Spring 2008

Like others who stage or watch debates more to be entertained than to clarify our darkening horizons, Jacob Heilbrunn’s “anatomy of an industry” of “rank-breakers” parades before us intellectuals who ““slug it out”,  “resurrect acrimony,” and drown in the  “ginned-up psychodrama that infused [their] rank-breaking,” --- all because they’d rather be judged by “the noise they make” than by “their output.” Perhaps World Affairs would rather be The New York Observer. I wouldn’t comment had not Heilbrunn pawed me so clumsily as part of his “imposing list” of people “who switched positions with no more trauma than changing clothes” and so became “mere pikers” compared to “heavyweights” who “broke the chains” of past commitments after September 11. He tells us that “Jim Sleeper, a former fellow traveler of the neoconservative movement who bashed away at … political correctness, has now reinvented himself as a man of the left, bashing away in The Nation at moderates such as… Sam Tanenhaus for allegedly being neocons.” We do not learn, despite a feint at “full disclosure,” that Heilbrunn, one of Tanenhaus’ regular and grateful reviewers, is leaping to defend his benefactor by talking about me and other writers the way editors do when they haven’t time to think but can “do lunch,” where they learn what to think. Heilbrunn missed my Talking Points Memo posts of April 1 and 3, “Obama’s Racial Wisdom vs. Holdouts Left and Right,” and “Why Obama’s Critics on the Left are Sputtering.”  He hadn’t seen my Los Angeles Times review of April 14, whose first sentence reads, “It would be too easy to read Martin Amis’ slim book on 9/11 in a day and dismiss it with a politically correct glare.” Anyone who visits [my Web site] will know that I haven’t much altered the civic-republican clothing I’ve worn in “bashing” leftists and rightists alike since the early 1970s. I commend to Heilbrunn the sections “Looking for America,” “Folly on the Left,” and “Conservative Contradictions.” Heilbrunn needs to break ranks with the binary,  left. vs. right, “Slam! Bang! Poof! Oomph!” crowd he’s joined as he struggles to find post-neocon balance.

Posted by Jim Sleeper | April 12, 2008 10:14:34 AM EDT

Great Verbiage. But like most left leaning apologists....supposed facts are masked in minusia...of references .....the left has been on the wrong side of history throughout the 20th and now the 21st century....the stakes are just as large..if not larger....

Posted by Seth Brown | April 20, 2008 12:47:40 PM EDT

One comes away from reading this article with a mental picture of its players as rouged and perfumed creatures, in their panties, squealing at each other on a bed, pummeling each other with feather pillows.

Posted by werbaz | April 20, 2008 1:10:10 PM EDT

The biggest problem is audience. There are three: 1. You figure out who might really listen and you write for them, or 2. you figure out who would be most pissed off by what you say and you write for them. The sad part is only the second crowd tends to wield the numbers to break down the doors to 3. the ones that really matter, the educated masses, those who will only listen if they have an interest. Those are the king makers, they are jaded crowd in the trenches with all those medicated students, or in airline seats every Monday morning, or on The Metro every morning and evening. So it seems beneath every bad boy intellectual is only just another hopeful narcissistic American Idol, in search of fame on PoMo Real TV.

Posted by James D. Carmine | April 20, 2008 2:36:11 PM EDT

The focus on so-called rank breaking is original and the historical run-down is clear and enlightening. But it's when Heilbrunn veers off the historical into moralistic prophesy about Hitchens and the rest, [whose "impetuous support for the Iraq War require an unanticipated soul-searching on their part, an accounting for the positions they have taken and the rewards these positions have brought] that he wounds his piece fatally. This facile cry of "history will absolve me" is a transparent cover-up, since it could easily be reversed against Heilbrunn himself, who has just draged these writers' need to be on the right side of history through the mud.

