David Rees: Cormac Ignatieff's "The Road": "Hello everyon...

David Rees: Cormac Ignatieff's "The Road": "Hello everyone! Personal message to all the New Yorkers out there: Did you read Michael Ignatieff���s essay in the the NY Times Magazine? If so, contact me ASAP to let me know you���re OK. I put your flyer up at Grand Central Station, but have heard no response. Myself, I���m just making my way out of the debilitating Level-Five Mind Fog that came from reading the thing.... Ignatieff���s 2005 NY Times Magazine essay justifying the Iraq war... said the reason the American public wanted to invade Iraq was to spread 'The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jefferson���s Dream'. (I am not making a joke. This is for real.) And, he implied, anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq did so because they hated Thomas Jefferson��� and they didn���t believe in the Ultimate Tasks of Dreams!... I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: 'Please, for the love of God, don���t ever listen to me again'. HOWEVER... The first nine-tenths of Ignatieff���s essay... is a collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans. It hums with the comforting murmur of lobotomy.... Below, a smorgasbord of Ignatieff���s musings, with commentary: 'An intellectual���s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician���s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm...' Right off the bat, he���s saying: 'It was right for me to support the Iraq war when I was an academic, because academics live in outer space on Planet Zinfandel, and play with ideas all day. But now, as a politician in a country that opposed the war, I���ll admit I screwed up, because politicians must deign to harness the wild mares of whimsy to the ox-cart of cold, calculated reality'. So, although his judgments were objectively wrong, they were contextually appropriate. Sweet! You���ve been totally 0wn3d by Michael Ignatieff! And so have all those dead Iraqis...

#noted