Or perhaps Mel Gibson. After posting to his blog an unflattering photograph of Larry Summers, Sullivan fielded a reader's email that helpfully instructed him to compare the image of the NEC chair to a figure in this Hieronymous Bosch painting:
"See if you can find him," Sullivan invites, if only because the Where's Waldo? supplement in Der Sturmer was a broken link.
Now, I could understand Sullivan's failure to recognize a reference to the Dearborn Independent when it was made -- unfairly, I thought -- to suggest that he suffered from less-than-philo-Semitic tendencies. A British expat who has not made a study of American anti-Semitism may be forgiven much of its esoterica. But to claim innocence about a daubed medieval atrocity like the one above is to take Borat at face value on the Jewish Question.
And that this association between a black hatted moneylender (who actually more resembles Marlon Brando) and Obama's top economic adviser should be made on the day that Sullivan's faith commemorates the crucifixion of the main character in the painting is sickening, even by blogorrheaic standards.
UPDATE: Evidently, I wasn't the only one struck by the tastelessness of Sullivan's post. Another reader mailed in to point out the obvious, to which Sullivan replied:
Oy. In my survey of Getty photos for the Face Of The Day, I thought that one of Summers was a gripping and surprising portrait. Then a reader emailed me the Bosch and I too was struck by the similarity. I can see now why you might see things the way you did. But it was in no way intended. I'm sorry if anyone was offended. I'll try and be more conscious of these things in future.
Leaving aside the unctuousness of that oy, I'm afraid this doesn't do to explain how a Harvard- and Oxford-educated journalist could fail to see what any junior school student could see. There's no wiggle room for interpretation here. Israel and its organized defenders and critics do not factor, and unless a thermal scan of the Bosch canvas reveals the word "neocon" to have been feverishly scrawled beneath the oils, I fail to see how anyone professing to be an intellectual cannot have been "conscious" of the intent of this notorious rendering of the long march to Calvary.
As it happens, I'm in the midst of an essay on Benjamin Disraeli, and I've noticed that one of the more admirable aspects of this eminent Victorian's career was his ability to deflect instances of Jew-baiting with wit and irony, virtues that scandalized the vices of his haters more than any call for tolerance -- a term meaningless at the time -- could have done. (During his fifth campaign for parliament, Disraeli's radical opponent taunted him with flamboyantly pretending not to know how to say his exotic name: “Mr. Disraeli—I hope I pronounce his name right.” Came the fleet-footed reply: “Colonel Perronet Thompson—I hope I pronounce his name right.” I'll take such a clever fuse-snuffing to the earnest alarmism of the Anti-Defamation League most days.) And yet, Dizzy's milieu was one in which cultural anti-Semitism, still inexorably tied to snobbery, had yet to give way to the full-blown political variety for which the 20th century is rightly lamented.
Others may find Sullivan's apology plausible and be on their merry way. Allowing even that the disappearance of his cogency and toughmindedness has been a cause of speculation for some time, his blunder seems indicative of a broader and more worrisome phenomenon.
It was enough for Juan Cole to strike the original name for his proposed lobby of neo-isolationism ("America First") once he discovered it had been used already. There was no hue and cry from the Jews over that grimly hilarious lapse because, well, only bloggers take Cole's insights seriously, and he copped to the ever-cited charge against him -- ignorance -- by revising his original blog post without affixing a mea culpa or correction to it. (Martin Kramer points out that Cole's academically sound m.o. is to commit some howler of fact or analysis, get called out on it, then cover up his mistake on his site, curiously titled Informed Comment, through the coarse art of "retro-editing.") But that only raises the question: What is a so-called progressive scholar of Middle Eastern history doing writing or talking about anything other than the scansion of Persian poetry if he doesn't know who the hell Charles Lindbergh was? (The America First movement was recently the subject of a much-discussed Philip Roth novel and can't quite be counted as the sort of esoterica I alluded to earlier.)
I think this actually represents the next stage in sophistical anti-Semitism, beyond even the obsessive and giveaway form of anti-Zionism to which John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Charles Freeman, Michael Scheuer, and plenty more succumb in the name of "realism" (while of course endorsing the brute "facts on the ground" in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia and China). A kind of historical amnesia married to political autism now persists among shabbier members of the intelligentsia, who breezily traffic in all the familar tropes of Jew-hatred, but then claim to have had no cognizance of them. Rather like one of those proverbial monkeys tapping away at a typewriter and unintentionally hitting upon a diary entry by Wagner, they would have us believe that blind coincidence was all that was involved in their noxious recalls. And maybe it is, but that only raises a further question of how they became members of the intelligentsia in the first place without having grappled with one of the oldest and most toxic questions of modernity.
Internet discourse is a race for the lowest common denominator. That we'll have to accept. But language, even produced in an overcaffeinated fug while still in one's pajamas, can alter the way a person thinks and perceives -- oh, what's that phrase again? -- "what's in front of one's nose." It seems to have done just that, at much too great an expense, to a once noble mind.
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