Posted by Roque Nuevo | April 21, 2008 1:27:00 AM EDT

Rank Breakers: The Anatomy of an Industry, by Jacob Heilbrunn, lists, lauds, laughs at, and unfortunately, licenses, NYC intellectuals, who are, like free world humans everywhere, daily bombarded with news of atrocities that demand changes in our actions, and in our liberal or conservative writings, if not in our innate political convictions. Just two widely reported horrors, set out below, suffice to illustrate the silly navel contemplation fixation, of the foremost left/right NYC intellectuals lauded in this article. It is the bounden duty of free humans apprised of actual atrocities to millions of humans, to take up arms, to stop those horrors. One can envision cases, where intellectuals are too disabled to walk, too weak to lift a rifle, or perhaps, just too NYC comfortable, or too afraid, or inherently noncommittal, to actually report for active duty, when duty calls. Free humans look to those so afflicted, to lift their pens, or submit to television facelifts, and, at least, speak plainly about the actions of regimes, existing today, approved too long by the left, and allowed to exist too long, by the right, that remind one of Hitler, Stalin, et al, in the bad old days cataloged by Mr. Heilbrunn. It is now, as we breath, that dozens of benighted dictators, sheiks and kings, conduct genocide, enslave billions of humans, and in general fail to meet the minimum standards of humanity, or sapience. Failing our bounden duty, we enable the monsters that proliferated, all our lives, in liberal paradises approved by the left, and not quite expurgated by the right. We act, or we take their victim’s blood onto our hands, in exchange for the ink, the air time, and our souls, that we sell, or barter for celebrity. The Burma junta holds their peoples hostage. The generals demand that we give them cash aid, to distribute, while the world ignores their swelling Swiss bank accounts, or they will put another few hundred thousand Karen, and others of Burma’s less loved population to death, by, thirst, starvation, exposure, disease, or the predicted oncoming cyclone. Pax American Coalition has hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, even France has their toughest soldiers deployed in Afghanistan, freeing millions of enslaved souls. Where are NYC intellectuals? Speak up, and demand that the free world’s magnificent dark angel warriors, the operators of our anti-terror special forces, act covertly, now, as thousands die daily, to exterminate the half dozen crazy old generals who have Burma’s elected leader under house arrest. Give up those half dozen junta lives, so that Burma’s elected leader can bring any of her peoples who survive this deliberate, genocidal, mass murder, into the free world’s family of nations. Get you’re your intellectual preciousness, and remember that SAS, Delta, Seal Team XX, were created, and frankly, their operators live, for those occasions when statesmen must order dark deeds, by freedom’s soldiers, for the angels. Speak plainly, and effectively, thinkers, or shut up, and continue to live richly, in your deserved ignominy. A father in Basra stomped his daughter to death, assisted by his sons, and praised the Islamist judges who promptly cleared him of misconduct. He described his regime’s appointed religious judges, as men devoted to God, men like himself, fathers, who understand honor, and God’s will. The father stated in general, that his daughter liked a UK soldier, she was seen speaking to him, and was killed in an honorable way, in obedience to the God of Islam. That, he said, absolutely proves that as long as one Muslim who knows God’s will, and practices it is alive, Islam will be ruled by God’s will, overseen by religious judges, and executed by honorable men, with God’s will as their only law. Left and right scribblers of NYC, and talking heads, adjust your free speech, bought and paid for with our soldier’s blood, and their mother’s tears. Speak plainly about this honorable Islamist father’s firmly held convictions, and the solution demanded of all free humans, or accept your blood guilt, for the next hundred thousand incidents of enslavement, including murder, rape, or mutilation of a daughter of Islam, in London, in France, in Detroit, or as written about in recent years, drowning, in a Washington, D.C. swimming pool, perhaps on embassy row. Demand understanding, and acceptance of the fervent words of an extremist honorable father. Insist upon timely implementation of free world solutions appropriate to his deeply held religious convictions, all over the earth. Show intellectual courage, from your locked and guarded New York enclaves, at least equal to the courage that a Basra father and his sons displayed as they stomped a female child to death, in accordance with God’s will. Demand, now, that the free world educate, or exterminate, every last regime, and every last committed Islamist man on our planet, that purports to know the will of God, and insists on freedom, within their tribe’s or regime’s religious laws, to enslave, and murder as they please, the women and children of the Islamofascist’s worlds. Outlaw, with your words, your votes, and your force of personality, those benighted regimes that enslave billions of peoples, in leftist, communist, and Islamist horror unmitigated by intellectual’s free speech, or actions. If we fail to plainly speak of this barbarity, and the efficacious solutions demanded of the free world, we become enablers, and supporters of each crime against humanity. Our failures, of will, of courage, or of understanding, allow extremist regimes, and their cadres, to continue, as they have for thousands of years, to mutilate, enslave, gang rape, and murder their daughters, sisters, and mothers for daring to question their tribal traditions, or the authority of their male relatives. Speak up for the angels intellectuals, or shut up, and go rest on your laurels.

Posted by Franklin D. Lomax | May 22, 2008 12:20:17 PM EDT

What a sour and apparently self-loathing essay. I mean, if these guys, who all spend their time doing exactly what Heilbrunn spends his time doing (what he's doing, in fact, in this very piece), are such moral and intellectual gnomes, then what is he? Have some self-respect, man. Just because the Hitch or Sully or the Buruminator aren't quite the moral and intellectual equals of Lionel Trilling or Whittaker Chambers (although, let it be noted, Buruma has written a number of good books, and Chambers wrote only one) doesn't mean that they deserve such contempt.

Posted by Daniel Oppenheimer | May 23, 2008 6:16:19 PM EDT