Greenwald reads me

Being “read” in this Internet era is an interesting phenomenon. In my old novelist days it would take months or years to discover what people thought I meant (or whether they liked it). Now it’s near instantaneous. But still what you find is not entirely unpredictable. To begin with, when you link gay marriage and the war on terror, you know you are going to gore a lot of oxes on both sides. So I can’t say I was surprised to see Glenn Greenwald taking a whole lot of umbrage at me on Salon.

What’s interesting about when people attack you is what they think you are saying, kind of a deconstructionist puzzle. Greenwald presumes that I assume Islamists are at our door. He runs the following quote as if it might come from my article: “read Zawahiri’s speeches about the Plan for Caliphate!!” Of course I didn’t write this at all. One of my teachers told me way back when not to overuse exclamation points, although occasionally I err.

Still, to be clear. I don’t presume them to be at our door, although I know they are capable of hugely violent actions against the innocent. But I do think the Islamists approach life in an entirely different from manner from Mr. Greenwald and even from me. We are Western of the minute people, they are in it for the long haul … to put it mildly. That is why in my essay I referred to the year 800 and secondarily to the large demographic changes of our time (Europe, of course, although Latin America seems to be at the beginnings of a similar change). It is these long term massive changes that the contemporary Left avoids dealing with. Yet changes do occur in history. And there is no guarantee that they be good ones unless good people make them so, and even then…

I also find Greenwald’s gleeful categorization of Left and Right a tad tedious and old fashioned, but of course that’s one of my hobby-horses. I note one of the commenters on Pajamas accused me of being a “liberal.” Greenwald assaults me as a right-winger even though I support gay marriage and choice … I guess I don’t got that “old time religion.”