Dear Log,
I like to call this article "Duelling dualisms done dirt cheap!".
I am applying the Tlönese lit-crit method to it, and so am supposing that Michael Hirsh, the author of that article, is actually the same person as the author of the book he's angrily reviewing, Anatol Lieven (or at least Anatol Lieven as imagined by Hirsh).
Especially with sentences like "And he seems never to have recovered from his pique over this diplomat's insufferable arrogance", there is a very strange multiple applicability which goes well beyond mere irony.
And there's something very hron-ish about a paragraph like this:
«Perceptively, Lieven likens this Southern/Frontier nationalism to the more classic kind of radical nationalism that emerges from the cumulative frustration of defeat often found in nations, say of Germany in World War I (and which in that particular case helped buttress Hitler's rise to power half a generation later). In this case, however, the frustration of the South and Southern Midwest over the rise of godless modernity at the hands of the North and the Easterners built up over a century and a half during which Southerners were derided as "peckerwoods and rednecks," as the former segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, once put it. "The role of defeat in the genesis of nationalism resides not only in the defeat of a nation as a whole, but of classes, groups and indeed individuals within them," Lieven writes.»
