Bill Whittle: Tribes

Okay, okay.
Go read it. Everyone else is, so if you don't you won't be able to call yourself fully in the know. I have been keeping up for about three years. Three or four times a year he puts out another chapter and all the right people ooh and aah and link to it.

It's called Tribes. He contorts himself into knots driving home the point that the essay is not about race or class. He has to be one of the most persuasive writers working today, except maybe Hitchens or Billmon, so he leaves no cracks for easy criticism. But this piece hammers away too much on the already bruised "left", whoever that may be. Since I find myself drawn more in that direction, I suppose the spleen was too bitter for my liking. Strikes me as chauvinistic, in the academic sense of that word. Not enough attention to the virtues of mobility (from one tribe to another, for example). And absolutely nothing about reconciliation. But what might one expect from an atheist. Too much TV. Survivor and all that.

I very much liked some of his earlier stuff...essays called FREEDOM , COURAGE and CONFIDENCE. I posted good comments about Whittle's essays last October. I like reading them in the same way that I like watching a Bruce Willis or Clint Eastwood film. But this time I didn't get the tingle. Oh, well. Maybe I'm getting jaded from too much finger-pointing. I've about had it.