So I was reading Eric Alterman’s blog item “Wolfowitz on the record, about a cocktail party Tina Brown threw in Washington the other night, and I kept getting the creepiest feeling. The author of What Liberal Media? had just outdone himself, proving once and for all there really is no such thing as the liberal media. Alterman did this by fawning all over Wolfowitz with the peculiar awe of an autograph hound, disguised as, “I felt bad for the guy when I saw him standing by himself.” And then he compounded my disbelief by painting a portrait of Wolfowitz as a misunderstood Worthy Wiseman.
Confused by Alterman’s longing for Wolfowitz’s approval — at one point he suggests that Wolfowitz is the “perfect choice” to negotiate a peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and writes, seemingly in jest, “Somebody please run with this idea so I can go down in history as having lit the spark that solved the Palestinian problem” — I asked my truly left-wing friend William Osborne to have a look at Alterman’s item. This was his response, which pinpoints what’s wrong as I could not:
The ironic subtext is that Alterman is very proud of himself for being invited to such an elite party. As Chomsky has noted, a principal function of elite universities is socialization in elitism itself. The status to get to these parties is what people like Alterman live for. All the talk of Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago combined with such a deluded political atmosphere gives a sense of Washington’s phony grandeur. There is something about Wolfowitz that is so tacky it would put off people even in my little hometown in New Mexico.
Our country is slowly assuming the odd character of a nouveau-riche Raj in the early stages of a hokey empire. Alterman and the politicos pose with cocktails, so enamored of themselves, and yet the backdrop is so odd: a city with unbelievably massive ghettos, no decent mass transit system, depredation and poverty everywhere outside its grand monuments to power.
The list of domestic short comings goes on and on, but never mind, we have our cloddish social Darwinist neo-cons and Doonesbury liberals delighted at being invited to the posh parties of the powerful
Conquering countries is so much more fun than building subways or creating decent high schools. One could sit in a corner at the party and see that history never changes. The march of folly will eventually collapse, rotted within.
