Every time I have something here that they like, the 2 Blowhards link to me. Thank you 2 Blowhards. If I linked to 2 Blowhards every time they had something I liked, there'd be nothing here but links to 2 Blowhards.

But I did especially like this posting about Postmodernism. This is one of the cleverest bits of anti-Frenchness I have come across lately, and God knows, there's been a lot of competition in that department recently. The basic thesis is: Postmodernism doesn't make much sense of the world, but it sure as hell makes a lot of sense of France.

Final fraught-with-further-significance paragraph:

I guess the real question is not why the French see something of themselves and their situation in Postmodern thought, but rather what American academics see in it? Whatever our own issues are, America clearly lacks that peculiarly French culture-schizophrenia. Is it possible that our academics miss it, or do they perhaps actually long for it? Or have they simply not read enough history - either French or American?

No I think it's simpler than that Friedrich. I think that American academia (at any rate the bit of it that worships Postmodernism) is a little slice of La France in America. At any rate in the sense that France is described in the rest of Friedrich Blowhard's posting.

Postmodernism is what happens when you let appearances get way out of hand. It is one thing to say that you can manipulate reality by manipulating its appearance. (You definitely can.) It is quite another to say that it is only appearances, only the way things look, that matter, and that what things are is just a trick of the light.