You don’t impress me
December 11, 2006
Respect should be earned, not handed out like Halloween candy. But the supposed authority of NY Times columnists drives me mad. The assumption being their credentials speak for themselves, and we can just shovel their shit into our minds.
Ignoring the fact that the majority of them are horrendous writers (Tom Friedman, I’m looking at you), adding voice and obvious opinion to a story that was on the front page two days ago offers little value. “No shit” isn’t the reaction you’re looking for.
But I read them anyway. So what exactly does that say about me? Perhaps that I’m an instigator who actively seeks out excuses to bash people in better places than I am? Could be true.
Or maybe I’m looking for ways to make it better. For once, I’d like to see a columnist assume a counter-intuitive reaction to an event and defend it. Just for shits and giggles.
In the last issue of Rolling Stone, Maureen Dowd slaughtered what could have been at least a remotely funny piece about Stewart and Colbert.
In the latest issue, Paul Krugman writes a DOA assessment of the growing gap between rich and poor.
Huge disparities of wealth give the rich the means to corrupt the system on their behalf.
No shit!
Or try to wrap your head around this little comparison…
To get a sense of how dramatic [the growth in the gap over the last 30-plus years] has been, imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of America.
Oh fuck, we have a line of people.
The are standing in ascending order of income, with the poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right. And their height is proportional to their income - the richer they are, the taller they are.
I’m keeping up so far.
Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line - representing those Americans living in extreme poverty - is only sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy on the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.
I’ve tuned this nonsense out, but isn’t there a more concise way to say this?
Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet [...] And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle - the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn’t changed. But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart.
“How to build a Nuclear Submarine” isn’t this complicated. What should I expect from an economist? This kind of writing. What should I expect form a respected Times drone? Something more than this swill!
I’ll leave the David Brooks and Tom Friedman bashing to Matt Taibbi.
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Pop an eye at Georgia’s assessment of the Week In Review.
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