“BONG-POSTER KOANS”….Via Atrios, I’ve finally found someone else who had the same reaction as me to Michael Ignatieff’s recent essay in the the New York Times Magazine about why he got Iraq wrong. Here’s David Rees over at HuffPo:
I’m just making my way out of the debilitating Level-Five Mind Fog that came from reading the thing….The first nine-tenths of Ignatieff’s essay, far from being an honest self-examination, is a collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans. It hums with the comforting murmur of lobotomy.
Everybody else has focused on the odd fact that Ignatieff seems to be claiming that his mistake on Iraq was due to his overreliance on ivory tower academia, which is indeed a peculiar assertion since most academics opposed the war. But what I noticed when I read his essay was that it seemed to be a jumble of unrelated paragraphs tossed together with no meaningful connecting thread at all. That didn’t really seem worth blogging about, though, so I didn’t. But if I had come up with “collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans” as a description instead, maybe I would have.
