I love polemics

As a kid, Daniel Drezner was exceptionally, eerily bright—so bright, in fact, that he was writing op-eds for the Hartford Courant, a pretty fancy paper if you ask me, while still in high school. In marked contrast, my youth was spent watching “Martin.” Suffice to say, I have as yet to recover from this wanton, senseless assault on my brain. To this day, Martin Lawrence has a hypnotic hold over me, not unlike the hypnotic hold Siddharth’s island rhythms have over lovers of soul calypso everywhere, despite the fact that Lawrence has said some needlessly crass and unflattering things about Arabs and Muslims, e.g., the opening monologue in “Runteldat,” during which he celebrates the newfound solidarity between black and white Americans that derives from a profound distrust of a fellow called “Abdul.” In fairness, he also had a brush with death when, heavily laden with jewelry, he went for a jog in searingly hot weather while wearing multiple plush tracksuits—that is, he’s clearly eine kleine nutso, so perhaps he deserves a pass. But yes, I was watching “Martin” while other kids were devouring serious literary fiction (or, you know, falling into a life of petty crime and cheap thrills, or huffing Elmer’s and popping wheelies), despite the best efforts of my saintly, suffering parents. This is one of my great regrets: I lost a lot of valuable reading time. Eventually, books won, but it wasn’t serious literary fiction that did it—I still have an intense, unthinking aversion to anything I see read on the L train or the F train (the latter of which carried me most of the way to school, forty minutes each way) by the spectacle-set—it was instead a much-maligned genre, the polemic. I fell hard for the polemic, almost as hard as we scrawny ethnic dudes of Stuyvesant High School fell for the brainy beauties in our midst (our school truly was a place where “all the guys were cheesy / but the girls were mad fly”). I found myself a dog-eared copy of The Present Danger long after the Soviet empire was dead and buried, and I sketched out a movie version starring Wesley Snipes as Norman Podhoretz, with capoeira moves standing in for the old man’s cutting rhetorical thrusts. At the time, there was panic over “the Asian challenge” and the threat multiculturalism posed to our common citizenship and, er, the tax code, all of it grist for daring, insightful, electrifying polemics (most of them dangerously, or just hilariously, wrongheaded) that made me want to (a) learn how to use commas and semicolons (still haven’t quite mastered that one), (b) work harder in school, and (c) find some way to learn as much as I could, the better to enter the ferocious gladiatorial arena I imagined serious intellectual life to be. This was around the time Andrew Sullivan was editing The New Republic and Michael Lind was writing these amazing, bracing, deeply unconventional essays at lightning speed, a time I’ll always remember as a miniature golden age (for my brain). Something else was going on around this time: the war in Bosnia. Leon Wieseltier’s lead editorials and essays on the subject, polemical in the best sense, were the thing. Righteous anger has its place, and Wieseltier deployed it with devastating effectiveness in the war of ideas that made a serious intervention in the Balkans thinkable. And now he’s being attacked for writing a deservedly vicious review of a “scummy little book.” Some call it a “technical glitch”—what’s a serious meditation on the coarsening of public life doing in a book review? (The New York Review of Books has a lot to answer for, in that case. It contains meditations so serious, and so unmoored from the commercial imperatives of the publishing industry, that it’ll make your nose bleed.) Others maintain that Wieseltier isn’t treating the “scummy little book” (a better title than Checkpoint, certainly) with the respect it deserves, which is odd; my sense is that he’s treating the book with exactly the respect it deserves, which is to say none at all. Is the review polemical? Yes, and the polemic necessarily lacks subtlety. That’s a loss. And yet there’s also a gain, in sharpness and raw power. I found the review riveting, and I can’t say that of very many reviews. If you want service-oriented reviews, try Kirkus. They’ll help you get value for your book-buying dollar. Or better yet, form a book club comprised of serious, like-minded people. Let Wieseltier be Wieseltier! I should note that I’m a bozo. P.S.- There’s a line in Wieseltier’s review that might be of particular interest: “(About the deranging influence of blogs Baker makes a sterling point.)” Yes, but who’s doing the deranging? I’m thoroughly convinced that my brain is infected by devils.