Posted on 10/27/2001 6:48:43 PM PDT by gcruse
This week's Sontag Awardee (the London Review of Books) and Books in Brief.
THE SONTAG AWARD
This week's winner is the London Review of Books, which asked its regular writers for commentary on the
terrorist attack against the United States. The result is an extraordinary tissue of political hatred, intellectual
vulgarity, and moral incapacity. The entire issue belongs in a museum, under glass, as the definitive display of
ideology's triumph over thought and the archetypal example of thinkers unable to think in any new way, even
with the horror in front of them of 6,000 dead.
So, Mary Beard writes, "However tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming." Terry Eagleton adds,
"There is no conscious hypocrisy in believing yourself the great bastion of freedom while...embargoing Iraqi
children to death and being in effect a one-party state." Fredric Jameson, Michael Rogin, Richard Rorty, Edward
Said, Michael Wood--one thinker after another in a parade of thoughtlessness.
But three of the commentaries are particularly astonishing, if only for their source. What could possess
Thomas Laqueur to assert that "On the scale of evil the New York bombings are sadly not so extraordinary and
our Government has been responsible for many that are probably worse"?
The Yale literary critic David Bromwich used to be a subtle reader of poetry, but now he writes with incredible
intellectual vulgarity that patriotism and religious belief are to blame for the recent attacks: "Terrorism, religious
orthodoxy, and nationalism of all kinds (insurgent as well as established) have become in our time
inseparable companions: those who apologize for one thereby take on their conscience the crimes of the rest."
Finally, there is Eric Foner, the Columbia historian, who has placed himself beyond the pale with a
commentary that begins: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the
apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."
Perhaps the London Review of Books has done us a favor, for we will never have to take any of these writers
seriously again.
--Peter Berkowitz
October 22, 2001 - Volume 7, Number 6
And Yale, and Columbia.
Except Sontag has one distinguishing characteristic - she has "Pepe le Pew" hair.
One of their great heroes and fashionable mass-murderers Chairman Mao said, "a revolution isn't a dinner party", . Today's Leftists in the west have turned that saying on its head. In fact, in the west, revolution can best be understood as fashionable dinner-party one-upsmanship. In the west, revolution serves the dinner party.
We could hold a FReepathon...
where will they be
Someplace in Africa, they've got a lot of room over there
who will replace the 6 millions Moslems in this country who are largely gainfully employed?
REAL, WHITE AMERICANS!
We are going into a recession anyways as it is.
We can sell off all the Muslims' stuff after we deport them.
(please this whole post was sarcasm)
First off, show me where you get 6 million Moslems in this country.
Second, who will replace them? Anyone!
Sort of like being a happily married man, but still having fantasies about that nubile young thing you see every day at the gym.
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