Don't Let The Screen Door Hit You

Have you ever read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals? Good book. It is a deconstruction of the deconstructionists, an unsparing look at the lives of those who have claimed the mantle of virtue and reform. It's a great read, ands shows you how these grand visionaries who sought to reform bourgeois society had very little to offer in its place.

Roger Kimball, in his much-linked obituary for Norman Mailer, has written what ought to be the next chapter.

As a younger man I would have read that and wondered, is this just reactionary grumbling? Could he really have been that bad? But now I know: Yep--cause there's a thousand more just like him out there, poised to turn their own misplaced sense of greatness into the next secular religion.

Charles G. Hill has some thoughts, too, and almost manages to say something nice about the departed.