There's not all that much in Part II of John's Intellectual Progress or How I Became a Hawkish Free-Market Libertarian. I said yesterday that I came to Spain in 1987, and Spain was not a capitalist country yet. The best example is Telefónica, which was then the government telecoms monopoly. It cost something like two hundred bucks to get a phone hooked up. There were, of course, no cellphones. They sent you a non-itemized bill every two months and you could either pay it or let your phone get cut off. Overseas calls cost a fortune and there was a phone center, not one of those new card-phone places that cater to immigrants but an old-style Bulgarian Third World place in the Plaza Catalunya where you could go and make a station-to-station call, which cost an arm and a leg but at least you knew you were paying twenty bucks for ten minutes. You could dial direct from pay phones, but you needed a huge pile of change and you risked getting cut off before you got an answer due to some bug in the system.

In 1989 I was living with another American and a Canadian, who were both gay but not a couple, which took me a while to figure out (You mean they're both gay and like, friends and all, but they're not stuffing one another's orifices?), a Dutch guy, his Spanish girlfriend, and two California chicks. The California chicks used the phone we got hooked up so we could deal with job offers and stuff to call their high school friends, against the house rules, and wouldn't admit it, so we all had to pay like seventy extra dollars each one time when we got a huge, of course nonitemized bill. No, it wasn't me calling a phone-sex line, I was getting plenty, thank you, and besides there weren't any phone sex lines then. Not that any of us were aware of, anyway, at least not me. Maybe Don and Tony were calling up Dial-a-Squirt, I don't know, they sure brought home some avant-garde people occasionally, but I don't think so, those guys were legit. A little fruity, but legit. We never had any problems with the avant-garde folks, either, though Don had this big old tube of lube with nonoxynol or whatever that spermicide was called that he'd just leave lying around the place. I'd never seen that stuff before. He used to say he was a virgin because he'd never had coitus with a woman. Anyway, we couldn't prove the chicks had done it and so had to agree to divide the unitemized bill equally. Don just marched into the living room with his undeserved share of the cash we had to pay and just slammed it down on the table while shouting "THIS! IS! THE PRICE! OF ONE LONG PHONE CALL! TO YOUR FUCKING BOYFRIEND! WHO YOU WON'T EVEN FUCK!" It was great. This was still the 80s and some chicks still didn't put out, or at least didn't go all the way, because they had complexes about it. And they certainly wouldn't do that.

I decided right about then that socialism just didn't work, neither the government kind nor the all-for-one-and-one-for-all kind. This decision corresponded, more or less, to the same time I was reading Orwell and then went to Friedman and the Constitution and all sorts of histories.

I also decided that people are all confused about sex and to try not to analyze it too much more, and especially not to take it too seriously. Sex is something people do, and you can't stop them from doing it, so you'd better not try. This tied in with the general libertarian agin' authority streak I've always had. But I decided that authority, in the form of the laws, was there for a reason, just like in every organization you have to have a hierarchy. Now, we all agree to the laws, and if we don't agree with one of them, we can campaign to change it. Don't call me naive--it's happened, from prohibition and back again to women's suffrage to the abolition of slavery to those referendums they keep having in California, all cases where grassroots campaigns caught fire with the people.

Anyway, though, I figured any law must be there for a good reason. Now, we should analyze it and decide if it still does what it's supposed to, guarantee our rights to life, liberty, and property. If the law doesn't do that, it's probably a bad law and we might think about changing it after due debate and process. How does the Kansas sodomy law guarantee life, liberty, or property, for example? All I know about it is it makes me a felon. And fellow Kansan Bob "Mr. Viagra" Dole, too. If you can't giv--oops, never mind. Anyway, being conservative-minded doesn't mean you want to conserve everything, it means you want to conserve the good things. We can try to change the bad things. We just need to be damned careful in how we decide what's bad, and think about questions like basic human rights--individual freedom and our right as a society to decide what's right and what's wrong and how far that goes into people's individual lives. We need to frame questions at the most basic level.

Should the state pay for day care for working parents' children? Well, the right to life doesn't really come in here. Neither does the right to liberty. The right to property--wait, that does come in. The state's gonna pay for that day care with money that belongs to all of us. There are some advantages to and some questions about state day care. Parents with small children will benefit; they'll pay much less for child care. Should we subsidize people to have kids, taking money from the childless to support the fertile? We as a society do need to at least replace our current population. It's certainly true that it's in everybody's economic interest for these working people to spend their valuable time doing the jobs they're trained and educated for and to leave their children in the hands of strangers for nine hours a day. Is parents' ability to leave children safely with strangers something we ought to be spending everyone's money on, though? Why should I pay so somebody can watch your kid? It seems to me that these are more basic, more radical, if you will, questions than "How can we assure that women enjoy job equality with men? Well, since women usually get stuck with the kids, we need to pay for those kids to get taken care of while Mommy works. Mommy thereby benefits. This is good." The question we need to ask is "Do we all benefit?"

