Marty Peretz takes out the big lumber in support of
Larry Summers. He heaps scorn on Nannerl Keohane (she of oh so recently the Presidency at Duke) and basically accuses his enemies of moral cowardice, intelllectual mediocrity, and worse. I'm thinking he won't get quite as many invitations to those soirees in Martha's Vineyard this year...
Intellectual mediocrity is the highest goal of modernism, the French Revolution, egalitarianism, and the European Union.
ReplyDeleteAll men are equal. (And women, too!)
As the American home of the world left, the academy is of course in communion. Larry Summers is a heretic, and although it's passé, they burned him at the stake anyway because they couldn't find a functioning guillotine.
Excellence and effort are the enemies of the people. Divisive.
They'd abolish the World Cup if they could get away with it without their capitals getting burned down.
How Neitzchean of you, Tom. Been reading "Harrison Bergeron," have you?
ReplyDeletePeretz's defense of Summers (which I agree with in spirit, if not entirely substance), would be far more convincing if he didn't have a propensity to see anti-Semites under every rock and behind every tree. Martin Peretz is a one-trick pony, and the trick has long since lost it's novelty, so often repeated as it is. He is utterly incapable of writing a single piece that cannot be boiled down to "I went to Harvard and I teach there, too! And you're an anti-Semite, bitch!"