Keep the Yale Daily News Staff Naked

My jaded oculii were roaming carelessly, just the other day, through a salt-stained numero of the Daily when they happened to rest on Higginson Snotbottom's numinously scriptatory editorial effusion, "Why Daily Pensters Don't Wear Clothes." I fear they rested but a moment, a soi-disant hermeneutic flicker in my day, since at the time I was on the ship-to-shore phone, advising my good friend Bob Bork on possible mano-a-mano means of unmanning (were this necessary) the mewling catamites of the Left. Simultaneously I was correcting National Review galleys, sipping a very adequate Chateau Lafitte '41, playing a gripping game of trans-Atlantic telephone chess (on the other line) with dear Margaret Thatcher, and piloting the doughty vessel Military Industrial Complex across the briny reaches of Vineyard Sound.

Yet I was struck, for the piece in question was striking, frappant even. God and Man at Yale, God and Nude at the Daily! I thought of Carlyle. Shall we sartus, let alone resartus, the sartor? Shall we, while we're about it, clothe the Yale Daily scriptor? Through the turbid sophomoricism of what Mr. Snotbottom is doubtless pleased to call "prose," I seemed to detect an affirmative reply.

Perhaps I misread, for along with all of the above distractions I was at that moment busy ticking off an inexperienced crewman (named Malcolm Forbes) for his mishandling of the stern sheet. Yet I think I am correct in my recollection that Mr. Snotbottom advocated mandatory clothing for all Daily News reporters, at least when engaged in discharging their journalistic duties.

Caveat Emptor! L'etat, c'est moi! Don't it make your brown eyes blue! Not mine, certainly, but I confess to feeling a surge of indignation, all the same, at this fatuous manifestation of a meddling, bloated, neo-Johnsonian "Great" Societish welfare state Gorgon that I had long hoped would never rear its ugly head in the sartorially innocent groves of Eli academe.

It recalled to mind a most illuminating conversation that I'd had with a nude Leopold Stokowski, just last week, at a little gala thrown by an equally pre-lapsarian Hank Kissinger in honor of my latest opus, The Oracle Speaks (Knopf, $27.95, although if you have to ask the price you will in all likelihood neither understand nor be able to afford the book).

Actually I no longer recall the substance of the conversation. Suffice it to say that many wealthy and powerful friends were in attendance, most of them entirely unencumbered by clothing. And I remember thinking that this was as it should be. Apres nous le deluge, after all, so why wear clothes that'll only get soaked and have to be dry-cleaned by non taxpaying illegal aliens, many of them belonging to racial minorities that are tyrannical Communistic majorities in their countries of origin?

I submit to Mr. Snotbottom and to your readers that the Daily News of Yale College is staffed by nude young men and women who will one day join the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, and (by extension) of my friends. I can see no reason why they should be forced to hide the light of their essentials, or rather the essential light of their well-deserved physical and intellectual privilege, under a bushel, under a shroud of mediocre, Big Government-imposed apparel.