{"id":38,"date":"2002-01-16T11:18:10","date_gmt":"2002-01-16T16:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/pundit_roundup_yeehaw"},"modified":"2002-01-16T11:18:10","modified_gmt":"2002-01-16T16:18:10","slug":"pundit_roundup_yeehaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/01\/pundit_roundup_yeehaw.html","title":{"rendered":"Pundit Roundup — Yeehaw!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nSomething awful happened today. I read
\nGeorge
\nWill’s column<\/a> and found my head nodding vigorously at several points. Ewwww.\n<\/p>\n

\nI had pretty much written Will off long
\nago, with the possible exception of his baseball columns. But here’s what he
\nsays about the Enron collapse:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nIt will remind everyone — some conservatives, painfully — that a mature capitalist
\neconomy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not
\nspring spontaneously from society’s soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns.
\nRather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores that guarantee, among much else,
\ntransparency, meaning a sufficient stream — torrent, really — of reliable information
\nabout the condition and conduct of corporations.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nPoor Will. That pretty much makes him a Stalinist, as far as his crowd
\nis concerned. I don’t envy him going through his hate mail bag tomorrow.\n<\/p>\n

\nOne interesting thing Will adds is that “a few capitalists have done more to delegitimize
\ncapitalism than America’s impotent socialist critics ever did or today’s moribund left
\ncould hope to. It is the Republicans’ special responsibility to punish such capitalists<\/em>.”
\n(Emphasis mine.) Hmmmm… if I buy that philosophy, then that means we liberals have a special
\nresponsibility to punish those who delegitimize our<\/em> side.\n<\/p>\n

\nWell! I am not one to shirk my duty. May I direct your attention to
\ntoday’s little
\ngem<\/a> from our old friend Charlotte Raven? You might
\nremember<\/a> her as the lovely<\/em>
\nyoung lady who, seven days after the Sep. 11 atrocity, informed us primly that
\na bully with
\na bloody nose is still a bully<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nIn her latest column, Raven claims that had Charles Bishop been raised in the UK,
\nhe would not<\/em> have committed suicide by crashing his small plane into a
\ntall building.\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nFor boys like him, school will always be a nightmare, but there is far more chance
\nover here that he would meet a like-minded compadre with whom he could share jokes
\nand swap notes about the monstrous pain of the universe. At some point, they’d discover
\nthe Smiths and both would be delighted by how perfectly Morrissey captures that
\nfeeling of being invisible to the people whose attention you most want to attract.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThe… “Smiths”? “Morrissey”…? Why, Ms. Raven, what are these… strange, exotic
\nbands you speak of? They… confuse and frighten me.\n<\/p>\n

\nNo, I couldn’t agree more. If only we here in the United States had any<\/em>
\nkind of outlet at all<\/em> for our kids with Goth angst. But none exist.
\nNo, Britain is far better at absorbing its misfits in a healthy manner, given
\nits far more easy-going culture and complete absence of class structure.
\nI mean, young British misfits
\nnever<\/a>
\ndo<\/a>
\nanything<\/a>
\nwrong<\/a>, do they?\n<\/p>\n

\nThe really amusing part is Raven’s comments on Marilyn Manson — that if
\n“Marilyn Manson were British he could have had a nice career singing songs
\nabout how it felt to be a sickly, spotty but highly intelligent young man
\nwith a wicked sense of humour and a perfectly comprehensible horror of
\nthe banality and hypocrisy of late-capitalist society.” Could it be…? The
\nhigh-and-mighty Charlotte Raven, scourge of warlike capitalist American dullards
\neverywhere, doesn’t get Marilyn Manson?<\/em> Any American with any
\nknowledge of pop culture understands
\nthat Manson is nothing more than an off-color over-the-top 24\/7
\nmarketing campaign. Could it be that we<\/em> get the joke and Raven doesn’t?
\nIt’s almost too much.\n<\/p>\n

\nAs an added bonus, Raven
\nhated
\nthe Lord of the Rings movie<\/a> (of course!) — but if I understand her
\ncorrectly, the movie would have been a success had the special effects been
\ncheesy<\/em>. She is quite disappointed with the movie’s seamless CGI:
\n“The minute Middle Earth is as real to us as Battersea or Burma,
\nit is no longer Tolkien’s creation… (Jackson’s) literal-minded insistence
\non shining a spotlight into every crevice makes the whole thing seem completely
\nbanal. If Hobbits are real, they are laughable.” Oh, dear, dear.\n<\/p>\n

\nI know, I know. I resolved this year: no more po-mo lefty silliness. But I just
\nran across<\/em> this one. I wasn’t actively trolling through the Guardian
\nwebsite looking for trouble, I swear. Scout’s Honor.\n<\/p>\n

\nAll right, I’ll end on a positive note. Kathleen Parker pretty much
\nnails
\nthe CNN-Paula Zahn-zipper promo “controversy”<\/a> in today’s Merc:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nStill, for a nanosecond of offensive flattery, Zahn got the attention the
\nad was intended to get, she got to decry the “insult” that she’s an appealing
\nwoman, and she gets weeks of coverage in which her professionalism is praised
\namid apologetic admissions that, well, she is<\/em> a little bit sexy. And
\nyou thought you<\/em> were having a bad day.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nParker also notes that the zipper sound was inaccurate: “I personally visited
\nevery closet in my house this morning and couldn’t find a single zipper that
\nmade any noise. With little ado, we’ve entered the era of the noiseless zipper.”\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Era of the Noiseless Zipper. What will our nation’s scientific geniuses
\nthink of next?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Could it be…? The high-and-mighty Charlotte Raven, scourge of warlike capitalist American dullards everywhere, doesn’t get Marilyn Manson<\/em>? It’s almost too much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}