I'm from New Orleans and I'm glad to see someone trashing the established narrative about my city. Almost every single article I read in the national press gets it all wrong in ways that are both subtle and glaring; what they all have in common is a desire to push some political agenda. The right doesn't care and they don't hide it. They are greedy, unscrupulous wolves and relish their cruelty. The left, on the other hand, seems to operate more insidiously: the sick delectation with which they hustle to the camera old black ladies who watched their grandkids drown and who think white people blew up the levees is disgusting. As this article illustrates, the left's perverse obsession with victimhood at the hands of authority and the narrative constraints it imposes automatically disqualify the boring, everyday crime that is truly hobbling New Orleans right now. I am not a Republican or a right-winger but I am disgusted by the left's sickly ideology and bottomless appetite for those carefully selected, picturesque instances of injustice that allow them to remain in a permanent state of shrill, hysteric, victimhood. The national Katrina narrative is no more or less accurate than the 1987 hit "The Big Easy". "The Big Easy" was very inaccurate.

These guys don't sound like real red-staters. There is of course plenty of hypocrisy in the red-state discourse but these clowns do not even come close to capturing it. What they do capture, well, is the worst of the left: eternally devoted to impotently mocking the right, perversely attached to the position of loser, full of resentment for the masters they depend on and whose ankles they bark at when the master rolls out to the store to buy 3 gallons of milk for the kids.

"My So-Called Life" was invoked in the introduction to these four essays. I was in tenth grade when the MSCL characters were in tenth grade. I am the same age as Claire Danes. I was a nerd with curly hair like that nerd with curly hair. This show was praised for its verisimilitude, and realistic it was. I did not watch it regularly because I did not like it. I did not like it because the characters were cliches in a much more insidious way than were the characters on "Saved By The Bell", i.e. they were cliches in the exact same way that most teenagers, and, mutatis mutandis, most adults, are themselves already cliches. I will even go as far as to say that the nerd character from MSCL was actually MORE of a cliche than Screech from SBTB because he was presented as being three-dimensional. Screech was certainly thinking the same thoughts as the MSCL nerd as Zack and Slater riffed on him: fuck these guys, they don't understand my pain...The nerd exterior, as well as the Claire Danes exterior, are precisely propped up by the kind of banal hopes & dreams & inner pain kind of voiceover that, although in appearance "profound & personal", are in reality just the boring flipside of the boring outside. These essays continue in that vein: they are the commodified "inner" versions of the commodified "visible" teenage girl stereotypes that we all know so well, not the vulgar SBTB stereotypes but the more dangerous "I'm more complicated than I look" stereotypes a la "American Beauty". There must be some teenage girls out there who are writing more original essays than these, essays about something other than boys, divorce, status, friendships...we are all pathetically tied to these stupid narcissistic worries and concerns - I just as much as the "grinding" girl - but that doesn't mean we have to consecrate them by writing about them.

I just want to say that Sarah Palin has the kind of hard, closed face and erotically null "beauty" of one of those creepy "dirty housewife" posters on amateur porn sites. She also seems full of a certain kind of stone-cold ruthlessness and resentment particular to certain women.