Wish I'd said that
From Whiskey Fire via Eschaton:
(T)he Right Wankosphere(is) compelled to adopt a tortuous stance of "civil discourse" in order to pinch-hit for the intellectual capital they sense they lack, an attitude that in the end amounts to the contention that their insane enthusiasm for incompetent warmongering is a perfectly reasonable "intellectual position" simply because they don't use the word "fuck."
posted by bluememe at 1/01/2007
5 Comments:
Fuckin' A right!
Mister Bluememe-
I read that whole jargonated post at that blog because you were pleased with the punchline at the end? Now that's devotion for you. You are a much better writer than that person. The points they make in the post are a fair critique of "movement conservative" discourse, I suppose. I just think they could have done it without the thesaurus and the extra few paragraphs accumulated as a result. In the comments at that post, a nasty troll said that the author "writes like John Kerry talks." While I don't agree with the troll's whole statement, that part was spot-on.
Hmmm... Maybe I'm just slow on the uptake. Maybe that post was intentionally jargonated (as parody) to show how elitist "Movement Progressives" feel the need to show their intellectual superiority to their "average" readers. Not sure, but I think I've just spent far more time analyzing this than it was worth. If there was a joke there, I guess I'm just not smart enough to figure it out.
Randy:
Now that you mention it, I felt like I was working too hard when I read the rest of the post.
I have a funny relationship with that kind of writing. On the one hand, my writing idol is Raymond Carver. (If you aren't familiar with his fiction, get thee to a library. He is IMHO the greatest minimalist ever -- makes Hemingway look prolix.) On the other hand, my own writing, absent heroic effort, tends to go in exactly the opposite direction. And I can enjoy the work of (other) show-offs, if there is a payoff. So if I am motivated, I enjoy the challenge of following writing even more convoluted and complex than my own. Here I was motivated by the awesome punch line, which in a sense made the stuff that came before a sort of shaggy dog story -- maybe the last line would not have been funny without the build-up. (OTOH, it was Atrios' link that get me there, so perhaps that isn't it either.)
Anyways. Thanks for the compliment.
Well, sorry about the jargon. It's a fair comment.
If my basic point came through, though, and it provided a laugh, well, thanks -- I'm grateful, seriously. Anyway, this is genuinely useful criticism, the best kind. Thanks.
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