 | I have started this thread for comments on Dinesh D'Souza in general, not to be limited to the thread title.
I have read D'Souza's Letters to a Young Conservative and his End of Racism. I found both lacking
The Letters to a Young... series is of broad interest. I have read both Christopher Hitchens' ...Contrarian and Anna Deavere Smith's ...Artist. The First, as it was Hitchens, was well written, but nothing special from him. Smith's book, which I expected to find some fault with, was quite amazing. No conservative, she managed to write the book without a single political aside or gratuitous remark. Her advice is very appropriate to both artists and the rest of us. I recommend it unconditionally.
But D'Souza's ...Conservative was not written as advice, but as braggadocio. He crows of his exploits (quite tame, actually) as a Republican campus provocateur. He makes a few fag jokes, and he embarrasses himself as an academic.
His End of Racism was based on a promising subject, but was overly smug and suffered from its ivory-tower author's isolation from the real world. D'Souza, of dark skin, acts as if he has faced real racism (I doubt it) and as if his skin color immunizes him from criticism. It doesn't, since even Ann Coulter is entitled to write a rational book on racism. Since I do not have the title before me, all I will say is that as someone with copper hair and blue eyes, who grew up in a town where to be colored was to be Italian, where the 10 blacks in my graduating class out of 500 did not sit segregated in the lunchroom, and who then did see such segregation at college, and who dropped out of college to live in the South Bronx (Dominicano, highest number of murders per zip-code at that time in the US) with his black lover, a victim off reverse racial profiling ("whitey") on many occasions by the police, I know a little about racism, and D'Souza apparently has heard of the word. The second edition, which I read, had some bland and unobjectionable arguments couched again in self-congratulatory language. I found nothing new, insightful or helpful in the work.
This brings us to his latest work,The Enemy at Home, which has been roundly criticized even in print (NYPOST) by his think-tank fellows. In it he blames the left for 9-11, not due to their lack of diligence, but due to the fact that the left (which seems to include all but the Pat Robertses in this country) has allowed the terrible scourge of the legalization of sodomy, the depiction on TV of suspect kissing, and low-rise jeans, as well as, of course, all those naked fashion catalogues. D'Souza argues that the religious right in this country should be making common cause with m*slim conservatives, not be going to war against them. I have not read this title, so I don't know how he gets around the fact that conservative isl*m means sharia, jihad, and bombs and beheadings. If only Daniel Pearl had been wearing his yarmulke...
D'Souza has always troubled me as someone whose true feelings lie below his spoken words. While Ann Coulter deserved derision for her book Godless, and has suffered for her stupidity, she did not call for actual collusion with our enemies. D'Souza claims that we deserved 9-11. He deserves our condemnation and the ostracism of all friends of liberty.
Ted Keer |
The Enemy at Home by Dinesh D'Souza
