This year I turned sixty and I don't know shit. Jonah Goldberg (scion of the always delightful Lucianne Goldberg) is forty-two and he knows everything. Indeed, his "CV" indicates he's known everything for a really really long time. Consequently, Jonah Goldberg is on TV and I'm sitting in my garage looking at my dog. I used to think I knew shit, but I've either forgotten it all, or I really didn't ever know any shit at all. It's important to know shit in America. Otherwise you're just another American loser. Like me. I know I'm a loser because I don't know shit like Jonah Goldberg. Jonah knows shit.
Why don't I know shit like Jonah Goldberg? How and when did everything go so wrong for me? I'm pretty sure the wheels came off in graduate school. Some "professor" brainwashed me into believing that meaningful analysis requires years of study, well-reasoned critical thought, and intellectual honesty. What a fucker. Indeed, all my "professors," were intellectual knaves who filled my head with very very bad ideas. They weren't like Jonah Goldberg. They were fiends, and I never really had a chance. Maybe in their floating dream world of tenure they didn't know what Jonah Goldberg knows: that you can make it in America by pulling disparate bits of gibberish out of your ass, string them together with rhetorical tricks learned from your mom, and create something called "instant analysis."
Jonah Goldberg knows you can get paid to practice this dark art on the TV, that they'll let you go to the front of the buffet line at the American Enterprise Institute, and they'll applaud when you burp your gassy insights and marvel at your ability to draw connections that are simply beyond the ability of elite "intellectual" types. (Example: American progressivism is really American fascism. Why? Come on, any American with horse-sense can see it clearly. Adolph Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt came to power at the same time in the early 1930's and so are--obviously--completely interchangeable. If Hitler and Roosevelt are interchangeable, then fascism and progressivism are interchangeable. Thus, progressivism is inherently fascistic. Presto!) Now that's the shit I'm talking about. That's the prime Jonah Goldberg shit.
I want some of that shit. I want to make arguments that require only a handful of discreet and disparate data points conducted across a thin beady thread of conservative night sweats. I want to dismiss the rigors of historical analysis and the demands of context. I want to erect an army of straw men, conduct ad hominem assaults, live in a Manichean universe, stumble down the slippery slope, revel in tautologies, dream in false analogies, and always always always confuse association with causation. No, I don't want to do the real work, I want that good Jonah Goldberg shit.
Of course, Jonah Goldberg really shouldn't be singled out. Jonah Goldberg just dipped his National Review issued ladle into a flowing river of the good shit. Dipped it in the holy river of pundit shit that flows ceaselessly. No, I shouldn't single Jonah Goldberg out, but it's just that he's just so darned appealing. If they sold Jonah Goldberg at the Sanrio store I'd buy him for the grandchildren.
End of rant