Via DeLong, David Rees in The Huffington Post, too funny, can’t breathe…
Hello everyone! Personal message to all the New Yorkers out there: Did you read Michael Ignatieff’s essay in the the NY Times Magazine? If so, contact me ASAP to let me know you’re OK. I put your flyer up at Grand Central Station, but have heard no response.
Myself, I’m just making my way out of the debilitating Level-Five Mind Fog that came from reading the thing. Even my “Second Life avatar” has a headache! (Hey young people, did I get that right? Hope so! See you in “Warcraft Worlds!”)
The essay is called “Getting Iraq Wrong.” And baby, if Michael Ignatieff got Iraq wrong, I don’t want him to be right! Because this essay can MAKE LEMONADE IN YOUR MIND.
I wrote a “cyber-essay” on the Huffington Post a couple years ago about Ignatieff. (Oh, sorry, you didn’t know I blog on the Huffington Post? Yeah, not to brag or nothing, but I totally do. Also, my friend has a flickr.) My cyber-essay concerned itself with a masterpiece of foreign-policy fan fiction: Ignatieff’s 2005 NY Times Magazine essay justifying the Iraq war. Ignatieff’s essay was called “Let’s All Fly Up In Space Together and Smoke Dope.” (That was the vibe, anyway.)
In that 2005 essay, you’ll recall, Ignatieff said the reason the American public wanted to invade Iraq was to spread “The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jefferson’s Dream.” (I am not making a joke. This is for real.) And, he implied, anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq did so because they hated Thomas Jefferson– and they didn’t believe in the Ultimate Tasks of Dreams!
So far, so GREAT, right?
Ignatieff’s latest essay is what Latin people call a “mea culpa,” which is Greek for “Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made.”