This is appropriately scathing, and also amusingly written. An excerpt:
I would not think that I would still have the capacity to be offended, after all these years of being desensitized, but Chris Lehmann has proven me wrong. Lehmann wrote something of such special cruelty that today I am moved to write in anger.
I was initially surprised that this piece had not kicked up a lot of outrage, but then I remembered that it was published in The New Republic and so no one has actually seen it. TNR, a legacy magazine if ever one deserved the name, has stumbled around like Mr. Magoo for two decades, trying to recapture past glories like shaming “welfare mothers” by re-strategizing and re-conceptualizing and re-branding and bringing in one talentless asshole after another to pilot the listless ship. TNR long ago achieved that status of being a publication that exists for no other reason than to keep Managing Editors and Senior Content Directors puttering along, a money pit from which new leadership can extract some expense-account lunches before passing it along to the next rube with a desire to be taken seriously by the worst people alive. At least there’s a kind of value in that, I guess; certainly no one is reading it. The last piece in The New Republic that mattered was, uh. Hmmm. Gawker gets more buzz than TNR and it was shut down five years ago. But Lehmann’s piece requires attention. True moral poverty of this type deserves to be recognized.
The offending piece is a review of a book called How White Men Won the Culture Wars by someone called Joseph Darda, a minor academic who I must congratulate for making such a naked stab for relevance with his book and its title. Its argument, according to Lehmann, is that the anguished fight for recognition, respect, medical treatment, and mental health care waged by veterans coming home from the war in Vietnam was, in fact, simply white male grievance politics. Legless 23 year olds who had been put through a meat grinder by a rapacious and indifferent military machine were, to Lehmann and Darda, no different from the angry white guys who own Ford dealerships that powered Donald Trump’s campaign. Their demands for recognition and access to basic social services can now be safely derided as the special pleading of the privileged; you know, the privilege of being crippled both literally and metaphorically. I urge you to read Lehmann’s piece to see how unbroken and shameless his contempt for these wounded and hopeless victims of empire really is. There is no “to be sure” paragraph here. Lehmann and Darda are committed to the bit.
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