In DC, I run with a community of writers, political thinkers, and sundry other intellectual types. The circle is large, sprawling, and relatively incestuous: We go to each other's parties, attend each other's events, go to each other's happy hours, etc and so on. What that means is that there are an awful lot of Evites floating around at any given time. This one to a barbecue, that one to a birthday, the third to a going away bash. And because a heavy portion of this crowd is comprised of professional prose stylists, there's ever-increasing pressure to make the invites funnier, the responses, wittier. It was rather fun at the beginning, but now the pressure is too intense, with each successive invitation demanding sharper wit and more innovative approaches. The meta comments ("Enthusiastic response!") have been tapped out, the dark humor analogies to foreign conflicts largely used up. I've taken to visiting wikipedia and pegging my invitations to some absurd anniversary or holiday falling on the date (my last party fell on international pi day -- 7/22). It's exhausting stuff.
I was reminded of the Evite arms race by the title of Dinesh D'Souza's latest, uh, "book": The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11. I'm becoming convinced rightwing book is caught in a similar loop, only this time towards ever more insane and inflammatory titles. Dinesh, after all, had to top Ponnuru's The Party of Death and Coulter's Treason, and will soon be contending with Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. I'm rather confident, particularly given Ponnuru's totally embarrassed reaction to his own book's title, that this is a purely mercenary decision on their part. Most of these folks fancy themselves serious thinkers but, in the end, publishing's a tough market, and a bloodthirsty title can stand between you and bargain rack oblivion.
But like with our Evite invitations, too much pressure for too long and all the good jokes, or slurs, get taken, and what's left sounds forced and self-parodic. To blame not merely the left, but the cultural left for 9/11? To wreck the word fascism by attaching it to "liberal"? It's a problem. Though one, if the Evite I just responded to is any indicator, that has no real solution.
