I was reading the arts section of The New Republic, and came across a five-page book review of a new biography of Jonathan Edwards, the 18th c. hellfire preacher. "Cool," I thought. "I was just thinking about him. This mag kicks the ink out of the NYer."
And then I was reading Slate, and they had a link for a book by John Edward, that daytime crapsack who says he can talk to your dead Grandpa. Very similar name, but dissimilar guys!
A better writer than me could come up with a whole day's entry from such a confluence. It'd be about how we used to have wingnut church leaders, but they believed in something, damn your eyes! But today we've replaced that unhinged indignation with unthreatening wingnuttery.
But I've got a different wingnut to fry on today's grill. We gotta talk about this Lileks guy I keep linking to.
As a writer, he is the freaking tops. His daily bleats are to this website what Pearl Jam is to a Creed cover band.
But as Pearl Jam oughta know, the shrillness of the message can severely undercut the melody that brought fans by in the first place. One day you're driving around singing, and it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that The Clash were political nutjobs, or that John "a brotherhood of man" Lennon was a bully and a jerk. And in order to keep on enjoying the song, you have to start ignoring the logical side of your brain.
Similar problem w/Lileks. Like most everyone who argues about this stuff, he's been a bit radicalized since Iraq. From my point of view, he's walked off the dock. He was always a champion beater of strawmen, but it was a lot more fun when it was Mariah Carey getting the stuffing knocked out of her.
But I could ignore it, because every other day he just wrote about idiots on the street or his daughter or something similarly innocuous. But then in tonight's bleat he mentioned quickly that he appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show. I knew the name was familiar, but I couldn't place it. So I Googled him.
Queue Darth Vader theme music.
Ohhhhh dang it.
There are two types of people. Those who yell at the TV/radio/computer/newspaper when it condescends to us, and those who don't. I'm one of the former. I yell at the inanimate object, and then spend the rest of the day thinking about how someday I'm going to bump into my TV/radio/computer/newspaper and I'm gonna be all like "Yo, watch where you're going," and it's gonna be like, "Whatever. Bitch." And then I'm gonna yell, "Oh it is ON!" and then I will thrash that mouthy little media delivery device until it apologizes for willingly misleading the American people and poisoning the public debate.
I don't know of anyone who does a better job of bringing on these, these... these introverted man's roid rages than Hugh Hewitt. The guy exists to create excess bile inside of me. He creates it quicker than Ted Rall (Lefty loosey) or William Safire (Right tightey).
And he's no one! He's Hugh frigging Hewitt for crying out loud. Nobody even knows who he is. But based on just a few articles and one exposure to his radio show--during which I almost went full nutsandwich and called in to yell--Hewitt earned his own private puke chute in my torso. The doctors pointed it out on the mono CT scan.
Even faced with knowledge of this relationship, I'll still read Lileks. But now I have to pick around the website like it's a second-rate salad bar. I have to ignoring the moldy ideas. Just like I have to ignore "And no religion too" when I hear Imagine, like I have to pretend I don't know that the Sex Pistols have some downright Nazi-ish lyrics on albums I don't own. I hate doing this.
So if anyone has dirt on John Prine, Garth Ennis, or the collective staff of The New Republic, kindly keep it to yourselves, and I'll try to spare you all from overt political arguments, so as not to lose the readers I've got. Shake? Shake.
