By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor
The front page of the December 18 New York Times announced the death of Norman Podhoretz at the age of 95.
The reaction was immediate, with almost all Times readers asking: “Who?”
Followed by “who cares?”
Both good questions. By coincidence, both can be answered simply: “no one.”
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| Norman Podhoretz was known for being outspoken |
While it’s true that he died in well-deserved obscurity, the terrible ideas, to use the term generously, that he articulated and tried to legitimate animate too much of today’s current discourse, especially among his beloved extremist Republicans, and for that reason alone cannot be dismissed so cavalierly.
The Times offered a few of Podhoretz’s intellectual gems in their obit:
One of his last publications was bluntly titled “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” (2007). It was a book, according to a Times review, that “furiously hurls accusations of cowardice, anti-Americanism and sheer venality at any and all opponents of the Bush doctrine.”
The Bush doctrine, you may recall in spite of the efforts of Podhoretz’s ideological (and biological) children to memory hole it, was that it was A-OK to invade a foreign country which had nothing to do with 9/11 if it was a dictatorship and the population were Muslim.
That’s the doctrine. There’s no more to it than that. By which we mean there’s nothing more intellectually to it, but there’s plenty more death, agony, suffering, torture, lying, and perversion of all American values to it, none of which bothered ol’ Norm.
The idea that over a billion Muslims, by virtue of their great ethical monotheistic religion, are somehow a monolithic threat to civilization (whatever that is) finds near unanimous support in today’s Republican Party, whose Mad King as recently as this week banned immigration (including by adoption) from mostly Moslem countries.
Another of Podhoretz’s spiritual children, a schondeh named Randy Fine, a Republican Congressman from the great state of Florida, recently said that mainstream Muslims should be “destroyed” and U.S. citizen and Muslim Ilhan Omar should be deported. Norman would be so proud.
He also was a fervent supporter of the disastrous Vietnam War (until he realized in 1971 that the game was up) and an even more fervent opponent of those smarter and less bent than he, who pointed out correctly that it was a pointless effusion of blood and treasure that did nothing to make the world a better or safer place.
And most of all he was a wild if hypocritical Likudnik, blasting Labor-led Israeli governments who dared to consider peace with the millions of Palestinians living among them and under occupation. When Israel was governed by rejectionist Likudnik governments Norman turned his wrath on American Jews who dared to criticize Israeli government policies. No foolish consistency for great minds like his!
Today he’d surely be pleased at the Mad King’s addled endorsement of the Israeli Government’s illegal and autocratic rule over every Palestinian in the Occupied Territories and its depraved indifference to the lives and fates of Palestinian civilians.
His U.S. political judgments were equally acute:
“I hereby declare,” he said, hinting that he was deliberately needling some conservative intellectuals, “that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.”
As the statement has no intellectual content, it is impossible to refute. It is worth pointing out though that he has precisely outlined the governing philosophy of today’s Republican Party: better an ignorant idiot in the Oval Office than a Democrat who might make things better for people in America and around the world.
We’ll get to the needling bit later.
He first attained fame, or at least notoriety, as a supposed literary critic. Here are two of his early judgments:
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| His anti-feminist views were well-received |
He won notches on his critic’s belt by going after big reputations, disparaging Saul Bellow’s early novel “The Adventures of Augie March” in a 1953 review and writing off the Beats as “young men who can’t think straight and so hate anyone who can.”
That would be wrong and wrong. But Norman soon learned that you could go far by being angry and wrong, as long as what you wrote pleased the right powerful people, especially rich reactionary Jews. Like the board of the then-respectable American Jewish Committee, which published (and for all we know still publishes) a little read magazine called Commentary.
Norman became its editor in 1960 and over the years managed to run it into the ground. To celebrate his success, he published his first memoir in 1968, Making It. In between boasting of his college grades, he dropped a bunch of names and settled some of his many scores.
The reviews were, let’s just say, Nuzzi-esque:
Podhoretz, who has been where much of the action is for more than a decade, and has been editor of one of the country’s most serious journals of opinion for nearly that long, tells us very little about anything that has happened in his life except as it affects his self-esteem or concerns his quest for class, status, and power....But Making It may also be just what its author says it is: a bid for literary distinction, fame, and money all in one package. If it succeeds, we may surely hope that successive volumes will permit us to follow the career of this remarkable, still young man. And they may be more mellow; sometimes, as we age, memory softens our perceptions of reality. In Podhoretz Returns and Son of Podhoretz, the monster may turn out to have a heart of gold.
Spoiler alert: nope.
In addition to his terrible ideas, he is survived by his one contribution to the art of rhetoric. Until he was turned loose in the marketplace of ideas, thinkers and writers used public fora to argue for their views, in the hope that listeners or readers would be persuaded by the cogency of the arguments.
Podhoretz’s unique contribution was to spout forth geysers of dumb s***, not to persuade, but to anger those he didn’t like (usually “liberals”). The point was not to convince but to outrage.
Making a jackass of yourself in public by churning out drivel was once thought pointless, if not self-destructive. Now it is an accepted and even respected mode of discourse, used to justify broadcasting ever stupid and more hateful crap. Outraging smarter, better people with your horrible, usually bigoted, ideas has become the principal, if not sole, offering of self-described “conservative intellectuals” (kind of like a married bachelor or a Dutch treat).
In fact getting savaged for stupid insulting ravings has become a point of great pride to today’s reactionary provocateurs. If you don’t believe us, ask Norman Podhoretz’s spiritual grandchild, Kevin Dowd.
So with Podhoretz’s long-overdue demise, we come to the end of a generation of loud boorish and wrong neoconservative gasbags who for reasons still unknown (although likely arising out of their ability to please rich powerful reactionaries who underwrote their “institutions” and “intellectual journals”) were accorded a level of respect their work did not merit. Irving Kristol, Bill Buckley, Pat “I’ll just take the bottle” Moynihan, Midge Decter, Diana Trilling, Hilton Kramer – the good news is that they all now sleep the sleep of the eternally remaindered.
The bad news is that their hateful ignorant spiteful bigoted “thinking” lives on in today’s Republican Party and its apologists
Merry Christmas.
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