Will, though one of the most widely read political columnists in the country, has really had little to say since the glory days of the Reagan Administration, when he was one of Nancy Reagan’s most favored escorts. Back in the day, free markets at home and strong words abroad seemed to slay all monsters. Today, well, the old nostrums aren’t working so well. The economy keeps stumbling and staggering, and George, a gentleman rather than an economist, can’t really keep up with the math. As for foreign affairs, the less said the better. George doesn’t much care to run with the AIPAC crowd, but he doesn’t dare to run against them. And that leaves him with very little appetite for Mitt Romney, and very very little to say about the upcoming presidential election.
So what’s a neo-Burkean with time on his hands and column inches to fill to do? Well, he can try to take on two of his bête noires—football* and “progressivism”—at the same time. Taking the long view, as always, George starts off his most recent column thusly:
With two extravagant entertainments under way, it is instructive to note the connection between the presidential election and the college football season: Barack Obama represents progressivism, a doctrine whose many blemishes on American life include universities as football factories, which progressivism helped to create.
Dear, dear. Time is running out for George. His thesis seems to be getting away from him, and he needs a closing paragraph. How about this?
“It’s kind of hard,” said Alabama’s Bear Bryant, “to rally ’round a math class.” And today college football is said to give vast, fragmented universities a sense of community through shared ritual. In this year’s first “game of the century,” Alabama’s student-athletes played those from Michigan in Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Tex., which is 605 miles and 1,191 miles from Tuscaloosa and Ann Arbor, respectively.
Afterwords
Hat tip to Jonathan Chait at New York magazine, for filling me in on George’s space-filling diatribe, which I otherwise would surely never have read.
*One can only suspect that, as an undergraduate, young George was set upon by Princeton football hearties and subjected to a pantsing, or a wedgie, or some such homoerotic ritual humiliation, because he speaks of his detestation of the sport in the most unaffected of tones. When George makes fun of Hillary Clinton, or Al Sharpton, or some other exemplar of liberal “folly,” his tongue is always in his cheek. But when he writes about football, he’s in dead earnest.
†William Pitt the Younger, who, unlike Burke, could actually run a government, said of one of Burke’s speeches, “Like all of that gentleman’s efforts, I found much to admire and nothing to agree with.” When Pitt was still a boy he watched Burke give a speech in Parliament. In a letter to his mother he described Burke as a sort of lunatic and never changed his mind.
