Monday, January 26, 2004
(7:28 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Goings-On About Town
Heather Morgan, a fellow Olivet refugee, quotes a letter to the editor in her local paper:
Our greatness is no accident. Alexander set up the Hellenistic Age that civilized the barbarians in a search for worldwide brotherhood. In a civilized world, the Romans built the roads down which Peter and Paul carried the message of Christ to the West, the Gentiles, the sons and daughters of Japheth.
Every morning, thank the creator you are an American at such interesting and challenging times when you have the freedom to be your greatest self.
The parts I have left out are even better. It's amazing that conservative Christians are so hung up on the absolute historical truth of every word of scripture, yet they're so amazingly ignorant of history. I mean, I'm pleasantly surprised that this person even knows who Alexander the Great is, but -- a "search for worldwide brotherhood"?
Long Pauses, a blog that frequently quotes the newly anonymous a Gauche, blogrolled me somewhere along the way. I appreciate the shout-out and am thus reciprocating in kind. Attentive readers may note that Atrios and Talking Points Memo have been removed from my blogroll, since I hardly ever read them anymore. To add nuance to my take-down of Adam Robinson, I'd like to note that I mainly put "obvious" blogs in my blogroll early on because I didn't really know anyone who had a blog. If past versions of my blogroll were available, I'm sure we could watch the progression toward an ever-more-personalized version, where I mainly link to sites with whom I have some bonhomie and only point to a few exemplary "big name" sites (I'm going to stand behind CalPundit and Matt Yglesias, for the moment at least).
Chun the Unavoidable quotes a cranky passage from Josh Marshall's upcoming New Yorker article denouncing ultra-leftist anti-neo-imperialism, then says:
I don't know why I'd expect much different from a liberal who, when confronted by Richard Perle at a Washington think-tank panel, did everything but offer to fellate him in the bathroom after the show, but there it is.
Chun also previously noted that Marshall was "proud of winning a 'blog of the year' award from the same outfit that gave its columnist of the year award to Friedman." I don't read Friedman anymore, and so I don't link to him or comment on him anymore, but rest assured: the guy sucks serious gonads. He has never met a metaphor that he couldn't torture, a self-important anecdote that he couldn't exploit, or a completely out-of-left-field justification for what the Bush administration was going to do anyway that he couldn't pull out of his ass.
Thomas Friedman, like George W. Bush himself, is officially Beyond Parody.
And this is where the ultimate justification of Adam's suspicion of my blogrolling practice comes into play: I used to read Friedman just because he writes for the Times and I felt like I should, just like I used to read Josh Marshall just because he "took down" Trent Lott, even though I had probably never even heard of Trent Lott at the time. I am, in the words of a commenter from a Virtual Stoa post, a "trend-sucking dilletante," just like my man Slavoj -- whom I only read because a lot of people in the "postmodern" ghetto of the Amazon Listmania-o-sphere were mentioning him.
I now no longer believe in postmodernism, however. I believe in truths, objective facts, and universal moral values. This is because the right wing has completely stolen postmodern methods, and they do it a lot better than we lefties could have even dreamed of doing it. Perhaps, then, on some kind of meta-level, I am embracing objective truth simply as a rhetorical stance to advance my own pet political agenda, but I don't see what good it does anyone to point that out -- except the right wing. The newly anonymous a Gauche mentioned in the comments to Anthony's post below that postmodernism "doesn't help anyone." I don't think that's the case. I think it's helped Karl Rove a whole lot.
