Notes from the Bay Area
I spent much of last week in San Francisco and Palo Alto, giving talks to various audiences and meeting with scholars and fellows at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Here are a few takeaways.
1. Bay Area residents don’t have a great sense of humor about the Golden State Warriors’ collapse after leading 3-1 in the NBA Finals. Someone once told me that it’s a good idea, when giving talks, to establish a rapport with the audience by mentioning something of local interest. So last week I began my remarks by offering condolences for the Warriors’ recent loss. Then, figuring that of course people would value my deep analysis and not just my kind sentiments, I went into some detail reviewing the final three games of the series, paying tribute, of course, to the achievements of LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. And then, when the audience started good-naturedly murmuring, not to say booing, I’d threaten to throw my mouthpiece into the crowd, saying that I’d gathered that was a folk custom of the Bay Area. So the speeches went great!
2. Luckily, they’re very forgiving in Northern California (something they learn in their yoga classes), and so the speeches actually went fine. At the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, I engaged in a broad-ranging conversation on American and world politics, moderated by Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution, which–if you have an hour to kill–you can listen to the audio here or even watch the video here. The highlights of the Commonwealth Club visit, though, were several interesting conversations with various attendees, including one with a gentleman who introduced himself as a TWS subscriber and announced that he’d read all 1,000 issues of The Weekly Standard. I told him that really was impressive, somehow more so than merely working on the first 1,000 issues, as several of my colleagues and I have, and that he deserved some kind of medal. He agreed.
3. Later in the week I spoke at a lovely San Francisco residence, at an event co-sponsored by Hoover and the Lincoln Club of Northern California. The attendees were conservatives (more or less) under about 45, many working in tech, as you’d expect in that area. Despite their almost uniform distaste for Donald Trump, and their concern about what his candidacy might do to the future of the GOP and conservatism, they were pretty optimistic about the conservative future–even in the Bay Area!–and their intelligence and energy left me encouraged. It really is a best-of-times, worst-of-times situation: On the one hand Trump is a disaster. On the other, the overreach of the PC left, the failure of liberal big-government policies, and the emergence of many attractive young conservative political leaders mean that conservative opportunities are in some ways very great.
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4. One of my most encouraging conversations took place at a Starbucks on the Stanford campus near the Faculty Club, where I was staying. It was 6:00 a.m. Thursday, and I was in search of coffee before getting down to work on my editorial (which you can read here). A man in his mid-thirties approached me, said he’d been reading and enjoying the magazine the last couple of years, and wanted particularly to thank me for standing against Trump. When I jokingly asked why he’d only followed TWS so recently, he told me he’d been pretty busy in the Army Special Forces for about a dozen years and hadn’t had as much time as he would have liked to read the magazine. I agreed that was a good excuse, and we talked at some length about lessons he took from his service, issues of American foreign policy, and the broader American political scene. He said he hoped to get involved in politics now that he was settling down to civilian life, but that first he had to make a living, and in fact was at Stanford studying in a short program to help him get started in a new business. I was again struck how much, it seems to me, our future depends on the leadership of what Dean Barnett has called the 9/11 generation. This young man, at once modest and confident, gave me renewed hope for the future.
5. On the other hand, I will admit that overhearing, in the faculty club dining room, the conversations of Stanford professors and their hangers-on did not fill me with confidence. The Hoover fellows were great. But the idiocy of American academia seems to be progressing unchecked. Of course, having breakfast there Friday morning, and listening to the clucking and hand-wringing about Brexit, was enjoyable–so there are compensations. (By the way, on Brexit, which was decided too late for our print edition, you can read these pieces online by Chris Caldwell and Irwin Stelzer.)
6. Let me end on an important issue: What’s with the bathroom appliances and fixtures in hotels and, for that matter, faculty clubs, across America? You’d think hotels and other lodgings would have an interest in making baths, showers, soap and shampoo dispensers, as easy to use as possible for their visitors. Au contraire! Their purchasers of bathroom fixtures must be an astonishingly credulous lot, buying complex bath/shower gizmos no one would dream of having in their own bathrooms. When I called the desk my first morning at the Stanford Faculty Club to ask, somewhat embarrassedly, how to switch the water flow from “bath” to “shower”, the desk clerk laughed, said she gets that inquiry all the time, and explained there was a ring concealed under the bath faucet (and far away from the main handles and levers) that had to be pulled down once the bath water was on to convert it into a shower. The clerk acknowledged that they’d discussed putting instructions somewhere in the bathroom to make this more evident, but hadn’t quite gotten around to it. Anyway, surely part of making American great again has to involve addressing the crisis of bathroom fixtures in hotel and lodging establishments across America.
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Onward!
Bill Kristol
