I never really followed the details of the controversies of George Soros’ s connection to David Brock’s Media Matters, or the latest tussle in which an Eric Alterman seemed perpetually engaged.
But I just replied to a hit piece on the Media Matters’ Alterman blog in which one Robert Bateman tries to attack Carnage and Culture by calling it a piece of “feces” and its author (me) a “pervert” (“of the historical record”). I guess the book’s argument that a unique Western military tradition gave European and American armies advantages in conventional war after six years still incites.
I have had a few incidents of that craziness in the past. Once a classicist, upset over the arguments questioning gender studies in Who Killed Homer?, claimed she called the FBI to report co-author John Heath and me as possible Unabomber suspects.
A Russian Online Magazine once ran a story in which the author dreamed of burning down my vineyard (and in fact a fire ignited there not much later).
And once in a briefing on the Capitol a Nancy Pelosi staffer disrupted the talk and stormed out, shouting that I was racist because I had been introduced by the host as a classicist-classicist, he said, must mean a supporter of class privilege.
But feces and pervert? These are new ones and from someone who identifies himself as an army officer no less.
Here’s the text and my response.