“Why talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room?”  Halpern wonders, quoting Churchill; the answer, he explains, is that in this case only the monkeys really matter.

As the tone of that last line suggests, alas, it’s hard to write a polemic premised on the assumption that your opponents are monkeys without sounding like a particularly high-vocabulary monkey yourself.

Helprin variously describes his foes as “wacked-out muppets,” “crapulous professors,” “regular users of hallucinogenic drugs,” “a My Little Pony version of the Khmer Rouge,” “a million geeks in airless basements,” “mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down” and so forth. The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn.

Ross Douthat reviews Mark Halpern's "Digital Barbarism" A Writer's Manifesto" for the NYTS.