Not an Ideal Speech Situation

Surfing around the links that Scott Eric Kaufman[n] of The Valve has provided to various views on Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble with Diversity, I made the mistake of clicking on a link to the http://tnr.com domain without putting on my latex gloves, eye shields, and gas mask, and was instantly exposed to John McWhorter:

Open University: Michaels condemns the diversity regime for its social calisthenics about our cultural differences while turning a blind eye to class-based inequity.... In this, Michaels is dead on, and his point that the diversity fetish leads to excusing other cultures for destructive behaviors we would condemn in our own is especially useful (witness the tendency to designate Osama Bin Laden a "madman," implying that this sane, calculating person is not responsible for his actions, whereas Dick Cheney is afforded no such exemption from sincere, visceral contempt)...

And I have to comment.

I don't know what things are like at your university, but here at Berkeley I have never, never, never, ever heard anyone afflicted with "the diversity fetish"--the tendency to overlook destructive and dysfunctional social patterns in other cultures--to do so by saying "HE'S A MADMAN!!" When we here at Berkeley are afflicted with the diversity fetish, we tend to say things like, "Well, you do have to recognize that the churching of women places the female at the center, and introduces a female-centered component into the otherwise male-centered rituals of the English church." We don't say things like, "the churching of women is a loony idea, invented and practiced by loonies."

(Actually, I do say that: the churching of women is a loony idea, invented and practiced by loonies. But I say this because I am part of a deviant culture here at Berkeley. I hope my fellow Berkeleyites will recognize that there are valuable aspects to my relative deviance, and that a diversified intellectual portfolio is worth holding.)

Back to McWhorter: To say that those who call Osama bin Laden a madman do so because they are afflicted with the diversity fetish and are attempting to excuse his "destructive behaviors"--well, that makes as much sense as to say that the green ideas that John McWhorter holds are colorless. McWhorter's parenthetical statement is not something from which meaning can be extracted.

Which makes me wonder why he wrote it.