In the New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban admits some confusion about America's favorite British Poz Power Bottom, Andy "You Can Tell by the Sibilant S" Sullivan:
What is baffling is why such an ardent disciple of Oakeshott came to sign himself up for the Bush program in the first place--a decision that Sullivan now says he finds "more than a little worrying." For, from the moment of its declaration, the "war on terror" ("this crusade," as Bush then defined it), by committing the United States to an indefinite future of hostilities against a shadowy and shape-shifting enemy, had all the hallmarks of one of Oakeshott's most deluded Rationalist projects. Yet even as Osama bin Laden morphed into Saddam Hussein, and Paul Wolfowitz unrolled his great plan for the democratization of the Middle East by force of arms, Sullivan was a raucous cheerleader for the administration.It's like asking how Torquemada, that ardent disciple of Christ, done tortured all them peoples, and killed 'em besides. Andrew Sullivan is an ardent disciple of Andrew Sullivan, and that latter Andrew Sullivan is an ardent disicple of a fungible series of interpretations that are remarkable for how closely they hew to whatever Andrew Sullivan is saying at the time. You could just as easily find in an essay in The National Review:
What is baffling is why such an ardent disciple of the President's War on Terror now identifies with a relativist like Oakeshott.Which is perhaps to say that reading Andrew Sullivan requires a very particular modality.
And this brings me to a point about politics. If the politics that a person advocates represent not only a hypothetical net gain for himself, but a universal gain; if, in other words, no harm or detriment is evident to any of his own interests; then you can be certain that his politics are at their very base total bullshit.
7 comments:
i've always felt that that net gain concept applies to claims to morality.
Where is YF when you need him?
Why make fun of bottoms and lisps? That shit is kind of counterproductive. It's like color consciousness at Morehouse College.
M_A: It's a line/joke from Angels in America. Louis' boyfriend makes fun of him for the fact that he calls himself Lou in front of his family, and says he does it to hide the "Sibilant S."
Fuck-all. The pop culture always trips me up.
Enjoy.
Apropos of nothing, my all-time fave scene from Angels In America...
Roy Cohn: "AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don't tell you that."
Henry: "No?"
Roy Cohn: "No. Like all labels they tell you one thing, and one thing only: Where does an individual so identified fit into the food chain, the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will come to the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, a homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men, but really this is wrong. A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through the city council. A homosexual is somebody who knows nobody and who nobody knows. Who has zero clout."
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