In 1992 I came back to Kansas to get a master's degree in linguistics, applied, I must confess. I was there until 1994. Authority was now in the hands of the PC Patrol. Dennis Dailey, Mr. Popular Sex Professor, refused to speculate on the question "What causes homosexuality?" because if we asked that question, then we would use the answer to make gay people be straight. Concerned people, the kind who were into saving the baby seals the year before and wanted us to spend several thousand bucks per capita in order to save the family farm the year after, were passing out condoms all over the place because the Left was pushing the idea that heteros had as much to fear from AIDS as homos. (I'm not saying don't wear a glove. I'm saying that the biggest factor determining whether you're gonna get AIDS is who you're hosing. If that's an IV drug user, a prostitute, or a gay man in a big city, that person has a lot better chance of having the virus and you stand a lot better chance of getting it, since your chance of getting AIDS from someone who doesn't have it is zero.)

The Applied English Center told us ESL teachers that we had to teach our foreign students that there was a word, "lesbigay", which referred to some hypothetical community of lesbs, bis, and gays. I had students from Afghanistan and Mozambique You think I'm going to teach them that shit? They had some "women and minorities" program to get those groups into engineering, tragically dominated by pale penis people. This consisted of workshops to which all high school girls and black and Hispanic boys were invited in order to get them interested in engineering. Great, you'd think, the department is trying to get kids interested in coming to school here, it's selling the university. But white boys were not allowed in, and neither were Asian boys, who seemed to be unfairly engineering-oriented.

This black guy whose initials were D.F. got elected student body president on a "let's unite everybody together" platform. Great, you'd think. Then it came out he'd had a job working at the Salvation Army homeless shelter, for which he was paid the minimum wage. He got caught falsifying time sheets, claiming a good many more hours than he'd actually worked. This guy was stealing from the Salvation Army. From the homeless shelter, for Christ's sake. What's lower than stealing from homeless people? He wasn't forced to resign like anybody else would have been after something like that came out. This guy was not fit to hold any position of trust. And the university administration at first tried to sweep this under the rug. Then D.F. punched his girlfriend, causing her to need dental work. She took him to court and he pleaded guilty in Kansas City, Missouri. The shit hit the fan like three days later. The feminists aboutfaced and now wanted D.F.'s scalp. Most of the regular Student Senators, the frat boys who vote to lavishly support all the intramural sports teams and the aggressive bearded grad teaching assistants who always want higher pay and free parking stickers, wanted to get rid of this guy because, like, the KC Star and CNN were picking it up and it was making us look bad, having a woman-beater and thief from the homeless as our president. The Black Student Union wouldn't back down, though, and finally the Student Senate, completely illegally, invented an impeachment procedure, since no one had ever even thought about having to remove a thief and a bully from his position as our president, and removed D.F. from office. Everybody got denounced as racist. D.F.'s successor, the previously elected vice-president, didn't give much of a damn about what people called him, but his mom was Japanese and his dad met her when he was in the Army. Racists, my ass.

I could tell you fifty-eight stories about the idiocy of early 90s political correctness. Here's the best one. I was teaching upper-intermediate writing and we were supposed to have our students keep daily journals in which they could write anything they wanted, but it was suggested they write about their feelings. I figured most of these people probably didn't think their feelings were any of my business, so I added the suggestion that if they had no other ideas, they look at the free daily student newspaper, find a story they were interested in, and write a paragraph giving their opinion.

So the UDK broke what they figured was a big story, that 48% of all students who graduated finished their BA in four years and 38% in five, with the rest in six or more. Or whatever the stats were. But the figure for black students was more like 32% in four and 56% in five, with the rest in six and some 5% in seven. My guess is that a lot of us white students from the KC suburbs, Topeka, and the Kaw Valley went to better schools and were better prepared for college than many of the black students, who came more from KCK and Wichita where the schools aren't as good. So it took them a little longer to graduate, on average. No surprises there. The UDK called racism, of course, and wrote about how blacks were discriminated against somehow.

Anyway, this Taiwanese guy who I had in class--he'd just come over--chose that story to write his daily journal entry about, but he completely missed the point. He wrote about how it was terrible that the black students didn't study harder and work more diligently in order to graduate on time (seems that if you don't pass your classes or drop half of them in Taiwan, it's your own fault), and how he and the other foreign students were always down in the dorm cafeteria studying in the evenings while the black students were partying and carrying on. I seriously thought about what to do and decided to just sort of ignore that entry and let him figure things out for himself, not out of cruelty but of my own incapacity to explain exactly what the hell was going on.

This was the final nail in the coffin. The multiculti-diversity folks had pushed me too far. It was the same smarmy ed-school crap that I'd had to put up with in high school, but then it was authoritarian old-style teachers and church ladies bossing you around. Now it's those damn department secretaries and associate professors and cataloguing dorks in the library who've taken over the universities and mark a hard line which you must follow or be publicly declared antidiversity, culturally arrogant, and Eurocentric. There's still a "they" telling you what to do, and at least the old-style authoritarian teachers were honest about their goals, keeping all of us in line. The new "they" wants us all to get in line, too, because if we don't we're racists. What's worse is that they're convinced of their virtue. The old-style teachers left you alone after you got out of their class, but the new ones try to change your behavior at all times.

So I got out of there as fast as I could, after getting the damn degree, of course, and before getting myself blacklisted. Now I just stay far away from that kind of people. They get on my nerves. My nerves are delicate.