Royalist lives! Reads The Nation! Writes Letter! Gets Zinged on Renaissance Blog!

I thought Simplicius might appreciate this one, from the letters page of this week's issue of The Nation (yes, I subscribe to The Nation, mostly because I enjoy reading the same article 75 times a year [hint: we're screwed]): Many thanks to Katha Pollitt for laying out the truth about the historical non sequitur "Islamo-fascism." [...] If anything, Al Qaeda and the Taliban resemble Puritan Roundheads run amok. They do? What, is The Nation taking letters from 400-year-old Royalists, still bitter about spending the 1650's in Paris? Feel free to disagree, but it strikes me that only the most anti-Parlimentarian person on earth would make this comparison. Sure, the wide range of people who got called Roundheads included some rather nasty sorts. But this guy is just reproducing the dismissive language of ye olde political history (not to mention Royalist propaganda itself) in order to critique our own dangerously dismissive rhetoric. In other words, he's substituting 1645's discursive equivalent of "Islamo-fascists" for today's. It's kind of like saying, "If anything, Al Qaeda resembles those dastardly Pinkos" or some such early Cold War nonsense. Ok, that one's a stretch, but still. If we're going to use our skillz as historians and critics to unpack the hateful vocabulary of Bush et al, shouldn't we take some care as we do it? And don't get me started on this guy's misuse of "non sequitur." He's totally a crypto-Cavalier. Of course, "Roundhead" has a much softer sound to it than "Islamo-fascist," which is so obviously an idiotic and wrong-headed coinage that The Nation quickly dispatched (months after the fact) their crack columnist to explain its fallacies to all of its readers, readers who, being the over-educated types that we are, have known since the minute we first heard the term "Islamo-fascist" that it was crap. Thanks, The Nation. Anyway, times have changed, 400-year-old Nation reader. This purple dude is our kind of Roundhead. One wonders whether or not, 400 years from now, children will be playing with flexible dollies called "Islamofascifriends" or "TerrorTubbies."