June 25th, 2012
The highest compliment I can pay this Maggie Gallagher essay on David Blankenhorn is that it, in addition to everything else, it serves as a devastating argument against Twitter: Slower reaction, lots of words, and infinitely more thoughtful.
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Thoroughly agree.
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Certainly it’s fed on some self-assurance that we’re all supporting cast in a frame-by-frame remake of the 1950s-60s civil rights movie. The feeling of, “Want to get on the right side before it’s too late” is a real factor.
I tend to doubt that upheavals/fads can ever provide a faithful replay of any earlier one, or that history has a “side”–w/ that disclaimer finished: what if it yields relatively less triumph than decay, 20 or 50 or more years on? Personally I think of the HUAC era as unfairly caricatured, and of the ’03 Iraq War as a bipartisan kludge at worst, but is it impossible for the equal-sign-symbol-on-your-Facebook maniacs to be viewed as stock villains a la Joseph McCarthy or Richard Perle come 2050? Booyah, thought experiment
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[…] In Praise of Maggie Gallagher […]
Fake Herzog June 25, 2012 at 6:01 pm
Can I just note that Public Discourse is a website that cranks our an essay like that just about every day!!! In other words, the internet has a forum for some of the most thoughtful, important, political/cultural thinkers to write intelligent, engaging, longform essays on issues of the day — it should be one of your first stops on the information superhighway during your ‘morning commute’.
I wonder how they keep that website up and running — is the Witherspoon Institute flush with cash?