Posted by Dan Ewert : 7/16/2002 10:53:00 PM (Archive Link)
Check out the following article on TheNation.com. Rarely I have a read anything that packs so much American self-loathing, revisionist history, and left-wing thinking in so short a space. The author, Edward Hoagland, apparently means the point of the article to be thus, “Simple hedonism and materialism was not the point of crossing the ocean. Our revolution was better than that. It was to paint the world anew.” Those are the last two sentences and TheNation’s main page uses them as the summary. The actual article, though, does nothing to get to them. Instead, it’s filled with invective towards America concerning: capitalism, greed, racism, war-mongering, racist war-mongering, oppressive policies towards the third world, shallowness, environmental abuse, religious intolerance, cultural snobbishness, and a few other things I’m not quite sure how to word. It’s all in there in a few short paragraphs. Its breadth of whining is really quite impressive given the space. My problem with it is that Hoagland concerns himself so much with diverse complaints that he doesn’t bother backing anything up. He just throws it out and expects the choir to eat it up. My real irritation, though, is that he never bothers getting to the stated point. He puts forth a great deal of negativity but never clearly puts that in relation to his thesis. Then he doesn’t positively support the thesis. Very well… our revolution was better than hedonism and materialism and its purpose was to paint the world anew. So give me some detail on that. What were the goals? How have we fulfilled them? Frankly, given the rest of the piece, I don’t know why he considers America’s existence to be of any value. The article is absurd in its points, ugly in its lack of evidence and development, and sinful in its overall ignorance of the thesis. Absurdity I can stand. The latter two problems, though, are just bad writing.