By Ankush
I should've taken Charles Kaiser's advice and skipped Andrew Sullivan's cover story for The Atlantic, about how Barack Obamais the second coming of Christ. It is a stunningly bad piece of work-- reductive, overwrought, bloated, and, perhaps above all,patronizing.
The setup doubles as an example of numerous overblown passages in the piece:
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much thewar in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupationinto the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailedsince Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, anonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time theworld needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and aboutreligion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offersthe possibility of a truce.
Needlessto say, Sullivan can hardly provide actual proof for all of the stepsin this argument, even if you substituted more modest adjectives forthe grandiose ones he's used. But proof, in a piece like this, isbeside the point. The Atlanticis giving us access to the mind of a serious thinker who is writingabout Big Ideas. The exercise needn't be marred by serious reportingor self-reflection.
