Hatchet Man's Heresy Hunt...

New York City

I wish I could say I was surprised that The Nation assigned a hatchet man to trash my book The Intellectuals and the Flag: the ever on-message Daniel Lazare, who's sputtered against my work for years ["Pledging Allegiance," March 20]. On his Long March to expose apostasy and dig up Fragments of the True Left, no scruple impedes Lazare.

Because Lazare is perhaps The Nation's back of the book's main go-to guy for heresy hunts, it's worth a fair number of words to see how shoddy his work is. His method is part fabrication, part demonology, part projection. Even when he tenders an idea, he warps it with his steel-trap either-or mind. Thus, when he makes the reasonable point that one could respond to the attacks of September 11 "as a New Yorker, as a human being, as a secularist or as an anti-imperialist"--that is, one didn't have to respond as an American, perish the thought--he overlooks the many passages in my title essay where I do respond precisely as a New Yorker, a human being and, in fact, as an anti-imperialist, as well as an American. Lazare thinks I had to choose. That's his thuggish mind, not mine.

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