Fun with BHL

The gentlemen at Powerline are greatly exercised about M. Bertrand Henri Levy. Yikes, they're cross.

Not me! I have been reading his reviews and, as FDR was wont to say, "what a gas"! [Ed-You mean M. Levy? Him, too!] Laughter is the best medicine when the diagnosis is "French Intellectual".

Let us first lovingly and admiringly consider M. Alex Beam (sorry, it's contagious) of the Boston Globe. He begins by explaining just who the hell M. Levy is:

Sophisticated people everywhere -- Tina Brown! Adam Gopnik! -- are taking French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy's new book, ''American Vertigo," very, very seriously. BHL, as he is known chez lui, figuratively retraced the 1831 American journey of his countryman Alexis de Tocqueville, spinning out his impressions first in a series of Atlantic magazine articles and now in a book.

Color me skeptical. I can't take Levy seriously at all. I stuck with his first Atlantic article until I tripped across the phrase ''Detroit, sublime Detroit." I burst out laughing.

Me too! I think I might have held on until M. Levy sought to understand the Native American question by talking to Russell Means, or someone. Then I moved on to see who Benjamin Schwartz was snarling at this month.

Beam does say that BHL gives a celebrity appearance worth the price of admission:

I heard Levy talk last spring at the New York Public Library, and it was magnifique. Catch him if you can. Levy's English is quite good, but even he couldn't decipher a meandering inquiry from his acolyte, loony-left actor Richard Dreyfuss, who seemed to want to talk about the First Amendment. ''What did he say? What did he say?" Levy kept asking his handlers, but alas no English-to-English translator was present.

So that's where Richard Dreyfuss has been since What About Bob? I was wondering...

But for a real, hit'em in the groin, savage takedown, you have to look for a Midwesterner; say, a Professional Midwesterner, like...Garrison Keilor! Who do the Liberal Fogey had it in him?

It's a review so good that I just want to paste the whole thing. Here are some highlights:

It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize...

He likes Savannah and gets delirious about Seattle, especially the Space Needle, which represents for him "everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel." O.K., fine. The Eiffel Tower is quite the deal, too...

Bombast comes naturally to him...

As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions...

And finally...

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . . no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."

Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

My lesson is: despite everything that divides me and Garrison, we are united when some French Egoist writes a book.