Didion vs. Sullivan

Nick Gillespie | January 8, 2003

In the early 1980s I happened to attend, at a Conservative Political Action conference in Washington, a session called "Rolling Back the Soviet Empire." One of the speakers that day was a kind of adventurer-slash-ideologue named Jack Wheeler, who was very much of the moment because he had always just come back from spending time with our freedom fighters in Afghanistan, also known as the Mujahideen. I recall that he received a standing ovation after urging that copies of the Koran be smuggled into the Soviet Union to "stimulate an Islamic revival" and the subsequent "death of a thousand cuts." We all saw that idea come home.

That's how Joan Didion concludes a sometimes interesting, mostly meandering speech on 9/11, etc., reprinted in the New York Review of Books. (Wheeler, longtime Reason readers will recall, filed some stories from Afghanistan for us way back when.)

Andrew Sullivan takes her to task in Salon, making the case that the torpor of her analysis mirrors a decline in left-wing thinking.