LARD HAT

What struck me about this article was this paragraph:

One of the important things to recognize here is that traditional media failed the public long before blogs were even around. The death of the public intellectual happened arguably in the 1980s or 1990s, and that’s just in social commentary; it happened much earlier in the arts. Where we used to have Bertrand Russell and George Orwell, we now have David Brooks and Paul Krugman. Even Maureen Dowd has a column (how I have no idea). I like Brooks and Krugman, but they’re no Russell or Orwell. 

I personally have no idea when the public intellectual died, but I can say that I’ve never seen one in my short lifetime. Here in Europe, at least, the face of Intelligent Progressive America (that tiny minority) is… Michael Moore. I feel like I have to apologize for that fact to people. I tell them, “There are probably better intellectuals than Michael Moore out there, but they’re working at tiny liberal arts colleges and publishing books that sell four dozen copies, if they’re lucky.”