IN HER OWN WORDS

Just when I was beginning to ask myself if I'd been too hard on Claire Berlinski, she comes out with this:

Front Page: Okay Claire. So introduce us briefly to the menace in Europe.

Berlinksi: In brief: Europeans are lazy, unwilling to fight for anything and willing to surrender to anyone; they are fascinated by decadence; they favor the bureaucracy over the corporation; they are unable to assimilate their immigrants; they no longer have children; they no longer produce much of cultural or scientific significance; they have lost their religious vocation and they no longer hold their lives to be meaningful. 

Comments

[dan dragna]

To be fair to Claire (and I'm as skeptical of her cheerful dooming and glooming about Europe as I suspect you are), this sort of sweeping overgeneralization and casual short-handing seems to be almost expected of "public intellectuals" nowadays: faced with constant media demands to reduce one’s thesis to a tidbit digestible in less than thirty seconds, many authors often end up reducing the *subject* of their thesis to something digestible in less than thirty seconds.

A damn shame, no doubt. But a commonplace one. I suspect even people you very much agree with have been guilty of the same. I know I've noticed as much.

[Clive D]

True. Ann Coulter Syndrome strikes again....

[Mark Crawford]

Well, we are all starting to talk about her, aren't we? She has been dying to get these opinions off of her chest (they are real, by the way--her opinions I mean)and she seems to be having the time of her life.

But I do wonder if her consciously Hitchensian "Why Thatcher Matters" could be as balanced or nuanced as Hitchens himself. See especially chapter 3 of Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters--"Orwell and the Right".

I happen to think that Hitchens still carries something of the leftist sensibility within him, as Orwell himself did.