French intellectualism or prophecy?

More thoughts later. For now read this excellent review in the NYT Book Review. Finally, someone taking to task modern-day French intelligentsia. Bernard Henri Levy is considered France's leading thinker but Garrisson Keillor sees a prophet:

As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions. He has a brief encounter with a young man outside of Montgomery, Ala. ("I listen to him tell me, as if he were justifying himself, about his attachment to this region"), and suddenly sees that the young man has "all the reflexes of Southern culture" and the "studied nonchalance . . . so characteristic of the region." With his X-ray vision, Lévy is able to reach tall conclusions with a single bound.

And it gets better.