Thursday, January 13, 2005

Overdogs and Their Lackeys

We in the ULA ask no one to be starry-eyed about joining this outfit. Steve Kostecke, myself, and other ULA cultural warriors are looking for those who can step into harness alongside us as equals to help in pulling the ULA sled. (We'll nudge you back in line if you move in the wrong direction.) All that we offer is the opportunity to be part of an irresistible new literary movement.

I get the impression that those who join Overdog outfits on the Right or the Left are there to serve glamorous potentates. Interns at The Nation, Harper's, or National Review seem enthralled just to be in proximity of the likes of Katrina, Buckley, or Lewis Lapham, who pontificate from above as if they were Cyrus or Darius, waited on by underling eunuchs who've been castrated intellectually if not physically.

Will the demi-puppets wake up long enough to realize it's all a scam? Katrina vanden Heuvel is like the ancient Athenians, democratic only in theory, worrying over the abstract condition of the world from her sense of noblesse oblige while slaves stand alongside this plutocrat with feathered fans. Or, there's Roger Kimball expounding on the free market-- a concept of which his own magazine would certainly never take part!

The game was given away on election eve, when various corrupt figures on both the Left and the Right gathered at the William Buckley residence. There they were, Henry Kissinger, Tom Wolfe, Robert Silvers!, putting aside their ephemeral differences while they gloried for the evening in their mutual status as Overdogs; while the meagerly paid servants or interns outside polished their limos and maybe their shoes. Very democratic! I wasn't invited to one of those private affairs. Were you?

No comments: