack at all from inside the academy (and aren’t in any danger of falling in the face of external attacks).
One thing that really bothers me is that the brightest students seem to really want to have a cause to pursue. The Left gives them many causes, but the Right offers little — very few alternatives. I guess conservatives generally just go to the business world (or big law firms, in the case of law-school graduates). Maybe this works out in the end, but it still feels like this generation of college students is being lost even more to the left-wingers than before.
Of course, before, we had hissing . . .
The issues discussed in this letter would make a very good long magazine piece, by the way.
I love what a regular correspondent of mine wrote, in the course of some points about political debate: “My uncle, whose manners were always perfect, would occasionally repeat a Hungarian expression that very roughly translates to: ‘A gentleman remains a gentleman even at the bottom of hell.’”
Here is something from another correspondent:
Jay,
It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. I was a teacher in Kabul (at a USAID-funded school) from August ’05 to June ’08. I got married this summer (to a feisty Palestinian-American Catholic — I’m pro-Israel and evangelical Protestant, but it works), and now my wife and I are living and teaching in Almaty, Kazakhstan. . . .
I’m writing because I’m very disconcerted by all of the pro-Soviet sentiments and symbols that I’m seeing here.
A very interesting, and important, subject, but I wanted you to hear about his marriage. Isn’t that wonderful?
A different reader writes,
Dear Mr. Nordlinger,
I love your Impromptus column [I blush], but I do have one quibble [uh-oh]. In your 12/10 column, you mentioned a letter received from “a 9th-grade girl” about what to read concerning Che Guevara.
You would have knocked her socks off if you had referred to her as “a young woman in the 9th grade.” I’m not writing a wailing and whiny PC letter — but she would be a conservative for life if an author like you in a publication like NRO had called her an adult.
Who knows what a small appreciation of her intellectual development would have done?
I understand this reader’s point, obviously. But understand my point, too: The evanescence of “boy” and “girl” in our society — in our language — is regrettable. I use those words as much as I can. Adulthood comes so soon, bearing heavy weight. Why the rush? And what is so bad about being a boy or girl, if you are one? How early do we have to start — how early do we have to start using “man” and “woman” (even accompanied by the adjective “young”)?
“Must the winter come so soon?” laments Erica in Vanessa (the Barber opera). (No, not The Barber of Seville, by Rossini; Vanessa, by Samuel Barber, libretto by Menotti.) Must boyhood and girlhood end so soon? (Besides which, I referred to the young letter-writer as “a conscientious girl,” which is no insult.)
Impromptus readers may remember a story out of Washington, D.C. — Kramerbooks, in Dupont Circle. A customer comes in and talks to a clerk he knows. The clerk mentions that a mutual friend of theirs has had a baby. The customer says, “Oh, that’s great! Did she have a boy or a girl?” The clerk gulps and says, “She had a woman . . .”
Seriously. (I should probably mention that both customer and clerk were men — or at least male.)
At what point should “boy” give way to “man,” and “girl” to “woman”? That, sports fans, is a matter of taste, judgment, and instinct — as so many matters are.
Wee bit o’ fun with names:
Jay,
I know you love great-sounding names, and is there a better name for a quarterback than Colt McCoy (University of Texas)? What a perfect fit. It wouldn’t be so perfect for, say, Michigan, or Penn State. But for Texas — perfect.
Another letter:
Jay,
I heard the sad news that Burnley Miracle, once a customer of mine, died last week. I have always thought of his as a great name, and wanted to share it with you . . .
Couple of months ago, I made a “cultural observation,” as I put it. To wit:
When I was growing up in Ann Arbor, hippies and druggies played hacky sack. In fact, it was a cultural signifier: Only hippies and druggies played hacky sack. It was kind of their national pastime (besides toking). In fact, “hacky-sack-playing burnout” was a fairly common phrase.
I hadn’t seen hacky sack in years — until I was in Central Park a few days ago, and saw workmen playing it, on a break. (A couple seemed a little embarrassed.)
What’s my point? Not sure I have one — it’s just that: well, hacky sack can be enjoyed even when you’re neither stoned nor wearing a Che Guevara shirt.
This prompted a fair amount of mail. One guy said, “Not everyone who plays Frisbee smokes pot, but everyone who smokes pot plays Frisbee. I think you can say the same about hacky sack, no?”
Could be. And you want to read a dyspeptic, outrageous right-wing letter? Me too:
Ann Arbor hippies played hacky sack because it gave them the opportunity to practice goose-stepping in public without frightening the citizenry. Today, this technique is being accomplished through soccer. Note how children of all ages extend and straighten their lower leg as they bounce a soccer ball off their foot, just as they do in Moscow and once did in Berlin.
I’ve issued this warning before: First they take away your football [an American football, mind you]. Then they come for your guns. Finally, your sons are being marched off to a feminist health collective for estrogen shots. Remember, it all starts with soccer. Am I the only voice of reason?
I spotted a sign in an Upper East side chocolaterie the other day: “Close your eyes, open your senses.” Um, but isn’t sight . . .?
For yesterday’s Impromptus, go here. For Monday’s and Tuesday’s, go here and here. For the Impromptus RSS, go here. And I’ll catch you . . .
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Now available from National Review is Here, There & Everywhere: Collected Writings of Jay Nordlinger. It contains almost 100 pieces, on a great variety of topics. And it is just over 500 pages long. Mark Helprin, the novelist and analyst, says that reading these pieces is “like opening one present after another.” The book is $24.95, but is being offered through NRO for $21.95. If you’d like an inscription from the author, that’s free. To order the book, please go 
