I’m in the wrong profession

In addition to throwing a competent knuckleball and embarking on a genuine, wake-up-in-a-ditch bender, it’s been a lifelong ambition of mine to write an article on foreign affairs for The Weekly Standard. It can’t be that difficult, as Waller Newell demonstrates this week in yet another bodice-ripper devoted to unmasking the grave existential peril posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who tips his sinister hand by smiling mysteriously, “as if he knows something we don’t.” Known best for his anthology of writings on manly virtue, Newell has lately restyled himself as an interpreter of political Islam, writing articles that insist by juxtaposition that contemporary jihadists are actually European leftists in Muslim garb. His latest piece claims to locate Ahmadinejad in a perverse intellectual genealogy that includes Hugo Chavez, Robert Mugabe, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Martin Heiddeger, Michel Foucault and a more generalized pool of nihilist ideologues including “the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis, and extending to later third world offshoots like the Khmer Rouge.” (Curiously, Kant and Locke are omitted from this roster of the damned. He’s evidently not a reader of Chris Muir. His loss, I suppose.) Newell packs his article with predictable, apocalyptic references to the “Hidden Imam” — whose return, we are told, will be assured by Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons — as well as the obligatory, credulous reminders that Ahmadinejad seeks to “wipe Israel from the map.” he spends a great deal of time arguing that Ahmadinejad is a contemporary disciple of Ali Shariati, the late Iranian sociologist of religion whose works Newell has clearly not bothered to read.

It’s all a gigantic mess, with scraps of Orientalist gristle thrown together like a mangy dog’s breakfast. But its so typical of the Standard’s prevailing hermeneutic: take an apparently dangerous and unstable personality, imply dark and indiscernible motives behind their conduct, impute to them certain real-world powers that they don’t actually possess, marshall the evidence selectively to show their filial relations to the worst monsters of the 20th century, and wrap it up with intellectually sloppy claims about what this all owes to postmodernism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and Dr. Spock.

I’m pretty sure I could do that.