Lee Siegel Is An Ass

And a pretentious one at that. Here he is writing in TNR:

There are few places on earth, as far as I'm concerned, where the light, especially in late afternoon, in summer, is more beautiful than on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It's a river light, soft and gently diffused. It gets delicately soaked into the sides of buildings, splashes the windshields of the yellow cabs coasting down Broadway, washes up against the green wall of the park that runs along the Hudson.

Come evening, everyone pours into Riverside Park from the Upper West Side's hybrid neighborhoods: older couples from the squat elegant buildings on West End Avenue, students from Columbia's carefully patrolled Morningside Heights, Hispanic kids and young couples from Amsterdam Avenue's brightly awned streets, young professionals recently moved into the new luxury high-rises that have sprouted up along the Upper West Side's left-liberal alley--the glassy new buildings like lost guests who've wandered into a noisy party meeting instead of the stiff, reserved dinner party they were headed to. And everyone covered in golden light in the green park. You feel the possibility of naturalness in humanity, and of humanity in nature. You feel at ease.

And then you go to a nice restaurant and sit down next to some troglodyte wearing... A BASEBALL CAP.

Oh how I hate these things...

When I see someone wearing a baseball cap in a movie theater, I want them to bring back the guillotine.

Read the whole thing here.

Note how this left-liberal culture critic finds it appropriate to end on a note of unrestrained imagined violence directed against those who don't share his exquisitely refined sensibilities.

All too often we find disaffected progressives adopting attitudes commonly associated with supporters of the ultra-reactionary Comte d'Artois [later Charles X]; "Off with their heads" indeed! Or perhaps the more appropriate reference is to Robespierre's use of terror in an attempt to impose his "Republic of Virtue." What is perhaps most bizarre is the fact that this terminally confused sartorial snob thinks that he is striking a blow against hierarchy.

Sad..., so sad, and more than a bit disturbing.

James Wolcott, another insufferable snob, but at least one with a soupcon of humor, responds to Siegel's madness here.