Subject: Bookshelf: A Conservative Collects His Thoughts Date: Published: 8/29/88 83 lines Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. LEISURE & ARTS -- Bookshelf: A Conservative Collects His Thoughts ---- By Joe Mysak Essayist Tom Bethell arrived on these shores first class on the Queen Elizabeth in 1962, a fresh Brit bound to teach prep school in Virginia, searching for jazz, and eager to show Americans the error of their ways. He did, but not precisely in the fashion he originally intended. In "The Electric Windmill" (Regnery Gateway, 294 pages, $17.95), Mr. Bethell presents his greatest hits collection, which taken as a whole provides "An Inadvertent Autobiography," as he has subtitled it. His book might also be called "A Conservative's Education," as it traces his career from its first tentative steps in the New Orleans Vieux Carre Courier in 1973 to his latter-day thunder in The American Spectator, for which he has written a monthly column since 1977. Collections of journalism may be an acquired taste. I happen to be an addict of them. True, one may be appalled at such works by Lewis Lapham, or driven to tears of boredom by the likes of John McPhee, but consider H. L. Mencken and Tom Wolfe -- there are classics. And that is where Mr. Bethell's work belongs. Reading it all under one roof, after having read much of it in installments, one is struck by just how unfailingly good he is. Mr. Bethell has learned that the more he writes about, the more he has to say, so he has made himself peripatetic. Between the covers of "The Electric Windmill" (the title piece is about an energy fair sponsored by the small-is-beautiful crowd), Mr. Bethell documents the history of New Orleans jazz, chronicles life inside the Beltway among the bureaucrats, considers why Darwin's theory of natural selection is flawed, and does a quick study of life among the weak-willed on Martha's Vineyard. He records exactly what he sees, yet he cannot resist the occasional jab, such as on today's elite: "Did these people ever do a day's work in their lives? Ten years ago daddy's credit card paid for everything." Mr. Bethell strikes the right note immediately, in a piece especially written for this collection entitled "I Was a Wishy-Washy Liberal." He describes his launch into American society in 1962, his amazement at the penchant for America-bashing by its hereditary elites (later on he asks, "Why did so many educated people seem to detest their own country so heartily? "), and how he learned which automatic political responses were considered in good taste by his hosts. He later learned, however, that "the liberal wish politically ... is for many of the people's decisions to be made for them by their betters in Washington, armed with the power of coercion, and employed at the people's expense." Not very liberal at all, in other words. It took him some time to come around to this point of view, perhaps the better part of 10 years, he thinks. But since then, he has come to recognize such humbug, and to dissect it with a joyful and infectious zeal. Mr. Bethell is entertaining, to be sure, whether he is writing about Teddy Kennedy or Alistair Cooke or a Hollywood sound stage. He can be tenderly compassionate, as he is in a piece on a home for AIDS patients. But often his whimsy is cover for serious business. After he became an American citizen in 1974, he became "convinced that there is at the core of contemporary liberalism something insane and self-destructive and (there is no other word for it) wicked." The essence of this wickedness, he writes, is that "individual responsibility for freely chosen action is denied." There is no such thing as culpability; there is only victimization. [28 lines irrelevant to AIDS have been removed. -- sysop] Mr. Mysak is managing editor of the Bond Buyer. [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]