AKMA’s Random Thoughts

W.? Post-Modern?

I have gotten into enough tangles about postmodern thought and its public image that I just winced and passed along when I read Joshua Micah Marshall’s comments from Washington Monthly about George W. Bush as a “post-modern president.” When even smart people like JMM, whom I much admire and read regularly, start bandying around shopworn anti-intellectual caricatures about “French” ideas and “relativism,” well, maybe it’s time to close up shop and go home.

But David Weinberger, no homme postmderne he, didn’t let that pass, so I’ll crawl out of my exile on Elba to back him up on this. Joshua, if you understand postmodern thought and disagree with it, or if you don’t understand it, at least don’t play into the hands of anti-thinkers who prefer to dismiss discomfiting theories with the facile rhetoric of nativist, “facts-is-facts,” nonchalance. It sounds like something I’d expect to hear from. . . well, someone I don’t typically associate Joshua Micah Marshall with.