Books Update: Nicholson Baker's Wild Talk

[Himself]

I for one would feel terrible if Bush were shot.  The reasons are over
determined, but include:

1.  The sense that political violence is almost always illiberal, and
antithetical to the variety of pragamatic liberalism that I espouse;

2.  The sense that it would represent a failure of American democracy, which
in its finest moments deserves being supported and embraced -- I fully
expect Kerry-Edwards to trounce Bush-Cheney, and if Bush were murdered I
would be deprived of an immense and very patriotic satisfaction;

3.  The simple moral (categorical) revulsion we should always feel at the
violent death of another human being.

Those things said, it sounds as though Wieseltier is reviewing the opinions
of characters in the book (a plebian falacy if there ever was one).  I'd
like to look at the book itself and L.W's full review before I form a
judgment of either.




-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org]On
Behalf Of Otto
Sent: Friday, August 06, 2004 11:00 PM
To: Pynchon Liste
Subject: Fw: Books Update: Nicholson Baker's Wild Talk


>
> Books Update from NYTimes.com
> Friday, August 6, 2004
> -------------------------------
>
> Leon Wieseltier: Nicholson Baker's Wild Talk
>
 "Checkpoint" by Nicholson Baker

"Yet the discussion of Bush-hatred, and of Baker's book, cannot be concluded
with a polite absolution. For the virulence that calls itself critical
thinking, the merry diabolization of other opinions and the other people who
hold them, the confusion of rightness with righteousness, the preference for
aspersion to argument, the view that the strongest statement is the truest
statement -- these deformations of political discourse now thrive in the
houses of liberalism too. The radicalism of the right has hectored into
being a radicalism of the left. The Bush-loving mob is being met with a
Bush-hating mob. Liberals are forgetting why liberals are not radicals. When
Jay demands to know how Ben would feel if Bush were killed -- ''won't part
of you think, He's got it coming to him? Huh?'' -- the most that center-left
Ben can muster in the way of principle is this: ''I don't -- I'm not -- I
can't predict how I would react if the president were actually shot,''
followed by some sensitive mutterings about ''the simple sight of any human
being stilled.'' American liberalism, in sum, may be losing its head."

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic

> =====================
>

Half of the review isn't about the novel!

Otto