Your Friends and Neighbors

Surely it isn't lost on Dinesh D'Souza, author of The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, that he's indulging in the same kind of blame-America-firstism that he and his ilk decried in the Noam Chomskies of the left? Evidently the problem with the intellectual "enemy within" wasn't its hatred of America but its hatred of the wrong things about America—military power, for example, and not Live Nude Girls (or Boys). Such a qualified defense of one's country does not betoken real confidence. Why do they hate us? If it comes down to our survival, who cares? Let's protect our necks first. We can "dialogue" about it later, provided there's anybody left.

Of course, I'm not so green as to believe that D'Souza believes a word of this. There is the small matter that a suicidal terror campaign against the most powerful nations on earth is itself, for its ringleaders, as much about power as it is about some perverse conception of "values." But there is also the fact that, as Mark Steyn notes in his review of The Enemy at Home, their hatred is of kind and not at all of degree. People driven to bloodthirsty rage by "Baby, It's Cold Outside" could care less how many concessions you make to them.

In what feels like a slightly dishonest passage, the author devotes considerable space to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual progenitor of what passes for modern Islamist “thought”. “Qutb became fiercely anti-American after living in the United States,” writes D’Souza without once mentioning where or when this occurred: New York in the disco era? San Francisco in the summer of love? No. It was 1949 – the year when America’s lascivious debauched popular culture produced Doris Day, “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” and South Pacific. And the throbbing pulsating nerve center of this sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, where Sayyid Qutb went to a dance: “The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips…” As I wrote in Maclean’s a couple of months back: “In 1949, Greeley, Colorado, was dry. The dance was a church social. The feverish music was Frank Loesser’s charm song ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’…” Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban introduced it in the film Neptune’s Daughter.

Steyn is a conservative commentator writing about another conservative commentor, so you can imagine that by "feels like a slightly dishonest passage" what he really means is "is unflinching bullshit." Here is a book that serves no purpose but to but to make a good gag gift from Republicans to their liberal friends. It will persuade nobody of anything except that D'Souza, like Ann Coulter, is interested mostly in raising his own profile by any means necessary. (The only difference is that Coulter winks at us while D'Souza expects us to take his psuedo-gravity seriously.) If you want to see a reaction to this book that isn't bound by decorum, Wolcott's your man. When he's around, nobody's safe: not even other Manhattan liberals.

It's been real, folks. Thanks for having me.