I was planning to let this pass, but as Lee Siegel digs himself deeper and deeper into some catacomb of self-righteousness over James Kincaid, he's begun flinging his dirt all across the left, a schtick that's grown tiresome. Now, because too few people appear to agree that Kincaid is a child molester, we're all a bunch of "liberal automatons" and "clueless knuckleheads" who "respond like growling Pavlovian dogs to any suggestion that people cannot indulge their every sexual appetite."
So let's talk this one out -- one blogofascist to another. Kincaid is an English professor who studies the sexualization of children in American media. The other day, he wrote a piece for Slate on the reemergence of Jon Benet, arguing "JonBenet would not get all this attention did we not want to bestow it. It's not the media forcing on us something we'd rather not have: We're lining up at the trough to be fed...[it] allows us to fulminate against trivial problems while ignoring huge problems close to home, meanwhile wallowing in self-righteous porn babble: We are able to use the half-clothed bodies of children as centerfolds while professing shock that anyone would so display them. The story is always the same: Somebody else finds the bodies of children irresistible and we want the chance to rail against these monsters, meanwhile relishing the details of the very bodies we claim indifference to. It is a classic example of scapegoating."
Siegel criticizes Kincaid for being a "a very snide and superior writer," which, for obvious reasons, I can't help but point out (Writer, heal thyself!). More alarmingly, in three posts entitled "James Kincaid and Pedophilia," he asserts that Kincaid's belief that we view children sexually and so take a subconscious glee in fulminating endlessly about those who would sexualize them, obviously reveals him as a pedophile. Siegel, floating high above any evidentiary standards or textual support, has now made this accusation with ever greater degrees of explicitness, the last of which accused the left of being in cahoots with pedophiles. His advice for us, as I understood it, was that we'd begin winning elections when we ceased supporting NAMBLA. Wonder why James Carville never thought of that.
