Disclaimer: I’m not homophobic and I don’t have a problem with gays. But I think this is damn funny!
Andrew Sullivan is kicking John Derbyshire around, right on schedule. For those have you who haven’t followed this little feud, Sullivan has been pissed off at Derb for quite a while. It goes like this: Derb makes a witty, sly, deliberately offensive, Prince Philip-type soundbite that is insensitive and unabashedly true. Despite his surrounding such one-liners with sensible, if less hilarious, commentary, Sullivan takes them out of context and makes Derb sound like Sir William McCordle. Derb makes a policy of remaining stoically silent. Fans of both authors hate the rival and love their man even more. A fairly profitable arrangement for both, and boistrous entertaiment for me, but I must comment on a paragraph that is the source of Sullivan’s current wrath:
“In National Review again, Derbyshire recently described looking for a place to live in the New York suburbs:
‘One time we got off the train in a town that was pretty solidly
black. It took us about five minutes to figure this out. Then we went
back to the railroad station and sat half an hour waiting for the
next train.’
He justifies this by citing a range of statistics about why black neighborhoods tend to be worse off than others. “Are we racists?” he asks of himself and his wife. “Depends what you mean,” he answers. ”
In Sullivan’s mind, Derb not wanting to live in a mostly-black neighborhood is bitter, evil, hatred. I think this is just the simplistic position of a bachelor with no wife and children to protect from the “statistics” that he thinks barely important enough to mention.
But as I mentioned, these little skirmishes are too much fun to knock. Archetypally, its an utter classic: The tweedy, crunchy, somewhat bilious English conservative against a Boy George look-alike. I can’t say who’d win, but if they showed this on Pay-Per View I’d shell out the bucks.
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