Life on the Bench

I WAS SITTING ON a wooden bench outside a T station the other day. Like most wooden benches outside T stations (those monolithic expressions of suburban alienation) this one was spattered with graffiti. I've always liked graffiti, particularly in the carrels in Lamont when I've got a final the next morning. So I passed my wait by reading the graffiti on this particular bench.

This being a family newspaper, much of it I can't report. But something curious caught my eye: "LiberAls Suck." Next to that, perhaps significantly, was a weatherbeaten clump of spearmint Bubble Yum which looked remarkably like a small chlorophyll turd.

I wondered why this person--whom I suspected to be "Danny 84," because that name was scrawled in the same black Marks-A-Lot script to my right--feels that "LiberAls Suck." While a lot of people, particularly those who voted ... when was that? November? ... might see this as true, Danny 84s mode of argumentation intrigued me.

Knowing the nature of many opponents of the libertarian-militarist tradition (that's a more accurate label. I think, than "conservative.") I could imagine a comment like "Conservatives Suck" or "RcaGan is a Dick."

But it's always seemed to me that anti-liberals who take pen to hand, like George Will or that effete maniac William F. Buckley Jr. are fairly intelligent. And while the anti-libertarian-militarist tradition can be bastardized and profanely expressed in ignorant, duosyllabie terms (pick up the latest "Worker's Vanguard" and you'll see what I mean the anti-liberal argument can't.

THERE ARE TWO reasons, I believe. First, the basic American liberal argument to be attacked involves a large number of complex postulates about the proper role of the government in society.

The conservative argument, at least the way I've always heard it best explicated, involves no such complicated reasoning. At heart, libertarian militarism merely affirms that "man must be free." Thence flow the arguments for dynamiting the Department of Health and Human Services and so forth, in hopes of getting government out of the middle class's face and maximizing aggregate freedom in society. Also, the "man must be free" orthodoxy leads to things like B-1B bombers and ROTC to crush communism, fascism and other systems resembling the Soviet Union, all of which curtail freedom. It's a pretty good argument, really, because it lends itself to expression in pop songs like "God Bless the U.S.A."

In the second place, libertarian militarists--at least in Massachusetts, where the bench I was sitting on is located--are a minority. And therefore, to be effective, libertarian militarists must present a cogent., coherent, obviously persuasive dogma. Liberals in Massachusetts can trust in a wave of popular sentiment among the Commonwealth's Volvo-drivers and Burger King employees to absolve them of forensic shortcomings. Hence the viability of "ConserviTives Suck" as political propaganda.

But "LiberAls Suck" on a bench in staunchly Democratic Braintree, Massachusetts? What could it mean? Was it a Gary Hart-esque rail against the gloom-and-doom, tax-and-spend-failed policies of the Carter-Mondale administration? Was it a purely descriptive rather than expository comment, based on the dismal Electoral College performance of the Democrats? Or was Danny 84 actually a member of the party's agitprop crew, out publishing an argument so hopelessly nebulous and unremittingly vulgar that it would actually work to undermine the cause of conservatism in the Bay State?

Just then the bell rang for the next train. I got orr the Red Line. I was headed to Harvard. Everyone in the car was reading The Globe's editorial page. Suddenly Danny 84 didn't seem like much of a threat any more.