I thought that this brilliant piece would be archived by The American Conservative on their website (www.amconmag.com), but the editor for some reason decided not to. So anyone interested in the whole article will have to get hold of the issue of TAC for June 7.
It’s Sam Francis’s review of The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings From the 1950s Through the 1990s.
Sam is at his absolute sardonic best. He starts with the dust jacket blurb by Bill Buckley, where Bill tells us, “Never (that I know) has a single lifetime borne such literary and philosophical fruit.”
Right. According to Bill, Podhoretz’s life is one of unrivaled achievement in literature and philosophy. (Why not science while he’s at it?)
A used up gasbag like Buckley, who was never much to begin with, thought he could get away with such crazy junk. But Sam nails him. This is “a statement that places Podhoretz somewhat higher than such dimmer bulbs as Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe.” Don’t the publicist and publisher at the Free Press feel any shame in broadcasting such mindless ditherings by Buckley?
Podhoretz tells us that, “It was the neo-conservatives who decided that the time had come to drag capitalism out of the closet,” and cites two books of the late 1970s, by Irving Kristol and Michael Novak, another two neocon geniuses like himself.
Sam likewise nails this idiocy by the premier Commentary intellectual: “So much for Ludwig von Mises, Nobel Prize winners Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, and Ayn Rand, among others, not one of whom was a neoconservative and all of whom ‘dragged capitalism out of the closet’ decades before the neoconservatives had shed their pink diapers.”
Has Podhoretz never heard of these defenders of capitalism who predated the neocons by up to 50 years (the great Mises)? Is he stupid? More likely, he’s just a lying little propagandist who doesn’t care what the hell he says.
There’s a lot more in Sam Francis’s excellent demolition.
Where do pompous fools like Buckley and Podhoretz get the nerve to write garbage like this? Yet, who’s going to call them to account, except a maverick like Sam Francis? You can’t expect young neocons, ignorant as dirt and floating in the miasma of the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and Fox News, to know any better. Pity the little jerks.
