I received an e-mail yesterday from a friend of mine, a prominent neoconservative intellectual and the son of an unreconstructed and unrepentant anti-communist socialist:

[Y]ou were on my mind just this weekend, even though we haven’t corresponded for a while.

I was in New York to spend the weekend with my parents, as I do about every six weeks. They increasingly need my attention. My dad, now 88, is losing some clarity, and of course physical infirmities limit has outside activity.

His obsession with politics is still far and away his strongest interest, and he expressed some desire to know how to find things on the net that would interest him. He had a vague idea about blogs, so I introduced him to Rittenhouse and bookmarked it on his computer.

I showed him your links to the blogs you like, and told him that he could find lots of left-wing blogs there, and he could then discover which ones he liked best. (Quite unlike you, and I hope me, dad hates to read anything he disagrees with. He is only interested in leftist writers, those but not tainted by pro-communism. They have to be his kind of leftist.) [Ed.: I think I’m his dad’s kind of leftist. My master’s thesis, after all, was about neoconservative anti-communism, back when I was, or thought I myself as, a neoconservative anti-communist.]

I don’t think he got to any of the links. Rather, he immediately became engrossed in Rittenhouse, and I heard him laughing out loud in hearty agreement with your skewering of some rightist folly. Unlike many ventures in which I have tried to show him things on the computer, our outing to Rittenhouse was a big success.

This just blows me away. Given the source of this compliment, I’m so flattered I’m blushing. And I’m not a blusher.

| HOME |