(10:36 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

I am an "America-hating historian"

I periodically type my own name into Google, to watch with frustration as The Weblog utterly fails to be the top search result, indeed even to be on the first page of results. In any event, today I found this page, which contains the following sentence in the comment section (responding to what I assume is a published print article):

I suppose you'd suggest I read some Noam Chomsky, Adam Kotsko, Paul Krugman or some other such America-hating historians work in order that I may become as obsessively bitter as all of you.

Run a search within Internet Explorer to find the whole insightful comment. Further down the page, the same person quotes, in full, my Amazon list entitled "So you'd like to... Hate America" with no attribution, introducing it with this insightful comment:

Here's a little lesson plan for all you liberals that oh so love hating America. you can find YOUR history lessons. Don't bother watching sill [sic] John Wayne movies or reading comic books [earlier, someone had accused him of getting his history from these sources]. You won't find America-hating subject matter there. This synopsis was written by a leftist, for a leftist

He concludes as is appropriate:

Sad, isn't it? People devote such time to such utter ridiculousness.

I'm honestly not sure how seriously to take this person, or how seriously he is taking my list. I'm honored to be listed in between Chomsky and Krugman in any case. For review, here is one of the recommendations from my "Hate America" list:

'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace' by Gore Vidal is also essential to all America-haters. Punning off the title of the neoconservative philosopher Immanuel Kant's essay "Perpetual Peace," Gore Vidal (a distant relative of Al Gore and a high-culture "novelist") instructs us in the many evils of American imperialism. His simplistic polemical "arguments" remind one of the question-begging of "gay rights" activists and those who favor legalized discrimination (i.e., affirmative action). In short, Gore Vidal is a classic Clintonian hack writing an uninformed, semi-Pelagian piece of yellow journalism.

Looking over my list, I now realize that it is very possible that he chose Noam Chomsky and Paul Krugman because both appear on my list and they were the only names he recognized. Overall, this is even better than the time that one of my commentaries was posted on Free Republic.

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