Don’t even bother peeking at the comments this week.
(I should have mentioned that early punk was VERY “JOOOOOOO!!!!”-y, too, so there’s that.)
And do read the whole article I excerpt — it really is a good overview of the birth of neo-con…
Refreshingly for an author writing about the right from the left, Hartman spells his subjects’ names correctly, quotes them without feeling obligated to plant an ellipsis every fifth word (Ellipses: the “suspicious-looking package” of punctuation…), and gets his facts, er, right.
Even more impressively, Hartman neglects to mention Leo Strauss a single solitary time.
The only people who envision God as “a bearded old man in the sky” are atheists who insist that’s what believers do. Likewise, during my going-on 15 years as an “out” conservative, I have only ever heard tell of this “leostrauss” creature from smirking young libertarians and scowling old paleos, for whom he is boogeyman figure of shadowy origin, the Thinker From the Black Lagoon. (“If you stand in front of a mirror and say ‘Leo Strauss’ three times, you’ll vote for Bush,” I think it goes.)
That said, Hartman
, while admirably even-handed and objective for the most part, can’t quite help himself: like a stooped old man in Chinatown, Hartman can’t go more than ten blocks (or in this case, paragraphs) without hoarking up a glob of lefty snark.
