The #OWS virus. Dangerous to your health. Highly contagious.

By Roger Kimball

I’ve never seen The Andromeda Strain, but I gather the plot revolves around a deadly and highly contagious virus from another planet that’s been let loose on earth. Contemplating the hysteria that has greeted the Occupy Wall Street protests, I begin to wonder if a less deadly but no less contagious virus hasn’t been let loose among the left-liberal commentariat. The virus — call it the OWS virus — doesn’t kill, it merely mentally maims its victims. The chief symptom is a certain childish senility fueled by unassailable sensations of grandiosity. I minuted some yesterday in “The 99-Percent Solution.” The pièce de la résistance of that opus was doubtless the comment emitted by Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, that there’s a deep filiation between the spoiled children making a nuisance of themselves in Zuccotti Park and the events in Tahrir Square, Cairo, last winter. And Tahrir Square was only the first droplet in Mr. Kimmelman’s incontinent drivel. “Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall,” he gushes:

We clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.
So we check in on Facebook and Twitter, but make pilgrimages to Antietam, Auschwitz and to the Acropolis, to gaze at rubble from the days of Pericles and Aristotle.
I thought of Aristotle . . .

Embarrassing, isn’t it? ...More >