This is quite amusing, and certainly captures the pompous fraud in all his ridiculousness (though wastes too much time on his physical appearance); a taste:
After his years at Harvard, a school useful above all for making connections, Leon had acquired a job at the New Republic, a liberal weekly that had not long before been bought by a man named Martin Peretz, a wealthy, part-time instructor at Harvard. During his early days on the magazine, Leon published a longish piece there on, of all things, nuclear war. Nothing very distinguished about it, either, the thought of taking him seriously on such a large subject was in fact slightly gigglesome, but it suggested to me that young Leon, with all the possibilities open to him, the good student with superior tuchus-lecking skills, was considering that of becoming our next Henry Kissinger. I subsequently learned he was aiming higher.
Before long Leon was given control over the back of the book, the literary and cultural sections of the New Republic. His byline would appear mostly over something like a column, not every week but fairly often, on the last page of the magazine. These columns increasingly became moral diatribes. Whatever the subject, one thing they all had in common was that he, Leon Wieseltier, not only had a clearer vision of the world and what was important in it than anyone he was writing about, but also a deeper moral imagination. Along the way, he had developed a style which entailed short-sentences that suggested the aphorism. This style worked nicely to elevate himself while dismissing anyone who happened to disagree as a moral idiot, scum really, who if he understood how wretched he was would go instanter into the intellectual equivalent of a witness protection program.
In this new style, on his single page containing 800 or so words, Leon took on the role of moral conscience of the intellectuals, the Jews, the nation at large. His self-emplacement as spokesmen for the Jews especially caused me to wince and shiver. Still a fairly young man, Leon Wieseltier was setting up shop as one of the leading moralists of our day, and with absolutely no legitimate claims to it that I could see, and a few, from personal experience, that I knew disqualified him....
In 1995 an article appeared in Vanity Fair written by a man named Lloyd Grove, commenting on Leon’s social-climbing skills, his unbreakable connection with Martin Peretz and the power it gave him at the New Republic, his all-but-self-confessed cheating on his first wife (the Pakistani daughter of a man described in the article as a “merchant prince”). The article also remarked on how these various activities apparently got in the way of Leon, despite his rather extravagant intellectual pretensions, getting any serious intellectual work done: no books, few articles beyond those back-page moral diatribes. He was, he told Grove, contemplating a book on sighing, a fine Leon touch, in the realm of intellectual pretension. The unspoken charge was laziness....
(Thanks to Michael Sevel for the pointer.)
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