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As he climbed across the table to disagee with Tom Reiss
Filed under: Headline Shooter Tagged: books, Jonathan Lethem, movies, Peter Viereck, Tom Reiss, William F. Buckley Jr.
First, this welcome news:
DreamWorks has acquired theatrical rights to the Jonathan Lethem novel As She Climbed Across the Table, a romantic comedy that takes place in the realm of theoretical physics. Lethem, who has also written such novels as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, recently won the MacArthur Genius Award, which led to this deal. The book centers on a strange romantic triangle between an anthropologist, his girlfriend (who is a particle physicist), and Lack, a black hole in the universe that has come about as the result of an experiment with which the particle physicist was obsessed.
Then, in the current National Review Online, John J. Miller has a whole side of beef with Tom Reiss about his recent profile of Peter Viereck:
Did you know that America's "first conservative" was an anti-capitalist poet who wanted Adlai Stevenson to become president?
That's what The New Yorker claimed last week in a long profile of Peter Viereck, a man who is said to have "inspired" the conservative movement—before William F. Buckley Jr. and other ne'er-do-wells came along and caused us all to lose our way. (The article isn't available online, but you can read this [Mt. Holyoke magazine notice about the piece; Viereck is professor emeritus of history there].)
The occasion of a major liberal magazine devoting nine pages to a figure from the early days of modern conservatism ought to be the cause of much rejoicing. Maybe in future issues we'll get to read about the legacies of Frank Chodorov, Willmoore Kendall, and Albert Jay Nock.
But don't count on it. The New Yorker's interest in Viereck does not arise from a sincere desire to explore the roots of the Right. Instead, the article by Tom Reiss is a transparent attempt to attack "the radicalism of the George W. Bush Presidency" by suggesting that the conservative movement, in its infancy, betrayed its founding father. The true story is that Viereck was on stage during the creation of modern conservatism, but only in the opening scene. Then he walked away, never to be heard from again, except occasionally as a heckler. Here's the rest.
Categories: Jonathans, Reiss
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Comments
To attribute every thing in Tom Reiss' article to the "New Yorker" and the motivation for its writing to a desire on "the New Yorker" to undermine the Bush presidency by writing about Peter Viereck is advanced lunacy. Are we to assume that the same sinister New Yorker gang also made Hannah Arendt write Eichmann in Jerusalem? And Ved Mehta? And John Hersey? If Mr. Miller wants to argue with Mr. Reiss why not do so?