By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Spy Archivist Aula Minerva
We spend a lot of time wailing about the idiotic ramblings of New York Times columnists like Maureen Dowd, Soprassata Dave Brooks, Bretbug, Pamela Pill, Six-Months Tom, and Ross, the boy no one would have lunch with in Leverett House.
We owe them an apology, because there is no reason to single out these hacks for obloquy while ignoring the crap churned out by former Oregon Gov. Nick Kristof.
With democracy under attack, the republic hanging by a thread, and generations of social progress being rolled back by white supremacists and a blatantly illegitimate and corrupt Supreme Court, Gov. Kristof says today that the real problem is, wait for it,
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| Gov. Kristof has some thoughts about liberals |
Wait some more.
Better sit down with a stiff drink.
OK, it's liberal arrogance.
And it's not just liberal arrogance today. It's liberal arrogance since we don't know the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948, apparently:
It was easy for my generation of baby boomer liberals to be humble, because we had much to be humble about. Many on the left had erred on what was perhaps the most important issue of the 20th century, global totalitarianism: Too many had been soft on Soviet Communism or Chinese Maoism.
We're a boomer, too. In fact we may even be older than Gov. Kristof.
And unlike the Governor, we remember the 1960's. We remember a lot of old white guys, Democratic and Republican, lecturing us endlessly about Soviet Communism and the threat of what they called Red China.
Their solution to that threat was Vietnam.
Opposing the pointless, bloody, counterproductive, unwinnable, and essentially stupid enterprise of Vietnam was held out to us for years as a requirement for showing we were serious about opposing global totalitarianism and Soviet and Chinese expansionism.
It was all bollocks, as history shows. Over a million died in Southeast Asia to prove to Nick Kristof's satisfaction how serious liberals were about the “threat” of “global totalitarianism.”
In fact, when confronted by the real specter of Soviet Communism on the march,
serious white men so very concerned about stopping global totalitarianism did -- nothing:
By the way, not sending in the Army to resist the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was of course the right decision. But you can't blame it on liberals.
And fun fact: the anti-war critique of Vietnam was right in 1965 and every year thereafter. If you resolutely opposed the insanity of Vietnam and its spinoffs in Cambodia and Laos (brought to you by beloved serious centenarian Henry Kissinger), you were liberal. You were right. And if you want to take a victory lap, by all means do so.
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| Why weren't they fighting global totalitarianism? |
Gov. Kristof must have been too busy measuring the drapes in the Oregon State House to remember the second great battle of the 1960's: the struggle for civil rights. If you were a liberal who supported desegregating the South, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and then actually did not go ballistic when someone proposed building moderate-income housing in your lily-white suburb or busing Black children into your beautiful schools, you were right again.
Where are we so far?
Anti-war and pro-civil rights liberals were right about everything in the 1960's. Let's now focus on the Governor's attack on modern-day progressives. Guess what: it's also bollocks!
What are liberals wrong about today? You'll never guess (if you have wisely chosen not to read the last five years of the Times's pisspoor Op-Ed page):
I fear that liberals react to all this by inflating with self-righteousness. One lesson of history — and of ancient Greek playwrights like Aeschylus — is that it’s dangerous to become too full of yourself. Just ask Oedipus. (But hurry, because there are progressive calls to cancel classics.)
Yeah, liberals are too full of themselves, says this extremely humble bloviator.
Although it's hard-right extremists that are yanking books out of school libraries because they are “pornographic” (like Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Day poem delivered to an audience of millions without apparent harm), it's those insufferable progressives that want to throw Homer in the dumpster.
Quick quiz: name a liberal arts college in America today where you can't read Homer or Plato. We'll wait. At Gov. Kristof's beloved University of Oregon, you can study:
Where did Kristof get his stupid point about the liberal attack on classical literature? Click on the handy link he provided and you get an essay attacking some academic who argues that the classics can only be understand by placing them in the context of a culture that he says engaged in systematic racism and sexism.
Well, maybe that's one way to look at it. You can agree or disagree. But no one is saying you can't read Homer. He's saying that the proper way to read Homer is in the context of his culture, which is hardly a radical, liberal, or progressive idea. It's just an idea that's been around a long time.
Speaking of understanding the Greeks, it's remarkable that the same people who love to attack progressives as so woke are also the ones who love to attack the sexual practices of people like Plato and Aristotle. To them, Plato's Symposium is nothing more than a grooming party. Is it any wonder that Xantippe was so irritable? If Florida Gov. Ron “Puddin' Fingers” DeSantis can censor books about penguins with two daddies, wait until he gets his mitts on Socrates and his boys. But you don't hear Gov. Kristof talking about the arrogance of the anti-gay right.
We actually had a fine classical education, starting with Latin in seventh grade. After years of exposure to thrilling tales of Caesar, hard pressed on all sides by the Gauls, bringing up his legions by means of forced marches, we decided that the purpose of taking Latin (rather than something useful and important, like Spanish) was to brand the student as a member of a small elite who could study obscure and exotic things because they would never have to worry about making a living.
Then we got to college and read (in translation) the Greek classics. As Bertie Wooster would say, they were cracking. You should read them. They have lessons for us, but they aren't about how we should be more humble in dealing with Republican extremism. And they certainly weren't about passing off tired clichés as daring original thought.
There's more but you catch the drift: his attack on supposedly arrogant liberals is a falsified both-sides litany of tired tropes.
People say dumb s*** all the time. The New York Times Op-Ed page proves this every day, and 12 times on Sunday. That doesn't mean there's any equivalence to be drawn between occasional clangers served up by those on the left and the well-funded widely-supported Republican attack on free inquiry, thought, and history itself.
Maybe not being able to grasp this very obvious point was the reason that Nick Kristof was not chosen by the people of Oregon to serve as their Governor.
It could also be because he wasn't an Oregon resident under state law, which he thought didn't apply to the great moderate minds of the Times Editorial Pages. You can talk about Icarus all you want, but it was Nick Kristof who had to be fished out of the drink off the coast of Oregon.
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