Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 214 Editor's Choice: 36
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faux altruism
[Read the article: The unbearable whiteness of being]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wolverine said:
It's not only attacking the motives and morality of folks who aren't doing anything but trying to live better and smarter; at its heart they're trying to say it's laudable to live like nothing matters but you. The consumptive life is righteous, the efficient life is not. It's a Conservative thing.
But, see, that's just it. That's what this blog is all about: good intentions commodified.
Sure, I use reusable shopping bags. They're sturdier and hold more groceries than the plastic ones. But the folks Lander is ridiculing don't just use the standard 10/$10.00 kind I have (and maybe you do too), with the name of the local supermarket chain (NOT Whole Foods, btw) printed on the side. Noooo--they have to have the "right" kind (http://gothamist.com/2007/07/18/im_not_a.php). I support Obama, have since he came to prominence in 2002 in my state. Maybe they're Obama cultists, too. All fine and dandy while it lasts, but don't get too starry-eyed--when the cultural zeitgeist swings right, the privileged white upper middle class will, too, with all the fervor of religious converts. (I worry that they all claim to support Obama because it's hip and demonstrates how non-racist and evolved they are, but in the end they'll end up voting for the white guy.)
Case in point: remember the Sixties? At some point, a lot of those boomers stopped dropping acid and picked up briefcases and NIV Bibles and became neocons and the Christian Right and brought us Reagan and the Moral Majority. They still puff themselves up and talk about how their generation changed everything...but they sure don't nostalgize about how they subsequently helped put us on the road to ruin.
Yeah, there are faux liberals, wolves in sheep's clothing, and maybe Lander is one of them, I don't know. But there are also the sheep themselves, and when a herd of sheep panics, you don't want to be in the way.
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how do you know
[Read the article: The end of men]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]that in this womanless world of yours, men, even self-identified straight men, wouldn't be fighting over teenage boys?
Just askin'.
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Lizza, you, sir, are no Helen Thomas.
[Read the article: Obama campaign taking revenge?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I love it when the overgrown junior high school cool kids masquerading as "journalists," who comprise the East Coast media "establishment," put down their fruity cocktails, wrap themselves in the Noble Robes of the Fourth Estate, and start screeching about freedom of the press and media manipulation and whatever.
I'm guessing that if someone of the caliber of Helen Thomas gives Obama a hard time about FISA or campaign financing or revisions to his Iraq timetable or whatever, Obama's still going to take her seriously and give her pride of place in the Press Corps, even if she spends the whole press conference hectoring him with difficult questions.
But the cliquish, elitist New York media for whom Obama is simply the amusing progressive flavor du jour are not Helen Thomas. The New Yorker is like Playboy, only all the masturbation is mental. I really only buy it (occasionally) for a Seymour Hersh article, and end up riffling through pages and pages of in-crowd gossip, neurotic, pseudointellectual personals for Ivy Leaguers seeking other Ivy Leaguers, and ads for a tract by some medieval Jewish rabbi purporting to claim that Jesus never existed. It's a pretentious literary tabloid, is what it is, and Obama has no responsibility to give a seat reserved for a real journalist to a parasitic, pseudointellectual gossip columnist who's probably never set foot in the same state as the people that cover was purportedly ridiculing and who will fawn all over him just before stabbing him in the back.