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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
prytania
Published Letters: 231 Editor's Choice: 5
Way to go, Person!!
"Meet and Greet" okay?
I assume that you are not taking the bait to literalize a cipher?
Title: "Religion"
Text:
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
However, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Furthermore, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Please pay me a thousand dollars.
This is the kind of piece that once led me to pay for a subscription to Salon. It is smart--yes, it does have (omigod) a thesis--and well-written for a general audience. Even though Reynolds has it in him to plop right into jargon (a word like POHMer would have alienated 99.9% of his audience), he writes for smart people who have enough interest in the arts to give his piece a click. Salon used to treat movies and tv this way, too, before it learned the Power of Snark.
I do not pay for the political blogging and religion/anti-religion baiting that has, it seems, become the signature of today's Salon. One I can get better on more established blogs, and the other serves mainly to attract rage junkies.
Whom can you recommend? What atheist would best fit the bill for President?
Don't. Do not snark. No matter how loudly some little voice tells you to, don't give in to cheap sarcasm. Today's reflexive snarker is tomorrow's sentimentalist.
The stupidity of some Salon readers is breathtaking. The moderates and even the liberals of SC (and other regions that get reflexively looked down on) recoil when we are made the punchlines of moron city-slickers' cliched "jokes."
U pluribus unum, y'all.
One thing, though: Don't blame all of the negativity in contemporary American politics on Rove. The Bushies' earlier (and better, in an evil way) ratfucking "genius" cut his political teeth working for that "former governor" whose son is Mike Campbell. Take a look at how Carroll Campbell's campaign against Max Heller for the Fourth District Congressional Seat led to push polling as we know and love it today--and see what name first came to prominence when he suggested that particular poll.
Just glancing at Goodceleryexclamationmark's 319 letters (!!), I'd say that he or she is more likely a plagiarist, a too-rational sucker for Be-Bop's sub-Joycean affectations who has too much self-respect to commit to Be-Bop's nonlinearities well enough to do the job exactly right.
Regarding Salon's refusal to police these pages for off-topic comments and rage-spewing drivel: Haven't you noticed that the Opus letters page has turned into the local VFW on just about any Saturday night, full of cranky veterans who hanker for the old days when their dicks were hard, their bowels were functional, and penguins knew their place?
"Paglia is a tired old broad. Ad hominem arguments are the mark of lazy thinker."
"This is the first article I've ever read in Salon that was shallow and borderline stupid."
"[M]y English teachers always told me never to start a sentence, much less a paragraph with a conjunction[.]"
1. What did I ever do to deserve the ill treatment? For heaven's sake.
2. Lick me.
Used to be, poetry was essential, even to laid-off workers.
W.C. Williams:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
An article about anti-intellectualism gets fourteen whole pages of letters discussing anti-intellectualism before it turns into God.What God?My God.Whose God?Our God.NO God banalities.
Umm--who feels like breaking the bad news to Moira Kelly?
And do it much better (which is NOT necessarily true of every subject South Park treats).
He just doesn't seem to be trying this week.
Well, yeah. I am an Obama voter and a college professor, and I see how I might get in a jam the next time I bust a kid for doing exactly what Obama did.
In speeches, of course you do not cite sources. But you can give a little shout-out: "As my friend Hillary Clinton once said, 'Bill, put down that cigar.'"
Anything not cited does, in fact, imply ownership.
The aforementioned does not change my voting preferences even a little (Would that Edwards was still around!), but, yes, there are academic standards at work here among this gaggle of law profs.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
