Iggy Golightly & Holly Ignatieff

The following is a comment I made elsewhere. Worth reflection.

Stephen & Northern POV corrected Wherry. Critical Reasoning & Jack Mitchell’s comments half explicitly, mostly implicitly, raise a question I sometimes wonder about myself, inspired by a line in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (movie, couldn’t say about book): there’s no question Iggy’s a phony and always has been, the only question is whether he’s a “real phony”, like Holly Golightly, or a phony phony. He’s FELT DEEPLY about so many things and also felt EVERYONE should know how just how DEEPLY he felt (like letting his brother nurse his sick mother and then appropriating his brother’s & mother’s travails for a book in which Iggy becomes the caring one), while assuming supposedly iconoclastic positions from time to time in a Hitchens-like search to be later recognised for Orwellian moral clarity when all his fellow travellers were wrong (unfortunately, these wannabe iconoclasms were wrong on facts & morals, before & after). I guess there are two questions, whether he’s a just a phony or a “real phony”, and which is worse? Does he take on poses and then become convinced of their truth (a heightened version of what most human beings, esp. politicians, do) or is he always posing and simply can’t tell what’s real or true (like a Kundera comedian)? I think Iggy is an example of the second case, which is morally superior, as unaware of own phoniness and thus not consciously engaging in deception, his own or others, as well as a far more dangerous characteristic for anyone involved in questions of public policy which affect many people. Holly Golightly’s conduct only affects herself and a small circle around her, after all.

On a minor note, further to Stephen & Northern POV, I’d be intrigued to know what Wherry considers “the best bits of his Iraq reassessment”. Or is this a parody of Iggyism, for “Iraq reassessment”, see “misplaced specificity”? Or is Wherry suffering from Stockholm syndrome and actually thinks Iggy offered, (a) a proper “Iraq reassessment”, and (b) there were “best bits” within it? Or maybe even worse, if Iggy is a Kundera comedian-politician, has Wherry become a Kundera comedian-columnist, both playing roles, neither knowing, nor caring, about the real? Hope not. Hope it was just sarcasm or parody.