>Now a days he of course gets away with writing the crappiest shlock.
>For a critique of a shlock op-ed piece that Wolfe wrote for the New York
>Times shortly after the Columbine massacre see
>(http://world.std.com/~twc/currents.htm#On the Supposed Inscrutability of
>Evil)
>by my friend Thomas W. Clark.
>
>Jim F.
this isn't so much to defend wolfe as to suggest that there isn't much of a critique here. i don't know what wolfe wrote but i do agree that sometimes sociology can't explain why two kids shot up a bunch of other kids. and we especially can't know with media warped information. _that_ wouldn't be any sort of appropriate sociological analysis in the first place. instead, the best we can actually do with columbine, short of investigating ourself, is analyze the media representations of the event.
in short: critique: where's the beef.
as for wolfe, he may well mean by evil that there is simply a fundamental core of opacity of human action and social events that we can't get behind. it is inexplicable. but there is much that we can do something about. if the pomos have much to say at all it is this: the impulse to mastery can lead to a kind of velvet-gloved despotism. there is no need for resignation and to suggest that Columbine is not amenable to sociological analysis is simply to acknowledge human fallibility and the limits of reason. for my money, a stance that acknowledges that is a far sight better than one that imagines that we can know all. we can't.
what is clear to me, of course, is that alan wolfe is a defector and thus a traitor and so deserving of our wrath, even if that means we call things critique when, in fact, they are not.