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Pundit Roundup -- Yeehaw!

Something awful happened today. I read George Will's column and found my head nodding vigorously at several points. Ewwww.

I had pretty much written Will off long ago, with the possible exception of his baseball columns. But here's what he says about the Enron collapse:

It will remind everyone -- some conservatives, painfully -- that a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores that guarantee, among much else, transparency, meaning a sufficient stream -- torrent, really -- of reliable information about the condition and conduct of corporations.

Poor Will. That pretty much makes him a Stalinist, as far as his crowd is concerned. I don't envy him going through his hate mail bag tomorrow.

One interesting thing Will adds is that "a few capitalists have done more to delegitimize capitalism than America's impotent socialist critics ever did or today's moribund left could hope to. It is the Republicans' special responsibility to punish such capitalists." (Emphasis mine.) Hmmmm... if I buy that philosophy, then that means we liberals have a special responsibility to punish those who delegitimize our side.

Well! I am not one to shirk my duty. May I direct your attention to today's little gem from our old friend Charlotte Raven? You might remember her as the lovely young lady who, seven days after the Sep. 11 atrocity, informed us primly that a bully with a bloody nose is still a bully.

In her latest column, Raven claims that had Charles Bishop been raised in the UK, he would not have committed suicide by crashing his small plane into a tall building.

For boys like him, school will always be a nightmare, but there is far more chance over here that he would meet a like-minded compadre with whom he could share jokes and swap notes about the monstrous pain of the universe. At some point, they'd discover the Smiths and both would be delighted by how perfectly Morrissey captures that feeling of being invisible to the people whose attention you most want to attract.

The... "Smiths"? "Morrissey"...? Why, Ms. Raven, what are these... strange, exotic bands you speak of? They... confuse and frighten me.

No, I couldn't agree more. If only we here in the United States had any kind of outlet at all for our kids with Goth angst. But none exist. No, Britain is far better at absorbing its misfits in a healthy manner, given its far more easy-going culture and complete absence of class structure. I mean, young British misfits never do anything wrong, do they?

The really amusing part is Raven's comments on Marilyn Manson -- that if "Marilyn Manson were British he could have had a nice career singing songs about how it felt to be a sickly, spotty but highly intelligent young man with a wicked sense of humour and a perfectly comprehensible horror of the banality and hypocrisy of late-capitalist society." Could it be...? The high-and-mighty Charlotte Raven, scourge of warlike capitalist American dullards everywhere, doesn't get Marilyn Manson? Any American with any knowledge of pop culture understands that Manson is nothing more than an off-color over-the-top 24/7 marketing campaign. Could it be that we get the joke and Raven doesn't? It's almost too much.

As an added bonus, Raven hated the Lord of the Rings movie (of course!) -- but if I understand her correctly, the movie would have been a success had the special effects been cheesy. She is quite disappointed with the movie's seamless CGI: "The minute Middle Earth is as real to us as Battersea or Burma, it is no longer Tolkien's creation... (Jackson's) literal-minded insistence on shining a spotlight into every crevice makes the whole thing seem completely banal. If Hobbits are real, they are laughable." Oh, dear, dear.

I know, I know. I resolved this year: no more po-mo lefty silliness. But I just ran across this one. I wasn't actively trolling through the Guardian website looking for trouble, I swear. Scout's Honor.

All right, I'll end on a positive note. Kathleen Parker pretty much nails the CNN-Paula Zahn-zipper promo "controversy" in today's Merc:

Still, for a nanosecond of offensive flattery, Zahn got the attention the ad was intended to get, she got to decry the "insult" that she's an appealing woman, and she gets weeks of coverage in which her professionalism is praised amid apologetic admissions that, well, she is a little bit sexy. And you thought you were having a bad day.

Parker also notes that the zipper sound was inaccurate: "I personally visited every closet in my house this morning and couldn't find a single zipper that made any noise. With little ado, we've entered the era of the noiseless zipper."

The Era of the Noiseless Zipper. What will our nation's scientific geniuses think of next?

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 16, 2002 at 11:18 AM