Naomi Wolff is worth listening to. She gets some things straight. But she doesn't show much humor as she chips away at conservative icons like Milton Friedman. Friedman missed the economic debacle by two years -- he died in 2006 -- so he's not around to laugh or weep at how much he got wrong, but we can laugh for him. Because if nothing else, the economic collapse, along with the collapse of the Republican party, is a laff riot when you look at one pompous neocon ass after another deflating and receding. It was hard for Wolff and for the rest of us to maintain a sense of humor while neocons were in the ascendant.
Humor, after all, shows up in people who are able to perceive context and maintain a wider perspective. The anxiety of the high wire act we've all been forced into during the past several months by the political and economic convictions of two generations of arrogant neo-cons is assuaged now by the sight of those sad-faced clowns down there in the ring. Among the clowns is Alan Greenspan, his world-view shattered, looking damn silly -- damn funny -- with Henry Waxman glaring down at him.
"Alan Greenspan testifying before Henry Waxman’s House committee today:
"'I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,' Mr. Greenspan said. 'I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.'
A flaw. Hah!
"Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. 'In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,' Mr. Waxman said.
"'Absolutely, precisely,' Mr. Greenspan replied. 'You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.'"
If you're old enough to remember, William Kristol isn't a stand-alone conservative bore. But he's the most comical figure to come out of the New York neocon clique that included his father, Irving Kristol, his mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and (among others) the Podhoretz-Decter clan, which features that star in the Reagan White House, Eliot Abrams.
None of those guys are rib-ticklers, really, except for Bill Kristol himself. For all his claims of greater wisdom and clarity, this is the guy who went out and deliberately picked out the latest Republican gem, Sarah Palin -- a climax in the odd marriage of Republican neoconservatives and Republican Christianists. The courtship of Palin the moosehunter occurred during a cruise that took Bill Kristol to Juneau. It's as though Kristol were the wedding broker for John McCain and it's all the funnier because Bill Kristol takes himself (and Palin's superior qualities) so seriously. In Alaska and in the following days back in Washington, he couldn't get over his meeting with her.
Kristol is pleasant and civilized -- even witty, but perspective and humor are not among his strong points. He continues to write editorials for the New York Times -- just as though he didn't have on his record some of the funniest, awfullest mistakes one human being could accrue in a single lifetime.
Al Franken was a classmate of Kristol's at Harvard and it looks as though he may soon be in a position to glare down at the neocons in a Senate committee room. That's a performance I'd like to see, and the sooner the better.
