There are so many sources of light and wonder in this life: mint chocolate chip ice cream, the prospect the International Criminal Court might one day indict George Bush, the Watson Twins' cover of Just Like Heaven. But it is my beat, in this tiny corner of the Internet, to report on the inanity of Bill Kristol's columns for the New York Times. It's a dirty job. It's also, let's face it, a small and slightly pathetic job. I often cry myself to sleep, but Paul Krugman keeps writing about the housing bubble and the presidential campaign, and Thomas Friedman, it seems, is never coming back from vacation, so what are we going to do?

In this week's column our intrepid right-wing pundit takes the occasion of Tony Snow's passing to enlighten us on Snow's contributions to existential philosophy.

Yes, you read that right. Not satisfied to string together some humanizing quotes and an anecdote or two about how the late Mr. Snow was an upbeat personality (a real salesman!), Kristol goes the extra journalistic mile and presents Snow as a revolutionary philosophical thinker. Kristol isn't speaking metaphorically. He literally means to give Tony Snow credit for articulating a philosophical response to existentialism.

Holy! And you thought that, in all those press conferences, Snow was only lying about Iraq and John Kerry's heroism. Turns out he was doing much deeper work. But you probably also thought that existentialism described, not a specific set of philosophical claims, but rather a general way of doing philosophy that was more or less invented by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and later popularized by a group of post-war intellectuals and writers like John-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Sucker.

To understand Tony Snow's contribution to world philosophy, you first have to understand what existentialism is all about. Here, Kristol has some bad news for those of us who thought the existentialists, writing in response to attempts to investigate the world through abstract reasoning, were attempting to discover philosophical truths by examining the intensely subjective phenomenon of lived experience.

Turns out we were completely wrong about that. The real contribution of the existentialists, Kristol says, was to posit the idea that it's more interesting to be gloomy. Wearing funny hats, throwing parties, and greeting your friends with a smile? The existentialists stood against all that. They preferred to mope around Paris wishing it would rain more.

Never mind that Kierkegaard's essays are some of the most beautiful and profound works you'll ever read, that Nietzsche is one of history's most provocative and exciting thinkers, or that by every account, Sartre was a charming companion, an incomparable wit, and a ladies' man. I mean, to take that view of existentialism and its proponents, you'd actually have to know stuff. But, as Kristol never tires of illustrating in his columns, life is so much easier when you rely on conventional stereotypes and the dim memory of college course books you never read.

But back to World Philosophy. According to Bill Kristol, before existentialism, philosophy was all about feeling good. All philosophers were optimists. According to Kristol, their work was characterized by--and I love this phrase--"cheerful confidence." Isn't that perfect?

Plato's idea that we are chained creatures living in caves, seeing only shadows of the Ideal cast onto our barren cave wall by an unseen sun? That's optimism! See, he wants us to get out of the cave! That's positive thinking!

I'm not exaggerating. If you go back and read Kristol's column (although why bother when you could, instead, spend the time listening to Cat Power's version of Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again or reading Kierkegaard's Preamble From the Heart?), you'll see that my description of Kristol's views is actually--honest to God--what he's really saying in his column. Philosophy was all sunny and positive until the existentialists came along and said it was more "interesting" to be a "pessimist."

Here's where Tony Snow comes in. His great contribution, apparently, was to be a relentless optimist. He looked the existentialists in the eye and said, "I will not be afraid to cast things in a positive light!"

Obviously, the man was not the happy promoter of right wing ideology--the man of "cheerful confidence"--we all took him to be. He was, instead, some sort of philosophical genius.

To be fair, Kristol might be directing his remarks toward world literature--claiming that pre-Tony Snow it was all doom and gloom and that Snow's optimism made him an important literary theorist. As in any Kristol column, it's hard to tell what he's really trying to say.

In any case, I used to think I could never be a columnist for the New York Times. Now I see that I was wrong. I was assuming the standard was being set by Paul Krugman, he of the scruffy beard who never writes an extra word and is almost never wrong. But the standard is not set by Paul Krugman: He's the high bar. The standard for being a Times columnist at all--the minimum qualification-- is actually set by Kristol: His work is the low bar.

And so I say to the New York Times: Assuming you want the most intelligent and informed writing on your opinion pages, please consider offering me a weekly spot. I'm no Paul Krugman, but when I look at the work of Bill Kristol, five words burn themselves into my brain and I know I am right to think them.

"This," I always think, "this I could do."

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