Rules for Radical Conservatives

November 15, 2010
The pseudonymous columnist for the National Review Online ("a kind of reverse Stephen Colbert), Kahane showcases his conservative philosophies in all their prescient glory. A time-travelling Ginsbergian introduction makes it clear that this is a battle cry, not a think piece: "I was present when the Sodomites came for Lot's sons and rejected his living daughters... I was there at Belshazzar's Feast, when the moving hand writ large upon the wall: mene, mene tekell upharsin... I was there when Pilate washed his hands of the Christ, when the Czar and his family were murdered, when Oswald's bullet went through the back of Jack Kennedy's head." Kahane's fondness for language often lends his rebuttals of liberal thought a beat poet's madness; the whole enterprise, however, reads more like a rant than coherent thought, making it difficult at times to find the needle of argument in his haystack of propaganda. Those who follow Kahane (the name of the screenwriter in The Player who was murdered behind the Rialto theater) will no doubt be delighted; those you don't will of course steer clear, taking the author's lead in making no attempt whatsoever to find common ground.