Life is a journey, more specifically a train trip, Paul E. Gottfried says in his new memoir.
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Don't look for anything fast, flashy or foreign like the Orient Express or even the Broadway Limited coming down the track.
The Strasburg Rail Road is the modest metaphor Gottfried uses for his run at academic greatness.
In "Encounters: My Life With Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers," the Elizabethtown College history professor and Lancaster New Era editorial page columnist says his life, like the popular antique steam engine chugging through Amish country, "has gone nowhere in particular but has been nonetheless packed with fascinating encounters."
Some have been more frustrating than fascinating, the reader discerns as the author recalls the complicated relationships he's had with mentors, colleagues and adversaries of differing sociopolitical stripes — some of them amounting to cows on the tracks.
Most interesting to the general reader are chapters on how Gottfried's immigrant European Jewish family background, upbringing and education at Yeshiva and Yale universities formed his historical and political outlook, and on how his writings led to relationships with pundit Pat Buchanan and Buchanan's former boss, President Richard Nixon. The latter is detailed in the chapter titled "Two Pugnacious Republicans."
In an era when liberalism reigns, Gottfried is a conservative. And when neoconservativism was ascending, Gottfried identified himself as a "paleoconservative," a term he's credited with coining.
While the prefix might have an unfortunate association with cavemen, it represents belief in an anti-communist, anti-imperialist, civil society guided by Judeo-Christian religion and traditional Western values.
Yet Western values have long been been trumped by multiculturalism on almost every college campus, Gottfried notes. His book's overall tone is one of lamentation for what might have been, as he tallies up the price he's paid in prestigious professorships denied him over the years.
"What jumps off the pages ... is the amazing intellectual courage of an author who clearly and unequivocally states and defends what he believes. Agree with Gottfried or not, you will appreciate his refreshing honesty," syndicated columnist and media watchdog L. Brent Bozell III says in a cover blurb for the book, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute at $28.
Gottfried, as the Horace E. Raffensberger Professor of Humanities at E-town, keeps chugging along like The Little Engine That Could, even though it seems his brand of conservatisim can't crest the hill just now.
The current era of liberalism, however, may be just what is needed for the paleoconservative engine to gather the needed steam for the future.
Jo-Ann Greene is books editor of the Sunday News. Her e-mail address is jgreene@lnpnews.com.
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