Ship of Ghouls

In the latest issue of The New Republic, along with a superb deflation of Russell Kirk's intellectual pretensions by Alan Wolfe and Jed Perl's tour of the Met's newly opened Greek and Roman Galleries, is Johann Hari's sure-to-be-much-discussed account of his National Review luxury cruise that the author dubs "the Muslims Are Coming cruise," and not just because Mark Steyn is one of the marquee gasbags. Although not the comedy classic that P. J. O'Rourke's picaresque tale of a trip up the Volga with the writers and readers of the Nation was ("Up the Volga on a Ship of Fools" I believe it was titled when it was first published in Harper's, then-edited by Michael Kinsley), Hari's piece captures far deeper, scarier depths of fear, prejudice, parochial ignorance, self-delusion, borderline derangement, and sheer inanity.