[Peace-discuss] The pompous, verbose, superior fashion of a feckless left-wing snob

[C. G. Estabrook]

[On the question of what US policy in Iraq should be, much has been made
recently of a column by the liberal Kurt Andersen, here the object of the
wonderful Matt Taibbi's condign scorn. Andersen seems to have constructed
or borrowed what has been called an eggcorn -- "a plausible but
historically incorrect re-analysis of a familiar word or phrase" -- by
confounding "Hobson's choice" with Thomas Hobbes (or maybe Calvin's
friend). --CGE]

	WWW.NYPRESS.COM | FEBRUARY 23, 2005
	MATT TAIBBI: I SPY A SELLOUT
	Kurt Andersen, you're old and you suck.

"Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq; either we hope for the
vindication of Bush's risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in
de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi
civilians... I don't mean to suggest, in the right-wing, proto-fascist
rhetorical fashion, that every good American is obliged to support all
American wars. But at this moment in this war, that binary choice of who
you want to win is inescapable and needs to be faced squarely -- just as
being pro-war obliges one to admit that thousands of innocent Iraqis have
been killed or maimed or orphaned." --Kurt Andersen, New York magazine

Man, is it easy to make money in this writing business in New York City.
You youngsters out there who are still waiting to get published, still
trawling for internships jobs, you may not see it yet. But take a good
look at Kurt Andersen at New York if you want to see how it all works out
at the end of the rainbow.

Once upon a time, when he was writing for the legendary Spy magazine, Kurt
Andersen was not a mouse, but a man. After four years of working (along
with Graydon Carter) at Time magazine, Andersen left in 1986 to found the
famous send-up of Time's idiot news-mag culture. In hindsight, Spy was not
the viciously dead-on parody of media careerism that it seemed to be, but
it was funny as hell during a very unfunny time.

It was a publication Jefferson would have been proud of -- a high-tech
pain in the ass that savaged everything that entered into its field of
view, proving over and over that we were all better off thinking for
ourselves than listening to the pompous mannequin-frauds American society
presented to us as sages and cultural authorities.

For reasons that ought to strike everyone (and especially Andersen and
Graydon Carter) as quite sinister, Spy never made anybody any real money.
In a publishing landscape where dumbness itself (Cargo, Self) sells like
hotcakes, this obviously brilliant magazine with a desperately devoted
readership died something like a half-dozen deaths -- finally expiring, I
think, in the spindly altruistic arms of the owners of Psychology Today.

Andersen was long gone by then, having joined Carter on a 20-year journey
in which they would both be endlessly hailed as geniuses and innovators by
hordes of media sycophants and offered gobs of money to do either nothing
at all (splitting a million bucks to cowrite Spy: The Funny Years) or to
just add countercultural élan to the staid, unthreatening publications
(New York, Vanity Fair) that were placed in their rabbity custody.

Carter's career path showed that the best way to secure a golden old age
of attending parties and carrying the skirts for celebrities is to behead
a few in your youth.

What Andersen proves is that once you've put in a few years of writing
very well, with dignity and iconoclastic fervor, you can then mail it in
for the rest of your life. You can melt into the easy life and undead
thinking of a timorous upper-class weasel, and you can dress it up as
"realism" because you were somebody once.

Andersen's Feb. 21 Iraq piece in New York, "When Good News Feels Bad," is
the most shameful, vicious piece of horseshit I have seen anybody write
about this terrible war. It is sickening not on the level of writing or
rhetoric, but on the level of human behavior.

On the surface, Andersen's piece is a cheeky piece of political
self-denunciation, a mock show-trial confession. He confesses to being one
of those many New Yorkers who considers himself smarter than everybody
else and tends to disagree with the Bush administration "politically,
temperamentally, and ontologically most of the time." But, he says, smart
New York people like him -- us -- have to get real and face the ugly
reality of our emotional struggle over Iraq. He then goes on to indict all
of us for secretly applauding any bad news that comes from Iraq, and for
choosing to ignore in grumbling fashion the "surprisingly smooth and
inarguably inspiring" spectacle of the Iraqi elections. If we face this
reality, he says, we are then forced to see that "the only way out is to
root for Bush's victory."

"Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq." This is horseshit on
its face. Even the original Hobbesian choice was horseshit, especially in
the eyes of the stereotypical New York liberal Andersen is addressing. We
no more have to choose between chaos and authoritarianism than we do
between rooting for Bush and rooting for the insurgents. There is a vast
array of other outcomes and developments to root for.

We could root for Bush to admit he fucked up and appeal to the world for
help in stabilizing Iraq. We could root for a similar admission and a
similar appeal to the U.N., only coupled with an immediate American
withdrawal. We could root for America to come out firmly against the
Israeli occupation of Palestine, which would change the equation in Iraq.
We could root for such things as the turning over of Iraqi oil contracts
to the United Nations and an end to war profiteering -- which, again,
would change the equation in the war.

And that's just the beginning. It does not come down to rooting either for
Bush or for the insurgents. Andersen thinks he can make this argument
because he thinks he knows that in our hearts, many of us are rooting for
the insurgents -- and he is trying to tell us that renouncing this
instinct automatically translates into unqualified support for Bush. But
that is wrong, and totally dishonest.

"Either we hope for the vindication of Bush's risky, very possibly
reckless policy..." Note the use of the qualifying, "risky, very possibly
reckless," here -- obscuring the stark lie of the word "vindication." To
Andersen's audience, nothing can possibly vindicate Bush's Iraq policy.
Along with millions of other people, I opposed the war before it began,
and we opposed it not because we thought we might lose or fail in Iraq,
but because invading Iraq was wrong. It was wrong because they were lying
about why we were invading; it was wrong because the whole notion of
preemptive invasion is immoral and dangerous; it was wrong for a dozen
other plainly irrefutable reasons that will not change if Iraq is
magically transformed into Switzerland by next year.

"I don't mean to suggest, in the right-wing, proto-fascist rhetorical
fashion, that every good American is obliged to support all American
wars." No. You suggest it in the pompous, verbose, superior fashion of a
feckless left-wing snob.

"But at this moment in this war, that binary choice of who you want to win
is inescapable." Translation: you're either with us or against us, either
for us, or for the terrorists. Where have I heard that before?

Oh, that's right. I've heard it everywhere. Just never from that funny guy
who used to run Spy.

Volume 18, Issue 8

© 2005 New York Press