…Behind Palinism lies anger. It’s been growing as America’s relative decline has become more manifest in falling incomes, imploding markets, massive debt and rising new centers of wealth and power from Shanghai to Dubai…
Roger Cohen’s triumphant glee at American misfortune can’t be missed. Who is this Anglo-Jewish carpetbagger and what does he have to gain from the inevitable hardships for millions that must surely follow the Wall Street crash?
Some years ago, AJ Liebling published a devastating review of Graham Greene’s, The Quiet American. Liebling properly recognized that Greene’s anti-American rancor was rooted in the postwar collapse of British power and a deep jealousy of its replacement by American hegemony. Unlike virtually all other American reviewers, Liebling was profoundly disturbed and offended by Green’s celebration of the assassination of his fictional protagonist, an American CIA agent by Communist Vietnamese.
Greene was a cranky English Catholic who tilted toward Liberation Theology. The least you can say for the Twentieth Century English literary icon (overrated in my view but no matter) is that for all his leftism, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, he was finally loyal to his English nationality and his Roman Catholic faith.
Roger Cohen is an English Jew, loyal neither to England where he was born and educated, his Jewish faith or the US where he has made his career. For Israel, the Jewish homeland, Cohen has no use. Cohen is a perennial international Jewish type commonly referred to by his polite countrymen in the Nineteen-thirties as a ‘cosmopolitan of dubious origin.’ George Soros is of this category as was Armand Hammer in his day.
To a rootless and unfettered world citizen like Cohen, American exceptionalism is anathema. He sneers at American belief in manifest destiny. On our views on “religion, voting, patriotism and the death penalty.” Cohen and his internationalist ilk are long past such petty provincialism. He touts what he calls “a new world… (of ) …Mutually Assured Connectedness.”
(Ah, the fabled Global Village where the houses are made of gingerbread and the candy-apple trees grow. Just take the last exit off the Information Highway and look for the Welcome World Citizen signs.)
I would suggest that Cohen’s core problem with exceptionalism is religious rather than political. Roger Cohen is a profoundly twisted Jewish anti-Semite.
English Jews are the most cowed Jews in the Western world. Habituated by centuries of vicious, albeit unfailingly polite, Jew-hatred to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. The result is a peculiarly oleaginous, shit-eating brand of Hebrew. Jewish opposition to “Zionism” is nowhere as popular or pronounced as among wormy English Jews.
Witness that in Cohen’s perverted view, “…Behind Palinism lies anger.” A “…damn-the-world, God-chose-us-rage…”
Cohen is offended by a law professor from Northwestern named Steven Calabresi who insists that, “Like it or not, we Americans are a special people with a special ideology that sets us apart from other people.”
Why are Americans so damn superior, is Roger Cohen’s core complaint. Why can’t they be like everyone else? Why do Americans insist on swimming against the tide? Why won’t they assimilate and become one with the rest of the world?
Palinism indeed. Roger Cohen needs a good psychiatrist.
