Crookedtimber.org Website Review

Tom Lehrer would have been a member of the Intellectual Dark Web. > Lehrer represented the IDW of his day.  He said (sang) things > others couldn’t, and his main enemy or target was political > correctness.  It surprised me to hear how little many of the battle > lines have changed.  Yet Lehrer, while warring against hypocritical > He worried about the “decline of the liberal consensus,” > following the Kennedy era.  In 1982 he wrote > complicated” than the older liberal causes, so perhaps he simply > did not blend into the contemporary Left (the piece is interesting This is provocative – but it seems basically wrong to me. The more trivial reason why is that Lehrer seems to have stayed > “I’m not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I > couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the > problem: I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, > I want to vaporise them.” In a phone call to Gene Weingarten of > the Washington Post in February 2008, Lehrer instructed Weingarten > to “Just tell the people that I am voting for Obama” The more useful answer is that whatever you think about their respective political positions, their orientations to politics are fundamentally different. Lehrer was an iconoclast. The IDW people, in contrast, are iconolaters. IDWers don’t just want to push back against what they believe to be an emerging orthodoxy. They want to defend a pre-existing orthodoxy of their own (which roughly coheres around a common mythology regarding the ‘Enlightenment’ was and what it still has to offer) against it, and they take their own dogma seriously.  This is why the style of IDW tends more towards thin-skinned Perhaps a modern Tom Lehrer would indeed skewer the pieties of the left. Any broad social movement tends towards dogma. All dogmas