>rom a NYPress review of my old comrade Norman Solomon's new book:
>
>"There's a reason why the left, or what America calls the left, has
>an image problem, and it's not all due to right-wing propaganda. It
>has an esthetic that turns off ordinary Americans. The Left won't be
>caught dead eating at Jack in the Box. It doesn't know how to make
>dick jokes and it doesn't know what the blue line is for. It writes
>long pseudo-literary articles about boxing, but it's useless in a
>bar fight. Its vision of the future is one in which all vices except
>pedantry are strictly regulated-no sex, no rap music, no
>snowmobiles, no snorting smack with models in fur bikinisŠ Even its
>writing, and particularly its political writing, is joyless and
>condescending. The lefty writing style is characterized most
>particularly by a preponderance of irritating literary winks to its
>fellow tribe members, nervous little verbal tics that are the
>intellectual's idea of secret frat handshakes."
>
><<http://nypress.com/16/8/books/books.cfm>http://nypress.com/16/8/books/books.cfm>
You should have said it was by the excellent Matt Taibbi!
The paragraph preceding that says:
>You can talk all you want about suffering Iraqi children and the
>long-term consequences of using depleted-uranium ammunition, but
>you're not going to convince some frustrated cubicle slave in
>Lawrence, KS, with a fat wife and forty grand in credit card debt
>and a spare tire that makes him sick with self-loathing every time
>he sees the cover of Men's Health, that he doesn't want to bomb the
>shit out of somebody, anybody, at the earliest conceivable
>opportunity, for the first reason you make available to him. He
>knows better than you what he wants. And your timid little pile of
>"facts" and tepid appeals to some abstract morality, aren't going to
>cut it. Throw in a treacly afterword by Sean Penn (which this book
>has) and you've lost him a good hundred miles before the starting
>line.
I think this is a bit too misanthropic, but Matt's not one for subtlety. And he's got a point.
Doug