Appreciating Michael Medved, America's Great Renewable Source of Entertainment
The last time I read something by America's most mustachioed movie maven [*], Michael Medved, he was admitting to a hotel-soap-stealing compulsion, yammering that we should call Islamo-Fascists Islamo-Nazis, and trying to replace the term "traditional marriage" with "natural marriage" in an attempt to "drive the gay activists crazy." In what shaped up as an inadvertent attack on adoption, the arch social conservative wrote that his new term "will force the other side to try to assert the obviously absurd proposition that it's just as natural for a same-sex couple to raise somebody else's baby as it is for a heterosexual couple to raise their own."
Welcome to Medved 2.0, in which our hero shows himself to be one of the greatest, endlessly renewable entertainment resources we've got in this sweet land of liberty. Here he is heaping praise upon Reason Contributing Editor Deirdre McCloskey's new book, The Bourgeois Virtues:
I eagerly await the opportunity to digest this book in its entirety–feeling gratified that it seems to echo some of the arguments in a key chapter in my own most recent book, RIGHT TURNS…[in which] I specifically and passionately praise…"the Bourgeois Virtues," which have been subjected to considerable calumny and every sort of intellectual assault, while deserving as many defenders as possible. Deirdre N. McCloskey has, apparently, made a major contribution in that effort.
Whole thing, including Medved's strange identification of science writer extraordinaire (and major Ron Bailey fan) Matt Ridley as a "British banker and philosopher," here.
I'm curious as to Medved's reaction when he finally chows down on McCloskey's book and learns that she is the former Donald McCloskey, a change she documented in her stunning memoir, Crossing (excerpted here in Reason). If Medved is put off by bourgeois gays and lesbians who dast "raise somebody else's baby" as their own, what will he do when he learns that his great champeen of virtue is an unrepentant gender-bender, a drug-war apostate, a Modern Language Association member, and perhaps most shocking of all to a social conservative, the author of the following line regarding that great inspiration to Maggie Thatcher, F.A. Hayek: "You read it here: Hayek has more in common with Jacques Derrida than with Bentham and Comte and Russell"?
I don't know, but I sure hope Medved writes about it.
[*]: Commenter tew below argues that Gene Shalit is our most mustachioed movie maven and upon reflection, I'm tempted to agree.
