What's for Lunch? The Judts

For me, the best burger is made of sacred cow.

My meal the other day was two parts of the most serious and revered left-wing intellectual in the land, Tony Judt, and -- even more shocking to the old ladies of the Web -- one part his lugubrious and, apparently, preternaturally precocious 15-year-old son.

Big and little Judt, in a left-wing homage to Father's Day, exchanged a series of simpering, pickle-up-the-ass bromides about the environment and political leadership in the US on the Times' op-ed page. I said, hold on: This doesn't sound like any 15-year-old I've ever known. Fifteen-year-olds (I have had three of them) can be smart, quick, and worth reading -- what they aren't is tedious, pompous, and observant of the conventions of formal prose. The smell test: 15-year-olds don't sound like 62-year-olds -- unless they are.

The Judts' piece was so left-wing treacly, and smacked so much of parental ambition and getting your kid into a fine college, that anybody but the most loyal or cornball ought rightly to have rolled his eyes if not off his chair and onto the floor in great hilarity. But, in fact, the setup here is that Judt, who isn't just the last of the left-wing intellectuals but has ALS and is paralyzed from the neck down, was burnishing his own virtue -- his sacred cow status -- by showing off his wise-beyond-his-years, concerned-beyond-the-walls-of-his-private-school son. People -- left-wing people, anyway -- eat this stuff up.

The doubt I raised is a fair and obvious one. There is a reason the Times does not have 15-year-olds writing for its op-ed page.

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