MUST READ: Essay on V.S. Naipaul and the Degenerate Rightwing

V.S. Naipaul (New York Times)

A must read essay from Mark Ames entitled Why the American Right Never Liked V.S. Naipaul.

Seeing [former Black Panther leader Eldridge] Cleaver paraded around [the 1984 GOP convention] like a defeated, conquered aborigine struck Naipaul hard, opening up deep raw wounds: that of a colonized, backwater, dark-skinned twerp whose only way out of Trinidad was through Tory England, his conquerors.

Although a reactionary, Naipaul was never a lackey like today’s right-wing “intellectuals”; he never shied away from describing about the brutality of colonialism (unlike bootlicking scum like Dinesh D’Souza, who never missed an opportunity to glorify his white right-wing masters for colonizing India, despite the tens of millions of Indians who died of famine in the Raj).

It was Naipaul's independence that was ultimately his undoing at the hands of the modern conservative "intellectuals."

Naipaul is so affected by the sight of this conquered, lobotomized-Republican Eldridge Cleaver that he goes back again to Cleaver’s Black Panther days and finds himself not just empathizing but actually appreciating Cleaver’s literary and intellectual talents, something Naipaul couldn’t see back in the 60′s.

Naipaul, a thoughtful conservative in the tradition of William F. Buckley was too independent, too willing to "break ranks" with the echo chamber that he is no longer "taught" in the wingnut canon.  There really is nothing left in the right's intellectual tank.

Either get the Republican lobotomy (just look at poor P.J. O’Rourke), or go Left: those are the only choices in this country today.

What’s left today, three decades after Reagan’s victory, is a ruling class of Rotary Club nihilists. Right-wing degenerates. And they’re not even interesting degenerates anymore, the way some Right-wingers used to be. They just scream a lot. Scream and bang a stick on the ground–and at the end of the stick-banging, they go to pick up their checks from their billionaire sponsors.

Hey wingnuts, the needle's on E!