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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