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About ArmaVirumque ( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh) In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age. Recent posts
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Sep 24, 2006 08:07 AM
Results are still being tallied in the great contest to decide who is the most preposterous pseudo-intellectual of the last thirty years. The contestants are many, the competition fierce, but I’d like to put in a word for Lewis Lapham. Not only has Mr. Lapham provided hours of entertainment with his own special brand of self-righteous, politically-correct bluster, but he managed to take a dull but worthy cultural institution--Harper’s magazine--and turn it into a low-calorie laughing stock that nobody reads. Mr. Lapham will be forgotten in about 12 minutes, but in the meantime, Instapundit links to a couple of classic commentaries on "Laphamization" (including this one--mirabile dictu--from The New York Times). I offer as a special bonus the reflection I published on the occasion of Mr. Lapham’s most notorious exercise in creative reporting, a 7500 essay called "Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill." Mr. Lapham’s essay is full of charts and tables detailing the nefarious flow of money to conservative causes. There is nothing new here: liberals have been “exposing” philanthropic support for conservative causes for years. Three billion dollars in thirty years—that’s a lot of money. But wait, doesn’t the Ford Foundation support a galaxy of left-wing causes with half a billion dollars every year? And what about the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the various MacArthur Foundations? (The J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, Mr. Lapham neglects to mention, provides an annual subsidy of $2,150,000 to Harper’s.) What about, for that matter, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who through her foundations doled out $65 million to left-liberal causes in 2002?You can read the whole thing here.
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