I’m not a big fan of John Stossel, who hangs his hat, and his moustache, which was once the property of Harry Reems, at “Reason” magazine. John was once a hyperventilating talking head, à la Sixty Minutes, hyperventilating in the name of mainstream liberalism, until he saw the light à la Milton Friedman, and now he hyperventilates in the name of libertarianism.
As you can probably guess from the gleam of my innuendo, I’m not a fan, so when I came across a recent post by John, spiffily headed “Why I Hate The New York Times, my first impulse was to keep on going, but then I thought, “well, let’s see how stupid John is today”, so I skimmed it, easy to do, since John, basically a TV guy, tends to write in paragraphs that are one sentence long, and in sentences that are one line long.1
John begins by bragging about the fact that he lives in New York City, referring to the Times as “my hometown paper”. We get it, John! You’re a playa! The Big Apple is your scene! Then he bitches about the Times’ heads being unfair to Donald Trump, which I guess is possible. But then he latches onto something even makes me gag, “a nearly full-page “Style” section profile of black-clad antifa thugs. The Times made them sound fashionable and fun as they punch people who aren’t looking for any physical fight, just spouting their beliefs.“
The headline for this piece is "What to Wear to Smash the State,” and it’s disgusting as John says it is, if not more so, another instance of the banality of evil, and the banality of chic, at the New York Times. Somewhere in one of the closing volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust remarks, with inimitable Proustian irony, on the efforts of the fashion industry to prove its continuing relevance despite that unfortunate innovation in modern life known as World War I. Well, I am no Marcel Proust—I lack even the moustache—so I’ll have to let John carry the ball on this one.
Afterwords
The “Style” section of the Times is consistently gross, the copy turned out to provide an excuse for running the ads, which are, of course, beyond parody. I still remember a list of “must haves” that included a paté knife for $450, which, the Times told us with a straight face, took six months to make, which might be true if you allow for mining and smelting. Of course, if John were smart, he wouldn’t subscribe to the print edition of the Times, so he wouldn’t have to see “Style”, not to mention the even grosser “supplements”, devoted to items of conspicuous consumption so grotesque even the Times doesn’t carry ads for them on a regular basis.
I’ve bitched about the Times myself a lot.
- I’m not complainin’, I’m just sayin’. ↩︎
