Why I'm Not a Liberal: NPR did a piece on Pablo Neruda this morning. Stalinist artists seem so much easier to rehabilitate than Stalinist politicians or spies. Anyhow, I realized that although I continue to flirt with the left in policy matters, I'm still temperamentally conservative. For poetry, give me T.S. Eliot, which is conservative poetry inasmuch as reading it requires the study of Western Civilization & Literature, plus four or five dead languages. Liberals would never go in for that sort of thing. Well, no, they would, as long as the dead languages were aboriginal, and were cruelly destroyed by white men. Unless it was, say, Stalin's ethnic and cultural cleansing of the Turkic tribes in Northeastern Russia. That doesn't rate so high on their outrage scale, I guess.