BHL and Keillor

[thedarkages]

I went to the trouble of reading Bernard Henri-Lévy's American Vertigo, and regret it soundly. Even though Garrison Keillor could not tell the French philosophical tradition from a gopher hole on his native prairie, his bullsh*t detector, the readings of which were recorded in this week's New York Times Book Review, works just fine. American Vertigo, as I have said elsewhere, makes Baudrillard's Amérique look cogent and profound. I wonder why no one has tried comparing the two; he or she would find that Baudrillard had done the whole semiologically-significant-excesses-of-America thing first and better.

I may be unkind to Keillor. I believe that he has read Sartre in translation, but that's it.