9/05/00 12:25 p.m.
A Cop's Damascus Road, Part I
Why I am a Conservative.

By Jack Dunphy*, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department.

number of e-mailers have written to express their surprise that an ordinary cop should be writing for National Review Online. Some have even been so skeptical as to doubt that I really am a police officer. The story is a simple one: What began as a whimsical exchange of e-mail with Jonah Goldberg in the days before and during the Democratic convention in Los Angeles soon grew into what became my Convention Diary. Mr. Goldberg, responsible editor that he is, of course verified my curriculum vitae before running the piece; if he is satisfied, so should you be. (Responsible though he may be, some of the messages I received during the DNC suggest he may have been a bit fuddled from drink. To wit, a sample, spelling and punctuation exactly as received: "[Jack] — I should be heaqding downtown after a editorial meeting I'll know when and where. Jonah." You decide.)

While it certainly is remarkable that I should find my words placed among those of so many talented and accomplished writers, that is only half the story, for it was only eight years ago that I would not have been caught even reading National Review, much less writing for it.

While traveling over this Labor Day weekend I read an uncommonly good book, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace) by Harry Stein. Mr. Stein, a novelist and occasional writer for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, New York, and Esquire (none of which, as the book points out, is likely to hire him again) describes his journey from liberal journalism to conservative fatherhood. A representative passage, found on page 163: "So let's keep it simple: it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes loving, responsible, committed parents. Ideally, two of them, together for the duration."

Well now.

Stein is no less assaultive to other cherished notions of the Left, and were I blessed with the means, I would see to it that his book is distributed as widely as Gideon Bibles. I can only urge you to click right over to your favorite on-line bookseller and buy three copies, two to give to liberal friends. (You'll click right back, of course.) Or, for you traditionalists, run on down to your local bookstore, at which, if located in any of the major cities on either coast, or in such smaller, inland burgs as Boulder or Burlington, the clerk will sneer at you when you make the purchase. The book put me in mind of my own Road to Damascus, for I, too, once merrily roamed out there on the left fringe of the American polity.

As a single man of ordinary hormonal appetites, my conversion might have been brought about through the same process I used to select a fraternity in college: After years of lagging badly in this department, the conservatives now have the better babes. Shilling for the Clintons through the various scandals were such as Time's Margaret Carlson and Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, talented women, certainly, but unlikely to arouse the baser urges in the typical male. Definitely not this one. Ah, but in the opposite corner we find, among others, the elegant Laura Ingraham and the fiery Ann Coulter, she of the endless extremities. But no, I was already safely sheltered in the conservative harbor by the time Misses Ingraham and Coulter first graced my television screen. (I recall my joy at seeing Coulter tell Geraldo Rivera where to get off, and my disappointment when she stopped short of giving him another public nose-bopping.)

I am a Catholic, educated as a young man by Jesuits. As a high school student I drank deeply from the Jesuit cup of social justice theory, working at a soup kitchen and performing other such labors on behalf of the poor before graduating. Furthermore, I came of age in the roiling wake of Vietnam and Watergate, casting my first presidential vote for Jimmy Carter, in 1976. It is safe to say that none of the friends with whom I graduated high school were Republicans at that time (though most are, today).

Though an indifferent student, I attended what is often described as an elite university, where, in my youthful torpor, I absorbed all the orthodoxies put forth by my uniformly liberal instructors. I recall only one exception, an elderly professor of Chinese history who, having traveled widely in pre-Mao China, lamented what had become of the country since the arrival of Communism. Safely tenured, he was regarded as a crank by his fellow history teachers.

I watched the network news with an uncritical eye, taking at face value all that poured from the Delphic mouths of Dan, Peter, and Tom. I also lived in Los Angeles, where if you venture outdoors for a few minutes you are likely to meet someone employed in some facet of "The Industry," known to the wider world as show business. I made friends with many of them, and despite my employment as a tool of the oppressive, capitalist state, I was accepted as a fellow traveler, perhaps even prized as a potential double-agent. Eager to swim with the school among my show-biz friends, I adhered to the leftist party line espoused by anyone who rendered an opinion. (Conservatives, I later learned, remained deeply closeted; in Hollywood, it is far less destructive to your career to come out as a homosexual than as a conservative.)

Perhaps it was the accumulated years of seeing so much of my income extracted by the government while simultaneously seeing how they spent much of it, perhaps it was spending those same years being daily lied to by criminals, but there came a point during Bill Clinton's first term when I saw him on television and said to myself, "This man is lying to me." Again, this was during his first term, when some parents were still naming their baby girls "Monica," and only a few lonely voices were shouting what everyone of either party knows so well today: that Bill Clinton is a liar of staggering proficiency.

Thus the stage was set for my awakening. I was flying home from the east coast and enduring the sort of travel nightmare about which certain episodes of television sitcoms are made. Innumerable delays along the way allowed me to finish reading a book more quickly than anticipated, and I found myself stranded in O'Hare Airport late at night, long after the stores had closed, with nothing to read. For me, this might have led to insanity (as indeed it did, in the opinion of some of my liberal friends). I searched the terminal in vain for a discarded copy of the Chicago Tribune. Even a three-day-old Des Moines Register would have been a welcome find. Nothing. I sat down forlornly to await the shrieks of the banshees. But there, a few seats over, was an abandoned copy of National Review. Then again, perhaps not abandoned at all, but placed there by Providence.

Check back tomorrow on NRO for
Part II of A Cop's Damascus Road.

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber.)