Pay attention when he does this. Everything Chap points to is worth reading, but the Link Dumps tend to contain the articles that have been preoccupying him of late.
There are two articles I especially want to point you towards.
First, my man Stanley Crouch, writing in the New York Daily News, hits it out of the park, writing about what it must feel like to be a moderate or liberal Muslim these days:
During the 1960s a white Southerner made me aware of a problem that now seems to be common to the complexity faced by modern people of many different societies and religions: The loose screws among them have come to represent the entire group.Forty years ago, the white Southerner said to me that all of the televised redneck violence in reaction to the civil rights movement had made his Southern accent a social liability. Northern white people tended to assume, once they heard his accent, that he supported the Ku Klux Klan, had probably brutalized a black man and could easily have taken advantage of a black woman, who might be the mother of his unacknowledged child...
Read the whole thing.
And the second bit, which is just as irresistible - Christopher Hitchens reads Garrison Keillor's evisceration of Bernard-Henri Lévy's new book about America, and then proceeds to verbally disembowel the Bard of Lake Woebegone over at Slate:Every now and again you come across the real thing: a case of full-blown, corn-fed, white-bread American nativist bloviation. This often used to take the form of populist and pseudo-egalitarian diatribes against the stuck-up English with their fancy ways, of the sort that Charles Dickens encountered in his 1842 journey to the United States (and summarized in his American Notes, as well as lampooned in his worst novel, Martin Chuzzlewit). But more recently, attacks on the effete and the elite have borrowed from that same England's oldest prejudice, and concentrated themselves on the Gallic.I worry about Hitch, and would like to see him join a twelve-step program. But he's a well-lubricated rant machine, and it's a thing of beauty to behold when he's in full cry.
[...]
Hey ho for Yankee Doodle, cock-a-hoop and strutting away. Not since the xenophobic patriots of World War I took to roughing up German waiters and announcing that sauerkraut was henceforth to be "Liberty Cabbage" has there been such a fiesta of all-American bullshit: of what Kipling of all surprising people called jelly-bellied flag-flapping.
Chapomatic » Link Dump 14 Feb includes:
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