Dear Michael,
I had been asked (by National Review) whether to endorse the Yale boycott, my answer being no. A nice thing about Yale back then (my time) was that they didn’t import commencement speakers–we rolled our own. In l962 , Yale had a special ceremony, the purpose of it being to give President Kennedy an honorary degree, and either JFK wanted to speak or else Yale asked him to, and the tradition was broken. I remember nothing about JFK’s speech other than that it began with a genteel animadversion on Henry Luce and your servant, WFB. Come to think of it, that’s when he called for sharply lower taxes.
The lady’s formal qualifications are obviously in order–graduate of the Yale Law School, first ladyship, and now U.S. senator. The objections arise from that special fragrance she emits of hostility to the right and to public morals. Her signature epiphany came when the Monica business was looking for a cause outside the gonads of her husband, and she came in with the vast right-wing conspiracy. This appears to have settled in her mind as the lodestar of her politics. I think it mildly provocative of Yale to have called her up. On the other hand, I’ve given about 30 commencement addresses, so this isn’t a first in provoking graduating students. It isn’t as though Jesse Jackson had been brought in, which would have been disruptive and callous. Would I as an undergraduate join the boycott? No, unless the claims of ideological brotherhood were at stake.
You are good, Michael, to fret over the rights of nostrum-seekers who buy unneeded medicine advertised on TV. We can put up with that, I agree, and the FDA should have better things to do than to get in the way of it. I’d love to see scorn frazzle merchandisers who claim too much for their potions, but that kind of discrimination isn’t easy to generate, and if it were done with comprehensive concern for standards, we’d have to start by boycotting most of the lyrics of modern songs, or such is my impression, and of course most political rhetoric.
On the matter of sign-offs, I have for decades used XB, the first letter denoting more than merely routine affability, the second giving the initial of both my first and my last names. It is a mistake to design this signature closing of mine [as Slate has been doing] as:
X,
B
because that makes it look like a Valentine card; not intended, Michael, though if you would like one, I’ll write it down for next Feb 14.
XB
