But the possibility of a rhetoric dense in meaning? Of writing into which threads of allusion are woven? Of multiple levels of authorial intention? I weep at the failure of those of us Effete Ivory Tower Transnational Progressive Rootless Cosmopolite Intellectuals to have the narrow elites--let alone the broad masses--understand our layered and subtle discourse...
I mean, if Paul Krugman can argue that Mickey Kaus has lost his ideological moorings and is proceeding down the path to perdition all the while spending his days rationalizing his ideological transformation to himself as a "good thing," and can do so by making reference to a play by Romanian Absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco called "Rhinoceros," the day of the literary intellectual is not yet gone. Surely we should struggle to preserve pre-modernist, modernist, and post-modernist High Culture as parts of our Plan for Human Liberation, shouldn't we?
Brad DeLong