Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

 In the pages of the London Review of Books (August 27) is a thoroughly wonderful essay titled “The Sound of Cracking” by Pankaj Mishra in review of two books: “The Age of the Crisis of Man” by Mark Grief and “Moral Agents: Eight 20th Century American Writers” by Edward Mendelson.

In the essay, Mishra quotes a third author, Tony Judt (1948-2010), the European historian and brilliant essayist. Yes, if only this great thinker were with us today!

Here’s the money shot as they say in my line of work:

Though doused in Saigon in 1975, a retro 19th-century craving for universal mastery and control was rekindled in 1989 among many members of what Tony Judt called the ‘crappy generation’ – the one that ‘grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political’. Judt’s indictment extended beyond Bush, the Clintons, Blair and neocon publicists to intellectuals at the ‘traditional liberal center’ – the New Yorker, the New Republic, theWashington Post and the New York Times – who, he wrote, had turned into a ‘service class.’ Researching his book in 2003, Greif seems to have been troubled by this spectacle. Liberal intellectuals who might have been interested in his book about the crisis of man were, he writes, ‘busy preparing the justification of the US invasion of Iraq … on the basis of a renewed anthropological vision of “who we are” [in the West] against a new “they” figured as totalitarian.’ 

A chillingly great essay by Mishra. Something for those of you out there looking to be great. Check it out! http://bit.ly/1LyF0rk

Next: Running for Your Life: Endless Summer



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