Tuesday September 02, 2003

MORNING IDIOCY. Been too busy to post; the nephew is in town to start college. He's a fine lad and has been granted permanent exemption from any cracks I might make about the Youth of Today.

I got up early and looked around the Web. Much moronism on display, but mostly of the silly, mendacious, and pathetic varieties, not the instructive sort of idiocies upon which this journal feasts.

What do I mean by instructive idiocy? Here, I just found this at The Corner: a trifle that links to a "Broken Windows" Wilson piece called "Cars and their Enemies." The Corner bit is called "Why the Left Hate Cars."

These guys seem to be serious -- at least, serious in the sense of not kidding. "Cars are about the joyous sensation of driving on beautiful country roads; critics take their joy from politics," runs one stupefying Wilson passage. Another: "Cars are about privacy; critics say privacy is bad and prefer group effort. (Of course, one rarely meets these critics in groups. They seem to be too busy rushing about being critics.)"

And so on. Say this for old BW, though: he doesn't try to pin it all on the Left. In fact, he specifically states that the allegedly antiautomotive view "is by no means one that is confined to the political Left." He does conflate all principled objection to car culture with socialism and Luddism, but at least when he says "critics" he uses the word more or less properly.

The Corner guy, on the other hand, uses it to mean the other side of the aisle in all things. By this view, if you aren't on the Right, you not only (as these guys never tire of asserting) hate America -- you hate Chevys and cheeseburgers and everything else holy and decent.

The nation faces several crises and difficult choices, and credentialed conservatives are still busy with the you-guys-are-no-fun argument. Not a good sign.