too many Daves

Whatever else it may be, Leon Wieseltier’s New Republic attack on Andrew Sullivan is a chore to read. Only one thing caused me to slog through: the knowledge that Wieseltier would eventually get around to indicting my favorite blogger on charges of being either “a bigot” or “moronically insensitive” toward Jewish people.

I don’t know Wieseltier’s other work, so let’s just agree that I’m a jerk for wondering how the literary editor of an established magazine can write sentences that would push Strunk and White into a despondent fistfight over who gets to use the noose first. Sentences like this: “But the scale of this impact is too inconsiderable to assure anything that Israel does an important place among the causes of jihadism.” And this: “Worst of all, the explanation that Sullivan adopts for almost everything that he does not like about America’s foreign policy, and America’s wars, and America’s role in the world–that it is all the result of the clandestine and cunningly organized power of a single and small ethnic group–has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.”

How perfect, then, that Wieseltier should conclude a piece so badly in need of robust editing with a jab at the “divine right of bloggers to exempt themselves from the interrogations of editors.”

(Note: I edited this post. Out of pure spite. Like all bloggers, I have a skilled professional editor sitting here next to me. He offers me money, bonbons, shiatsu. But I rebuff him. Always. I am exercising my divine right to exempt myself from his interrogations, to shield myself from his insights, to spare myself the nuisance of him paying me for my words.)