Thursday, March 01, 2007

Arthur Schlesinger is Dead

The heaven's do quake.

Ah but Artie had some class now didn't he?
Authored several seminal works of history, founded the Americans for Democratic Action, served President Kennedy as an advisor and acted all his live as a lonely prophet for the coming age of liberalism.
If he had a fault it was in his plaintive insistence that a second new age of reform and renewal was right around the corner.
He spoke much of a pendulum effect in politics that only seemed to swing ever rightward in my lifetime. If the man was ever out of step with his times, it is only because we have left the age of rationality behind us and entered into a new era of synthetic facts and public propaganda. truly how can a historian ever compete with the vices of an entire epoch?
Ah but forgive Artie his little faults, he was among the first of America's serious post-war "celebrity intellectuals" (along with perhaps, William F. Buckley) and after all anyone who earned the hatred and contempt of the aforementioned Buckley along with Allen Drury, Gore Vidal and Dalton Trumbo had to have done something right.

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