Professor

It's time for another round of "What Are You Talking About, Andrew Sullivan?":

One of the least remarked-upon facets of recent years has been the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the academic left. While they control many humanities departments, and have filled the minds of many young people with idiocies it will take them years to shuck off, they have almost no substantive contribution to make to American society. Many enclaves of the academic left have actively longed for the defeat of the U.S. in Iraq; and are ambivalent between the West and its Islamist enemies. I think particularly of the gay academic left, so busy tying themselves into "queer studies" knots that they were utterly absent in the battles for marriage equality and military service. (And when they were not absent, they were busy criticizing advocates for gay equality for being "assimilationist.")

Given the knowledge that Candy Andy writes for Time, which is about one step removed from Highlights, I should be less surprised by the utter infelicity of his prose, but really, Andy . . .

Years don't have facets, and even presuming that they did, and further that one of the facets of said jewel-like year was "the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the academic left," it would hardly be one of the least remarked-upon, owing in large part to the logghoreac outgushing of Horowitzian inadequacies projected by David Horowitz Himself on just about everyone to the "left" of Franco.

Otherwise it's standard, boilerplate recitation of the old undergraduates-as-empty-vessels canard, in which the poor osmotic retards are filled with "idiocies" that they have neither choice in accepting nor capacity to reject after any short passage of time. The enclaves of leftism long for US defeat, since they remain ambivalent about (which Andy repalces, inexplicably, with "between") the relative superiority of the West and Islam, or the Islamic enemies, or SOMEONE, goddamnit, apparently blithely unconcerned that radical monotheism of any stripe is no great friend of the cultural attitudes of contemporary critical theory. Criticism of such-and-such, in Andy's world, is always taken as implicit condonement of whatever mirror-image so-and-so that's been designated, this week or this decade, as The Enemy. It does not require great learnedness nor incisive critical faculties to realize that complaints about Chevies don't necessarily make a fellow a Ford man. Whatever you think of the so-called academic left, you can't deny that the dramatis personae of global ills populating the current critical-studies imagination is more complex and well populated than the juvenile Manicheanism en vogue in policy-and-prattle circles these days. I don't imagine many queer studies profs, whom Andy takes down with all the ferocity of a kitten attacking a ball of yarn, operate under the illusion that some kind of global emirate is the ideal political circumstance in which the investigate the hermeneutics of queer identity in the late novels of George Eliot, or what have you.

As a parting note, Andy's classic narcissism is on gaudy display in the last sentence of that excerpt, isn't it? Other queers have questioned the immediate desirability of the two policy proposals that are dear to Candy Andy's heart, ergo they are enemies of the Cause of Equality. The irony--that half of the equality Andy mentions involves dying abroad for a vicious lie, perhaps after killing some Islamic Enemies by oneself--is apparent to us, but not to our sage columnist, who's very sure there's something wrong with the world today, and who's even surer that none of it is his fault.