"A Pinter with blood on his hands," is how Andrew Sullivan describes Regis Debray, the author of the pompous and singularly unpersuasive "French Lesson" that appeared in yesterday's New York Times. ("'Old Europe'... now knows that the planet is too complex, too definitively plural to suffer insertion into a monotheistic binary logic..." There's a cheap Insertion Joke in there somewhere, isn't there?)
Lileks's fisking of the op-ed has been copiously-linked. But I just want to quote the part that made me laugh out loud:
Debray:Posted by Dr. Frank at February 24, 2003 11:16 AM | TrackBack
Whence this paradox: the new world of President Bush, postmodern in its technology, seems premodern in its values.Lileks:
Somewhere in a Republican Guard bunker, the hard men confess: they have heard rumors that the US will use postmodern weapons! Missiles that dissolve context! High-powered electronic beams that underscore the relationship between power and culture! Rockets that can destroy the legitimacy of the authorial voice within a two-mile radius!