It finally dawned on me how deeply my fictional account of detention by Homeland Security had resonated with unbridled fantasies inside the heads of so many of my colleagues. I doubted any were about to be sent to Guantanamo Bay.Great idea. Show up intellectuals for the self-obsessed loons many of them are, right? Well, unfortunately that's not what Dorfman wanted to do.
Yet there was no denying that my tale had tapped into a deep paranoia. If entirely rational men and women, experts in literary interpretation and ironical readings, believed me, it was because they had already imagined such a possible world. Not one of my friends and associates at the convention or afterward dismissed my tall tale as patently absurd. When I lamented the naivete of my sophisticated audience, the response was unanimous: I was the naive one.Gimme a break. Dorfman's logic is flawed where he assumes that these people are "entirely rational". What evidence does he have for that? That they're "experts in literary interpretation and ironical readings"? I think I'll need more than that, thanks.
Maybe they were right. My fraudulent yarn was apparently terrifyingly plausible in a country where citizens can be held indefinitely without charges, where wire-tapping without warrants is rampant, where the vice president defends the use of torture, and where the president invades another country under false pretences.
Dorfman has done a public service by proving that many intellectuals are paranoid, egotisticalfantasistss even if he chooses not to accept this. If he had been speaking at a Star Trek convention he would have received a more rational response.
