I think it's not so much a question of the lack of an enraged intelligentsia--I think every major artistic and literary figure out there has been writing and speaking and singing--hell, even Bruce Springsteen sacrificed a good portion of his fan base to get directly involved.

But even that surprising development didnt have much of an effect. We as a nation don't listen much to our novelists, poets, songwriters, moviemakers, playwrights, etc... anymore. We've become such a childish, torpid, complacent pack of tele- anesthetised drones that we've lost the personal wherewithal to listen to our public thinkers when they fail to simply entertain. "Shut up and sing!", the refrain of our overwhelming culture. Compounding that social problem is the relentless howl of the hate-speakers on the radio and on cable news, and the lazy (or paid-off) acquiescences of our press.

Several years ago I posted a warning on this website of the war on ideas that that the Project for a New American Century and Grover Norquist and Erich Von Hubech had declared. This condition that we find ourselves in is no accident, and the only fault that lies among our intelligentsia is its failure to recognise how serious that declaration of war was and is.

It's true that there is no left-wing equivalent of the genuinely frightening mega-churches--no earnest young folks pounding the doors in cheap suits preaching, I don't know--Einsteinism, or secular humanism--no charismatic leftists thundering from an honored podium--and while it's easy enough to imagine such people and places, it's hard to imagine them having much of an impact on the larger problems of entrenched corruption, a debased and passive electorate, and the screaming anti-yawp of blind partisan politics.

What we need now is justice, and that means guys like Pat Fitzgerald, and the guy going after DeLay, and the army of professional prosecutors and investigators and mid-level bureaucrats and professionals who still love the Enlightenment and the Constitution more than they fear it's potential destroyers.

Blaming it on Joan Didion for not screaming loud enough is ridiculous. We're all screaming. But that doesnt matter. Action's the only thing that's going to count now. Prosecutions. Convictions, etc...

Levy is cute, and he's charming, and he seems like a hell of a lot of fun at a party, but he doesnt understand much about our situation.