-----Original Message----- From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of / dave / Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2000 12:06 AM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: cigars
Tom Lehman wrote:
> This sounds like it was written for people who take their professional
wrestling
> seriously.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune is just about the worst (goddamn) paper in the US, as any listers familiar with it will attest. Written and presented with a contempt for its readership that can be understood as a kind of ill-conceived paternalism, almost an infantilization of the reader masked as "clarity" of style. This supposed clarity is actually a near-complete lack of depth, content, and analysis, a watered-down fishwrap of a paper for a reasonably well-informed municipality that deserves better. The editors frequently toe the home-town corporate line in a kind of slavish boosterism that has as its basis the idiotic assumption that the world will be rent asunder should the fragile local status quo alter the slightest bit - the complete antithesis of the very essence of life in a modern metropolis. They are insufferably boring and predictable to read and what remains after they pass their benighted hands over the heads of their followers and underlings is, with a few exceptions, mediocrity run amuck. Their smug, self-satisfied liberalism, which they understand to be reflective of a cornerstone of civic pride, is especially hard to swallow in the present circumstances. And the Star Tribune is one of the few papers which is actually painful to look at and to read - others may be merely bad or espouse points of view that one might take issue with, but at the very least they don't reside in a stylistic vaccuum where insultingly banal, uninviting prose is held in the highest regard.
That's as honest as I've been all week...
As for Jesse the Body, the occasional forwarded articles aren't meant to be indicative of any implied level of support so much as just pointing out some of his quirks and hijinks. It's worth remembering that we here in Minnesota are presently governed, perhaps for the first time ever - anywhere? - by a bona fide Cartoon Character. (Credit to a friend of mine for pointing this out.) What's more, this cartoon character draws himself, a first if there ever was one. He's got it down cold. For that reason alone, owing to his place in the scheme of things, he's worth keeping tabs on.
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/ dave /