I have for some time said that the left is the politics of the spoiled child, seeking perfect justice, as they see it on earth, and therefore the freedom of knowing that actions do not have consequences. And when they are questioned they fly into a rage, just like a spoiled child denied a toy.

Erica Jong, who wrote Fear of Flying, which is number two or three on the list of books which I will not read, just below Al Gore's hysterical and apocalyptic lie, has given an interview to the Italian evening paper Corriere sella Sera. In it she ventilates:

"My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf [another increasingly unhinged person not of interest] calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can't cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves."


"My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."


"After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia..." "If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets."


"Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act."

Have you ever seen such self-obsession? I'd rather have a fat spoiled poodle. The poodle can be made happy with chew toys instead of chew lives.

Jong has a history of believing in conspiracy theories: she called Charlie Sheen, another man with an Armani tin-foil hat, "a brave man" for his belief that 9/11 was a put-up job by the American government. Brave? This is brave? Not in Hollywood and only Hollywood types call it brave. In Hollywood it's pedestrian and quotidian.

These people are on the same wavelength with Rosie O'Donnell, who also claims that 9/11 was a put-up job by the American government because steel doesn't melt. I am sure I heard her say that. Even I, in my darkest hours, and at my most dyspeptic, couldn't make that up.

Back to la Jong. From Wikipedia:

[Jong's] daughter from her third marriage, Molly Jong-Fast, has published a novel (Normal Girl) and a memoir (Girl, Maladjusted). Jong-Fast's writing speaks of the emptiness she encountered in trying to live out the sexual liberties lauded in her mother's work.

It is no question that Jong is spoiled and paranoid and has a list of friends who are just the same thing. But in all of them I sense a yawning void, and emptiness, a search for meaning in their lives. They come to a huge overarching conclusion and restructure the world to make it fit to their revelation, and when it doesn't work they become increasingly shrill. And increasingly coercive. And suspicious and paranoid.

I've come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a secular redemption, that sense of knowing that something bigger than you will in the last gasp save you. Secular redemption has been tried and it's failed. As cynical people throw over the successful restraints of a civilized society virtually always based on a religious premise, they are joined by foolish ones, all beavering away toward the Progressive World of Next Tuesday, and to get to it they will countenance any sort of fraud and force: ACORN, SHAC, abuse of governmental powers, threats, violence, and even concentration camps. If you cannot live without redemption in your life, get thee to a church or synagogue. But that would require the hard work of believing that you're not the most important thing in the world, which is something that the spoiled people just cannot do.

These spoiled and very unhappy, and dangerous, people. And in Jong's case, she's being rubbished in print by her daughter, her victim. But I'm sure it's not Erica's fault. Nothing is.