The Misanthrope's Corner.(Brief Article)(Column)

I've given you a peek into the files I've been throwing out, but there's still one left: my NOT file. It's where I've kept notes for what I initially thought would make good columns, but which, for one reason or another, did not work out. You're better off not knowing about some of them, but I found a few that are suitable for polite company, so here they are, along with my reasons for spiking them.

1. Ayn Rand. I abandoned this one for the simple reason that she exhausts me. That unrelenting intensity and repetitive bludgeoning, that preference for the battle ax over the rapier, that disdain for grace notes and the occasional jeu d'esprit. She's even worse than Alan Keyes -- either one of them could kill you. Just thinking about doing a column on her was like thinking about defrosting the fridge or cleaning the oven; I kept taking my notes out and putting them back, telling myself "next time," all the while knowing that next time would never come if I could help it.

It's an odd way to feel about a writer with whom I thoroughly agree, but it's merely a clash of temperaments, not philosophy. One of the bones I have always picked with conservatism is its total rejection of Ayn Rand because of her atheism. To me, there is much more to conservatism than religion, so I cherish a passage from The Fountainhead that speaks to one such issue. Everyone who shares my revulsion against the touchy-feely, emotion-drenched, low-class, womanish mush that America calls "compassion" will appreciate Rand's description of Howard Roark's office:

He did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never inquired about their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer's benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self- respect within every man in that office.

2. Elliot Richardson. Now you know my secret crush: a Northeastern liberal Republican, almost as bad as having a secret crush on Nelson Rockefeller or Christie Todd Whitman. I knew a lot of readers would take umbrage if I praised him, but what really kept me from writing about him was that I didn't have enough material -- just my memory of his refusal to fire Archibald Cox and his subsequent resignation as Nixon's attorney general, plus one column by Mary McGrory, of all people, who evidently had a secret crush on him too.

She called him "the ultimate public servant" and said he had "an exalted sense of office and duty," but it was her description of him as "incurably high-minded" that really struck home. She knew him well, while I had only seen him on TV, but it was love at first sight. I sensed a reassuring stuffiness in him, an old-money, George Apley quality reminiscent of ...