I'm not very familiar with your writing. Your description of the right's sudden shift to "whining and shallow" seems rather vague. Could you explain in exactly what way?
I'm not very familiar with your writing. Your description of the right's sudden shift to "whining and shallow" seems rather vague. Could you explain in exactly what way?
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Shallow: the rise of Ann Coulter. See my recent letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review about how no conservative who makes claims about liberals ever INTERVIEWS liberals, whereas liberals who write about conservatives (like me) try to give their writing depth by interviewing conservatives all the time.
My letter:
To the Editor:
In his review of Thomas Frank's ''What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America'' (June 13), Josh Chafetz partakes of a rhetorical maneuver fit only for blackguards and illiterates.
It goes like this:
Ann Coulter is a vitriolic right-wing pundit. (Examples of Coulter's notoriety are likely to pop to the forefront of the reader's mind: averring of Muslims, ''We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity''; fantasizing about the incineration of The New York Times Building; accusing those she disagrees with of treason.)
Tom Frank is a vitriolic left-wing pundit.
Q.E.D.: Tom Frank must be like Ann Coulter.
He isn't. Frank did something Coulter never, ever would do -- something no conservative ever does: patiently, respectfully, he sat down with people he disagreed with and listened to them. That he did not prefer what they had to say -- for reasons he illuminates with a sustained, subtle and learned argument, something Coulter has never managed to do -- is a writer's prerogative. It is not, however, a reviewer's prerogative to invent a case for guilt by association.
I suppose Tom Frank is vitriolic: ''bitter, scathing, caustic,'' reads my dictionary. But he is also a responsible intellectual, careful and thoughtful, and deeply humane. Nothing in his book is unsupported by evidence and logic, disagree with it though you may -- including those ''dry statistical studies'' for which Chafetz ''searches his book in vain.'' The book groans with them. Search not in vain, Mr. Chafetz: one of them, from the Center for Rural Affairs, is cited in the first paragraph.
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As for whiny--well, I just interviewed a conservative leader in Portland who said that conservatives were "opressed" by gays. Maybe you agree, but he also said conservatives were "opressed" when liberals called them names. It is an interpretation that Thomas Jefferson, for one, would have disagreed with. When he entertained foreign visitors as president he would always pile high a stack of the most scabrous anti-Jefferson pamphlets and newspapers in the waiting room (back then his enemies called TJ the "Nigger President" and the "Atheist President") in order to demonstrate that in America, it was precisely //not// an insult to anyone's rights, even a president's, to call them names.