You, Too, Can Prove Your Moral Superiority to Bill O'Reilly

Having failed to convince Bill O'Reilly to spend Spring Break vaccinating coeds in Darfur, Nicholas Kristof does the next best thing, which is to offer a Heart of Darkness tour package to some lucky undergrad, who will presumably learn how to tether his moral outrage to a Times expense account.

Graham Greene is dead; long live Graham Greene. As I imagine it, Kristof would be a lapsed Catholic just one tragedy away from redepmtive re-rosary-ification; the super-duper-lucky college student would be a beautiful woman who is more than she appears; their affair would be at once torpid and langourous; the setting would be the knife-point fulcrum between decadence and decay; a priest would have the final word, and it would not be kind to anyone.

Lordy, what nonsense! Every few years, it seems, some Madeleine Albright character discovers a previously unknown Jewish ancestor and makes a ritual trip to Auschwitz. May we call a thing what it is? The sole purpose of these monstrous photo-ops is to wrap a tissue-thin connection to past atrocity around oneself in order to gain immunity from your political opponents moral condemnation. This is what I like to call the "Charlotte York Rule," after the Sex in the City character. Charolotte is in bed with her lover, who says he can't marry her because she isn't Jewish; he promised his mother. She presses him. He says that tradition was very important to his mother; after all, she had relatives who died in the Holocaust. She screws up her face: "Well, now I can't say anything, because you brought up . . . the Holocaust." Kristof's trip is the moral equivalent of these.

Whatever unlucky prospective journalist stuck on the Grand Tour with Nick K. is sure to get a hearty heap-o-horror. Meanwhile, I'm uncertain as to what Kristof is actually advocating for when he yammers on about how the West has forgotten or ignored Darfur, child prostitution, conflict diamonds, ad inf. Sometimes he says that the West--whoever that is at the moment--ought to send troops. To do what? He can't say, and neither, dear readers, can I.

I urge you to read the whole letter linked at the Times page. Its creepy, peculiarly flippant tone--"I'm looking for a masochist" or "And no purchases of Cambodian sex slaves this time"--is indicative of something awful, though I'm not as yet certain precisely what.