The future

Wells Tower's report on this summer's YAF sponsored National Conservative Student Conference is a laugh riot. You could read the whole thing if you had bought the November issue of Harper's. Failing that, here's an excerpt:

In her facebook bio, Samantha Soller listed among her hobbies "political science, philosophy, and hippie-hunting, enjoys foreclosing on poor people's cardboard boxes, eating red meat, using her Sigarms P232 Stainless to shoot cute little bunny rabbits." I ask her about the gun.

"It's a semiautomatic handgun. I don't have one, but I would love to own one soon. It's really cute. It's silver. It fits in your handbag."

We close in on the catering trays, which today are full of steak and chicken fajita meat. The sight douses the cheer that mention of the Sigarms P232 had stirred in Soller's hale, brown cheeks. "What is this?" she says, surveying the buffet. "I don't eat anything that's not American."

A boy standing nearby assures her. "It is American; it's Tex-Mex."

Soller frowns. "I'm having the salad," she says. "I don't want to get sick."

I can't stop. Here's another excerpt. Note the recurrence of the salad motif.

The guest lecturer at the Thursday "Men's Lunch" is Dr. Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University. According to the program, Mansfield will talk about "manliness," which is also the title of his most recent book. The ladies, meanwhile, are supposed to be lunching with Bay Buchanan, but several of them, declaring a preference for Mansfield's remarks on manliness, launch a respectful, small-scale insurgency against the breakdown of coeducational order. The ladies are eventually permitted to sit "at tables in the back of the room that do not have salad," Roger Custer, the conference's director, specifies beforehand.