Some words and expressions can't be translated. Latin tags in particular, I think, are best left in the original. Lux et veritas. The words breathe a kind of Virgilian dignity, which an English rendering cannot touch. The phrase takes on imposing gravity from its associations with liturgy: lux aeterna, veritatis splendor, and the like. Entirely fitting for Yale to display the phrase on her crest.
And entirely unfitting when that same lux et veritas is rendered into the vulgar tongue and then plastered across the head of a dubious periodical. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I refer to Light and Truth, Yale's would-be analogue to the National Review. More accurately, it rivals the American Spectator for sheer clipped professionalism and thoughtful analysis. Yale Republicans in general, and conservatives in particular, just found their lives that much harder with the publication of Light and Truth. It is the sort of text a leftish academic dreams of sinking his teeth into, and no wonder.
This curious piece of reportage caught my eye a couple of weeks ago as I passed through Yale Station. Great stacks of the things were heaped up like ziggurats; it seemed that few passersby bothered to take a copy. I did, however, and was in for quite a treat. First off, the cover is a riot of cartoonish color. I resolved to read on anyway. This cover depicts a stylized Professor Donald Kagan, standing like Liberty Leading the People (sorry, Delacroix) amidst a gladsome crowd of ethnically diverse students. One studiously clutches a few tomes labelled "Shakespeare," "Aeneid/Virgil," and "Divine Comedy Dante." Hmm. In the background hulks a building with neo-classical facade, bearing the inscription "Bass Western Studies Center."
"Bass Western Studies Center?" I was under the impression that all Yale was something of a Western studies center. I have spent my entire Yale career sampling the greatest minds from Heraclitus to Joyce, and quite a few in between. Never once have I lacked for traditional courses on canonical works. But our rightist friends will hear no argument. The ensuing editorials and articles sing one tired theme with little variation: Yale has fallen from academic and spiritual greatness, and only we, at Light and Truth, can put her back on course. The pomposity is breathtaking.
But what can one expect from a Party of the Right mouthpiece? (The masthead features at least 12 P.O.R. members.) For those few who don't know, the P.O.R. is a body so right-wing and unpleasant it will make your teeth ache. Its crass tactics on the Political Union floor are legendary, and a number of its members embrace outright fascism, misogyny, and racial bigotry. (These are not insinuations-I have talked to those in question, and I know.) And they bring to Light and Truth the same crudity that defines their other media organ, the Yale Free Press. The same baiting edge, the same rough-neck mores, the same distasteful excess. Light and Truth's radicalism and repudiation of gentility totally disqualify it from being the "conservative" journal it has the temerity to call itself.
How many of these self-styled defenders of Old Yale have ever spoken to, or read the books of, any authentic Old Blues? Who does the campus Right imagine instituted the socio-economic sea changes, the "liberalization" which permits most of them to attend Yale? None other than the much-invoked old duffers, who indeed were often Republicans or conservatives, but were never right-wing populists. Of George Bush and Bill Buckley there were many, but of Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan there were none.
What we witness in a microcosm at Yale is reflected sadly in the larger world. The Grand Old Party of my youth, the party of Eisenhower and Taft, of Nelson Rockefeller and of Lincoln, is showing terrible signs of becoming the party of Newt Gingrich. In trendy G.O.P. circles, one hears nothing of Dr. Johnson, Edmund Burke, or T.S. Eliot. (Has Speaker Gingrich ever heard of Dr. Johnson?)
Instead, one gets hero-worship of Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan. The latter, I was told by one of my D.S. lecturers freshman year, was said to own more suits than books-yet I have overheard Light and Truth types singing his praises at the Elizabethan Club. I cringe. How the mighty have fallen!
My father, the most reliable conservative I've ever met, used to warn me against ideology. "You'll devote yourself to a cause," he said, "and end up becoming a troublemaker, no better than the liberals." Homespun advice, and I wish the creators of Light and Truth would heed it. For by adopting the bomb-throwing tactics of the Left, the campus Right has taken clear aim at its own foot and shot a gaping hole through it. Time was when glassy-eyed zealots were only hippies and Soviet apologists, or Ralph Nader and sundry other rogues. No more, I fear. Nowadays, true conservatives have to fight off radicalism from the Right as well, and the only winner is a gleeful Left.
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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