Ron Rosenbaum laments the departure of Christopher Hitchens from the Nation magazine. He rather neatly summarizes my own concerns regarding the influence of Chomsky, and others on the far left:
- It's sad, though, because one senses that Mr. Hitchens forced a lot of people on the Left to confront their blind spot, their on-bended-knee obeisance to anyone in the Third World who posed as a "liberator," from Mao to Castro to Arafat and the Taliban. This was why Mr. Hitchens was so valuable and hopeful in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, hammering away at the point that the Islamo-fascists weren't friends of the oppressed, they were oppressors - of women, gays, poets and all dissenters.
But now, a year later, it seems that despite Mr. Hitchens and a few other voices, such as Todd Gitlin's, the blind-spot types have won out on the Left - the blind spot to Marxist genocide obscuring any evil but America's. You could see it at the Sheeps Meadow. You can see it in the hysterical seizure on Enron and other corporate scandals: See, we were right all along - corporations and businessmen are (surprise!) greedheads. This excuses averting their eyes from anti-American terrorism - from people and regimes preparing to kill Americans rather than merely diminish their 401(k)'s. Enron was the fig leaf many on the American Left needed to return to their customary hatred of America. Because America isn't perfect, it must be evil. Because Marxist regimes make claims of perfection, they must be good.
So, for my part, goodbye to all that. Goodbye to a culture of blindness that tolerates, as part of "peace marches," women wearing suicide-bomber belts as bikinis. (See the accompanying photo of the "peace" march in Madrid. "Peace" somehow doesn't exclude blowing up Jewish children.)
Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it's the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence - thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he's more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It's a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush's, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.
Article comments
1 - Tom Shugart
This speaks to my concerns as well. Thanks, Eric, for sharing this. Wish I could channel my disdain into such well-crafted ridicule as Rosenbaum does.
2 - Martin Gorda
If you can get past the stylistic narcissism of his essays (the written equivalent of someone who likes to hear themselves talk), Rosenbaum has little to offer his readers.
He writes as though you are already party to his views; as though the simple act of Ron Rosenbaum trashing Gore Vidal or Pete Seeger, or extolling Chris Hitchens is enough. We don't need facts or reasoned arguments, just read a passage where Ron gives it to some whacko lefty.
And what about all those lefty whackos? I mean how can they possibly entertain ideas that are so far beyond the mainstream that even Ron Rosenbaum cannot countenance them. Oswald didn't kill JFK? Get outta here! You're joking right?
On the plus side, writers of Rosenbaum's caliber will only ever "preach to the choir." Rosenbaum is a literary Rush Limbaugh. Theirs is a style of polemic that compels neither thought nor reflection. Mind pap for the mindless wishing to remain that way.
I've read my last Rosenbaum piece. Life is too short to waste on bad logic and self-enamored writers.