May 25, 2004
Read Anne
by JeremyI have had a head cold for the past couple of days, so I'm feeling crappy on top of crappy. I'm not in a big blogging mood. But Anne Cunningham has some interesting stuff going lately. At first I was thrown by her warning that she's not fighting with her friends over politics as much as she used to. But I find her opinions on Iraq do not seem to have changed; she's just going through one of those Mario Cuomoesque phases where the act of engaging in subtly well-balanced assessments of the observations of serious people seems more important than the impulse to crack apart popular cocoons of idiocy. I have those Cuomo moments quite frequently myself. I appreciate the fact that you can read Josh Marshall, for instance, and get the serious observations of someone who knows more than I do. I sometimes appreciate the brilliant and lucid musings of Matthew Yglesias. But I consistently notice that weeks, even months go by before I remember I haven't even looked at either of those blogs. The reason is this: I tend to back silently away from clever, lucid people if I get the feeling they aren't being totally straight with me. I'm not attacking anyone (he says, Cuomoesquely) but here's an example from Yglesias in a random post in which he's discussing a comment by Glenn Reynolds suggesting that the anti-war crowd are moving the goalpost on how they're willing to define WMD:
This is actually very simple. The goalpost for whether it not it was "all" a "lie" is whether or not all of the things the president said about Saddam Hussein turn out to have been deceptive. Clearly, it was not all a lie. Saddam Hussein was, as the president stated on many occassions, a bad brutal man who gassed his own people. It also now appears that somewhere in Iraq there was one (or maybe two) shells of sarin gas. So it wasn't all a lie.
He goes on for several paragraphs. I'd summarize it as "Yeah, right. Bush is a liar." My point is simply that if your point can be summarized as "yeah right" or even "heh" or "indeed" then you should not pretend that your nicely worded paragraphs accomplish anything more than that. This is one of the reasons 100,000 people a day read Glenn Reynolds: he knows that sometimes "heh" is all one has in one's quiver...and that's "OK."
I'm not accusing Anne of this vaguely defined transgression (remember that I'm sick and fuzzy-headed anyway) just that she's more generous to these bloggers than I am. Objectively, she's right -- they all have something to offer and, because I lose patience, I tend to throw out the wheat with the chaff (worse, I don't care). But -- and this was supposed to be the point of the post -- that's why I'm glad Anne does that sticky work from time to time, so we can just "Read Anne."
And actually, in this critique of a post by Kevin Drum I would agree with her 100% if she simply changed the phrase "I think this is both true and not true" to "I think this is basically bullshit."
All that said (whatever the hell I just said), this post really hits a nail on the head, as does this post. Here's a taste:
In many ways the anti-Western pro-Communist intellectual history discussed by Hollander went mainstream in the sixties, and had some fairly perverse effects. I was struck by this comment of Hollander's:It is noteworthy that the injustices visited upon minorities barely touched the social critiques of the 1930s when discrimination was unalleviated by the federal government and unquestioned by the general public. Such historic wrongs became a matter of concern at the time when they were in the process of elimination.That is, things seem worse when they are openly discussed, when in fact open discussion is always a sign that the problems are being addressed. The real injustices and horrors are the ones you don't see, and never hear about.
Though I would also add my cynical take: there is an alarming amount of fad and fashion involved in how the mainstream intellectual left choose their projects. At the same time, there has always been a small core on the left who don't wait for a paphlet to arrive in the mail before feeling outrage at injustices they happen to be aware of.
And I would agree with this 100% if she changed the phrase "Now this is possibly true" to "Now this is disingenuous bullshit."
So what is my overarching point? Read Anne.
-Jeremy
What I'm wondering is why I have this desire to begin all my sentences with "Now."
Posted by: Anne at May 25, 2004 10:41 PM
Interesting. I hadn't really noticed that, so I don't think you do that often.
I've noticed that Newscasters start seemingly all their sentences with "Now." It's a tic they have. I guess it conveys a separation between the speaker and what the speaker is about to say, either because one is playing devil's advocate or laying out an idea for the sake of argument (you), or because the speaker wants to remind people (subconsciously) that s/he is just saying the words, not composing the content (newscaster).
I would hate to think how many words I overuse("anyway" is one of them, anyway).
Posted by: Jeremy Brown at May 26, 2004 04:34 PM
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