I should also mention that there's actually one useful thing he's done in his political writing, and that is to ridicule some of the unexamined college-leftist pieties that I get the impression he had when he was a young sprog—particularly the seething contempt for the mass of Americans. For all the costs, there are deeply good things about the life of an American suburbanite family, and I like that he can express that.
But he's like C. S. Lewis writing about atheism and identifying it all with his own snotty adolescent anti-religiosity. Since Lileks was a cartoon liberal to begin with all he can dispute is cartoon liberalism. And the essay he wrote for this past Sept. 11, the one that turned me off reading him regularly, he showed signs of being possessed by a new seething contempt himself, the notion that millions of his countrymen are subconsciously on the other side in the War on Terror and want to see his daughter incinerated. Spend too much time dwelling on paranoid thoughts and they start to color everything you see and do.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-22 10:01 am (UTC)But he's like C. S. Lewis writing about atheism and identifying it all with his own snotty adolescent anti-religiosity. Since Lileks was a cartoon liberal to begin with all he can dispute is cartoon liberalism. And the essay he wrote for this past Sept. 11, the one that turned me off reading him regularly, he showed signs of being possessed by a new seething contempt himself, the notion that millions of his countrymen are subconsciously on the other side in the War on Terror and want to see his daughter incinerated. Spend too much time dwelling on paranoid thoughts and they start to color everything you see and do.