Sound like anyone we know?
There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia, most prominently in academia, the media, and politics. We don’t need Osama bin Laden’s preschool jabbering about “the weak horse” to be worried about the causes of this Western disease: thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world — the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest.
Indeed, it is even worse than that: a Paul Krugman or French barrister neither knows anything of how life is lived beyond his artificial cocoon nor of the rather different men and women whose unacknowledged work in the shadows ensures his own bounty in such a pampered landscape — toil that allows our anointed to rage at those purportedly culpable for allowing the world to function differently from an Ivy League lounge or the newsroom of the New York Times. Neither knows what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein or how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and chain such a monster.
Our Western intellectuals are sheltered orchids who are naïve about the world beyond their upscale hothouses. The Western disease of deductive fury at everything the West does provides a sort of psychological relief (without costs) for apparent guilt over privileged circumstances. It is such a strange mixture of faux-populism and aristocratic snobbery. They believe only a blessed few such as themselves have the requisite education or breeding to understand the “real” world of Western pathologies and its victims.
If we accept that our aristocratic Left mutters exactly the sort of nonsense described by a host of critics from Aristophanes to Juvenal to Tom Wolfe, then just as bizarre is the Muslim world’s reaction to capture of the murderer of more Muslims than any living Muslim in the Muslim world. On reports of Saddam’s demise the same networks that aired Western professors fretting about his rights were interviewing weeping women in Palestine, somber coffeehouses in Cairo, and pompous intellectuals in Lebanon. In lockstep concern they all bemoaned the ignominious circumstances of his capture: He was found in a hole! He was dirty! And an American medic inspected him like an infected deportee! Alas, he fired not a shot.
nationalreview.com |
