Somebody, Somewhere, Must Have Liked Who Are We?

Michiko Kakutani is the latest addition to the dogpile on Samuel Huntington over Who Are We? After three opening paragraphs in which she appears to give the book's best argument for itself, she then reverses gears and calls it "crotchety, overstuffed and highly polemical."

Many of its arguments feel like leftovers from the 1980's and 90's, when debates about multiculturalism and core curriculums were all the rage; an era that feels strangely distant given the post-9/11 surge of patriotism and the more recent red state-blue state divisions of this war-torn campaign year.

And then she accuses him of "delivering what amounts to a 400-page PowerPoint presentation" (ouch!) on the need for "neo-isolationist nationalism," "riddled with gross generalizations" and "pockmarked with perplexing contradictions and curiously blindered observations." Ah, the joys of thesaurus ownership...