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Defending etc McDonald's etc
1.
I hope that WS is under 16 years old.
2.
Um. Okay. Chris Emery. I don't know if he's been defended yet, I might
have missed it, but I think a couple of words should be said (for the
man, not for his particular words), especially in light of Linford
naming the name. (And, really, I'm betting that Linford *wouldn't* have
used Chris's name if he had refined that unintentionally-attached portion
of his message.) (Note to literary critics: while the ol' intentional
fallacy embodies a really good point about lit crit, I think we also need
to acknowledge that sometimes some texts have specific purposes and
audiences, as the text in question, those 2 original down-on-the-list
paragraphs, was probably intended for an audience of maybe two, three if
you count Willow.)
Chris has been on the list since before most of you were born. . . . .
. . Okay, that's an exageration. But Chris really is a long time OtR
fan. And I've seen Chris say really provocative things before, playing
the list imp role. I don't know if that's good or bad. Whaever the
case, the imps around here have occasionally sparked off good
discussions. I do know that by and large Chris's impact on the list was
not bad, and it would be a shame if this one horrendously inappropriate
comment caused him to never come back here again. It would also be a
shame if no one admitted that to those of us who've been around for a
while, Chris has a certain ethos, and he was not wrong to lean on that
ethos, which allows him to say slightly shocking things. Everybody knows
somebody like that, and Chris was that. This is not to say that he
didn't lean too hard on that ethos this time.
But--this is sort of important--it seems to me (I could be mistaken) that
the comment came across the web before the absolute severity of the
situation was apparent. I know that when I first saw the TV footage I
had visions of firemen on the top floors of the WTC. I hadn't thought
about the heat of those fires. I hadn't thought about potential energy
and gravity. I hadn't realized exactly how many people go to work in
those buildings.
I wouldn't have so rashly said what Chris said, but, in his defense, it
hadn't all sunk in yet. If it had, then Chris probably would have
hesitated.
3.
One more issue.
WS has been picking up a few conservative points and making a botch of
them. Any good satirist (how lamentably few there are) knows that the
surest way to discredit an idea is to place it in the mouth of a fool.
Unfortunately, I don't think WS is Noam Chomsky getting some kicks. But
I do think he really has lowered the bar for conservative thought on this
list.
May I recommend www.nationalreview.com for some very interesting
pro-"profiling" articles which do not depend on fear mongering and do
explain fairly well why profiling might have not a thing to do with
racism and why failing to profile might itself be racist. Use the search
function. Not everybody is "on" at NRO all the time, but there's quite a
lot of good thought. National Review Online also took on on Edward Said
last week, to decent effect:
www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/nr_commentprint101101b.html and
www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowryprint101101.html.
Also, for anyone impressed or perplexed by Noam Chomsky's widely
circulated response to 9/11, which I found many times more offensive than
anything Mr. Emery has ever said, David Horowitz has posted an
interesting two part response. Horowitz is a major sixties student
radical leftist rabble rouser who decided he was dead wrong about 20
years ago. He has since become a conservative rabble rouser, and he's
good at it. Sometimes his mouth/keyboard gets ahead of him, but not
always, and when he's on, he's on. He's written two articles, "The Sick
Mind of Noam Chomsky" parts I and II, which I found very important.
www.frontpagemagazine.com/columnists/horowitz/2001/dh09-26-01p.htm and
www.frontpagemagazine.com/columnists/horowitz/2001/dh10-10-01p.htm.
These were published both at salon.com (premium) and frontpage magazine
(for free). The second deals--at length-- with objections to the first.
The reason I offer these up is some of the very easy
America-kills-folks-all-the-time talk that has been coming up on the
list. I don't have the energy to debate it right now--it would be sort
of a full time job. I'd say something like this: living conditions in
the States are really, really great compared to any other country in
history, I think; and, as a bonus, our government is more benign than any
other superpower in history. We got problems, yeah. But we don't have
the kind of problems you find outside of the capitalistic/democratic
areas. There are a million little objections to that, I realize. What'm
I gonna do? Post a whole conservative screedo here? Not appropriate or
helpful. I'll just let Horowitz et al stir the waters for whoever cares
to look into 'em. (Recommending articles and books might, I think, be a
good way to keep some of the endless debate off list. Mightn't it?
Let's keep that in mind.)
Oh! One more goodun for the right leaners:
www.nationalreview.com/05june00/goldberg060500.html. It's Jonah Goldberg
(brilliant lad) defending McDonald's. Yup. More interesting than you
think, no matter what your political leaning. C'mon. I know us. Every
one, just about, on this list, sometimes looks up at the golden arches
and shakes his/her fist: "Corporate! Impersonal! Yucky!!"
This is me sticking around,
Fred
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