Spinal Tap

Apologies for the paucity of blogging over the weekend. I actually had my head buried in another blog project planning session. I don't recommend that for anyone, btw.

Just a quick note for now, but I think the grand war of the internets has reached a new level today.

Why? Martin Peretz has joined the ranks!

Someone get me some popcorn, this is gonna be fun. Here's the opening rant:

Contemporary political issues are usually discussed--even in the serious media, to say nothing of the blogosphere--as if they had no history. But history is the spine of the present and also of my understanding of the present. Not simply because everything has a past. But also because history tells us about the proclivities of certain cultures and of their limits, too. History teaches us to beware of millenarians and utopians, of strongmen, of the idea of classlessness and class encrustations both, of greed, of otherworldliness, of technological solutions. But, ever since Montesquieu read the character of peoples through the climates in which they lived, we know also that there is a scientific basis to human similarity and to human difference. In any event, my reading of history is part of the spine of my thinking and of my writing. It is not only a tocsin. It is a connective.

One cannot grasp the meaning of the mass murders in Iraq without knowing something about the history of Mesapotamia. One cannot grasp French behavior in international affairs (and in internal social conflict, too) without seeing France as it has seen itself, the envoy of civilization to everyone in its arc. One cannot grasp the insistent religiosity of America without grasping that the colonies were religious commonwealths. And so on and on. History may be fragmented. But it is also whole.

Contemporary journalism is afflicted by sheer amnesia. It is has no grasp of grand history. That is axiomatic. Journalists don't even pretend to know history. They also don't know the sheer facts of yesterday, and this they do purport to know. Which means they interview fools and knaves as if they were wise and good. Every time I see Al Sharpton on television, I wonder why this great and phantasmagorical liar is being put forward as a witness to anything. Has journalism no judgement? Is this what is meant by objectivity?

Then there is the spine of my past: a man in his mid-sixties, a family man with children, a teacher at Harvard for almost four decades, formerly of the New Left (very important to understanding my spine) now of the center, at the helm of The New Republic (which I have deliberately maintained as undogmatic center-left) for 32 years. I have certain loyalties, espoused unabashedly. And, as I write, I call to mind an old Yiddish proverb: "If you betray your cause, you support the other's."

Wow ... one post in and the guy's already got a Montesquieu reference. Nice.