I Take It All Back!

In the past, I have disparaged the value of the often dry-as-toast Claremont Review of Books. I have called it boring, pompous, obtuse, arcane, boring, windy and boring (Fletch: I'll have a bloody mary, a steak sandwich and a steak sandwich).

And that held true for many an issue (I still get it but I don't know why, somehow I'm sure my inherent laziness is at play) until the Winter issue I just received. At the very end of the publication, Mark Helprin smacked me square in the gob with a piece called The Literary Tenor of the Times. It's not avail on-line so you'll just have to trust that this is what he wrote:

One seldom encounters pure nihilism, for just as anarchists are usually very well-organized, most of what passes for nihilism is a compromise with advocacy. Present literary forms may spurn the individual, emotion, beauty, sacrifice, love and truth, but they energetically embrace the collective, coldness of feeling, ugliness, self-assertion, contempt and disbelief.

And why? Simply because the acolytes of modernism are terribly and justly afraid. They fear if they do not display their cynicism they will be taken for fools. They fear that if they commit to and uphold something outside the puppet channels of orthodoxy they will be mocked, that if they are open they will be attacked, that if they appreciate that which is simple and good they will have overlooked its occult corruptions, that if they stand they will be struck down, that if they love they will lose, and they if they live they will die.

As surely they will. And others of their fears are legitimate as well, so they withdraw from engagement and risk into what they believe is the safety of cynicism and mockery. The sum of their engagement is to show that they are disengaged, and they have built an elaborate edifice, which now casts a shadow over every facet of civilization, for the purpose of representing their cowardice as wisdom. Mainly to protect themselves, they write coldly, cruelly and as if nothing matters.

Now he was talking about writers, but it rings brightly as a perfect description of the modern urban socialist as well.

You've almost redeemed yourself CROB, keep it up.