The Anchoress takes to task New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s oh-we’re-so-sophisticated-aren’t-we snide-isms over President Bush’s announcement that he’s been reading Albert Camus’s existentialist classic “The Stranger” this summer:
“Already, it seems, the President has polished off the Camus and had a debate with his new press secretary, Tony Snow, on the origins of existentialism. Now, it’s possible to feel misgivings about the President’s ranch reading. Hasn’t there been, over the years, more useful material for him to scrutinize memos, for instance, about Osama bin Laden’s intention to strike in the United States, or State Department studies on the difference between Sunnis and Shiites in a country he was about to invade? But it is the sunny optimism of humanism to imagine that books change lives, and that no one can come away from “The Stranger” entirely unaffected, particularly one who is, as he reminds us, a wartime President.”
In other words, Bush is too dumb to get anything out of “The Stranger.”
Comments the Anchoress:
“What a foppish snot. What disagreeable, nauseating snobs. These folk don’t take themselves too, too seriously, do they? I wonder how they can reproduce with their noses so high in the air?”
Don’t worry, Anchoress–they can’t.