Stanley Crouch Channels David Horowitz and Attacks Cornel West

Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?

Neatly tied together here, Stanley Crouch has chimed in on Cornel West's critique of Barack Obama. Interestingly, Grimace look alike Stanley Crouch defends Obama and the "blackademics" against West's charges that the President's policies are contrary to the good of the Black community.

While it was little discussed at the time, a year or so ago failed academic and bomb throwing polemicist David Horowitz attempted a beat down of Dr. West in a screed called "Hurricane West: Cornel West and American Radicalism." While possessing some pithy prose, Horowitz's assault was predictable and fit perfectly with his Right-wing victimology, conspiranoid fantasies of a Left-wing plot to destroy America.

To my eyes, what is funny/compelling/unintentionally ironic about Horowitz's vicious 2010 hit piece on Cornel West is that in many ways it is a mirror of Crouch's NY Daily News column of a year later.

There, as viewed through Horowitz's lens, President Obama is a dangerous Socialist Progressive anti-American who is in bed with and enabled by Cornel West's activism and ideology, where the latter is a fraud and con artist--he is apparently also an "academic entertainer" and a walking black stereotype:

There is no other explanation for the ability of a shallow, vain, and trivial intellect, a comrade of anti-Semites and violent racists and a friend to America’s enemies, to attain the cultural eminence that Cornel West has achieved....Cornel West can be seen on the one hand as a progressive version of the Stepin Fetchit stereotype — absurd in his stumbling efforts to impersonate an intellectual and to wear the mantle of a prophet of social change. But Cornel West is also the archetype of an American radicalism that has set out to destroy the American experiment, and whose favorite son now occupies the White House as its commander-in-chief. Viewed as a historic force that has conducted a 50-year assault on America’s institutional values and standards and that has driven America’s cultural decline, the progressive Left is a movement that masks malice towards its own country as a love for the world’s powerless and oppressed.

To Stanley Crouch, Cornel West is an out of touch activist type who is a huckster and academic circus freak who plays the over-educated fool for trinkets and gold:

Serious black intellectuals privately dismissed West many years ago as no more than an academic loudmouth with a good show business game. He has perfected a variety of poses - from academic to conciliator to rapper - that are intended to give the impression that a very substantial mind is mulling over something and will soon drop some rhetorical bombs that will blow away all nonsense. A staple figure in American comedy is the pompous, educated fool, drowning in narcissism. West has long fit the bill; Harris-Perry finally exposed him for those who didn't already know.

I hinted at this before, but will be even more direct at present. There is big money to be made in making sure that one gets their 30 seconds of air time on the Obama-West fracas. I don't want to scream that Horowitz, Crouch, and others are haters per se, but I would certainly whisper the suggestion at a decibel level high enough to hear.

The public intellectual controversy game puts money in the bank and butts in the seat. Thus, why so many want to suckle at the teats in order to move up to the lecture circuit, talking head "A-list." Those who sit in the pews of the Church of Black Authenticity Fighting Over President Obama's Politics need to be mindful of how in their worst moments the chattering classes and the Fourth Estate are (often) playing a game of Three Card Monty on the public.

In sum, the opinion leaders and taste makers do not necessarily care about the common good or the interests of the common man or woman for self-interest is their over-riding principle. We should all be mindful of that fact lest we find ourselves exposed, exhausted, and distracted in this time of national peril.