Andrew Sullivan Needs an Intervention

Andrew Sullivan needs to think about going off his testosterone injections. I believe the steroid treatment has affected his work to the point where readers, even those who disagree with him, need to consider an intervention.

Like a lot of people, I long ago stopped reading Sullivan's blog for any kind of political or cultural insight. Years ago his writing went from elegant and penetrating to shrill, hectoring and paranoid. It was as if he were devolving from an erudite Oxford-educated professor into an unstable teenager. Instead of driving at the center of an issue he has taken to stringing together dependent clauses to make his point. I suppose he thinks that the frantic accumulation of angry adjectives can substitute for analysis.

Thus, Sarah Palin -- Sullivan's dark, conspiratorial obsession -- is "more paranoid and vengeful than Nixon, more divisive than Buchanan, more deceptive than Clinton, more delusional than George W. Bush, more psychologically unhinged than any candidate for the vice-presidency in modern times." She is, we are reminded again and again, "deeply dangerous." Why she is dangerous we are left to figure out for ourselves.

I have come to blame Sullivan's mental deterioration on the bi-monthly testosterone injections he gets. Sullivan is HIV positive. He has euphorically praised the steroid medication. But he fails to see the downside. I had a brief encounter with steroids myself a couple years ago, when I was undergoing treatment for lymphoma. I'm allergic to Benadryl, so the doctor put me on a steroid.

I lasted about four days. In my experience, all the negative things that you hear about steroids are true. They make you aggressive, paranoid and alternately confused and manic. You jump from one point to another, never settling on anything long enough to think it through.

My low point came on the fourth day, or rather fourth night. Unable to sleep, I sat in my underwear on the roof of my house listening to be-bop jazz blasting from the speakers I had placed in my bedroom window. The next day I tossed the roids out. I never told my doctor I took myself off of them. He'd have to sneak it into my milk for me to go near the stuff again.

Reflecting on that experience, I began to understand the careening apoplexy of Sullivan's recent writing. A segment on 60 Minutes recently speculated that some men are gay because of a surge of the estrogen hormone during birth. If so, combine that with a liquid blast of testosterone, never mind the AIDS drug cocktail, and you don't need to be a pharmacist to predict what you'll get: the crazed lovechild of Rip Taylor and Cruella Deville. As journalist Steve Sailer once put it, "following his bimonthly injections, this one-time Oxford grad student in political philosophy suddenly starts acting like a Biblical patriarch gone bad, exulting in volcanic displays of pride, lust and wrath."

Such eruptions make it difficult to maintain a reasoned line of argument. Thus Sarah Palin is a farce and a joke, but also a deeply dangerous threat. Thus Sullivan's call for a "conservatism of doubt" coupled with his pious worship at the feet of Obama. Thus a recent post exploring how "the relationship between religion and politics is...the central question of our time."

Sullivan spends several paragraphs arguing that politics and religion, or at least Republican politics, don't mix. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world, which makes nationalism a sin. He calls for radical poverty, which is anathema to Wall Street greed.

And the jingoistic conservative idea of America as a unique and special nation is "not regular American exceptionalism of the kind that the president adheres to: a belief that this miraculous new world has opened up vistas of democratic opportunity to the rest of the planet, that its inspired Constitution has enabled stability and freedom in equal measure, that it played an indispensable role in keeping freedom alive during some dark, dark times, and that its core idea -- government by, for and of the people -- is universalist in nature."

Then, two paragraphs later, Sullivan offers these insights: "Christians can and must retain a debate about the means of economic justice." "Force should only be used, in Christian just war theory, in defense against an imminent or ongoing attack. The Afghanistan war was therefore justified, although not when al Qaeda and the Taliban had been eradicated. The Iraq war? Not so much." "But the problem even here is that the ends themselves -- the greater material enrichment of human beings -- is anathema to the Jesus of the Gospels."

So: it is absolutely impossible, indeed offensive, for Christians to have their spiritual principles affect their lives or the world around them. On the other hand, it is absolutely imperative that we use Christian ethics to challenge capitalistic greed, prevent torture, and make sure our wars are just.

Sullivan went on: the Bible tells us that "in Christ there is no east or west," something the Republicans, with their flag-waving talk of American exceptionalism, should learn. Yet Obama, the Holy One, sees that this "miraculous" new world and its "inspired" Constitution, with its core truths of government by for and of the people, is "universalist in nature."

One is tempted to ask: why is the new world "miraculous"? What "inspired" the Constitution? And what does it mean to say that something is "universalist in nature"? One might even think Sullivan is suggesting that there is something like a natural law. But that would be to ascribe to his blogs a coherence that they have long lost.