Ambivaloid
: Kurt Andersen, in an interview with Minneapolis’ The Rake [via Romensko] reveals that he and Graydon Carter are thinking of coming out with a Spy retrospective — good idea; I know someone who’ll love that (and so would I).
He also talks about his decision to support the war, “ruefully and fretfully,” which he wrote about in the NY Times magazine.
But to be anti-anti-war isn’t the same as being pro-war, and that’s the sort of the weird ambivalent gray zone where I was for a long time, and still remain, I guess….
On this particular thing with Iraq, I can’t understand how anybody can have absolute conviction on either end, frankly. So I’m both a contrarian, I guess, and a kind of chronic ambivaloid.
That, as near as I can tell, is a coinage — no Google references at all for ambivaloid — and it’s a good coinage. In these days of strong opinions, on cable TV or on weblogs, to be amvibalent is to be contrarian.
