Salt City Sinner

posted 10/31/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Perhaps the best political or literary take-down of my generation was penned by Matt Taibbi in response to Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat." In the review, Taibbi notes the peculiar quality that distinguishes Friedman from the usual beltway idiots ( link ): The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of one word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays...Thomas Friedman does not get [metaphors] right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always  screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest detail without genius. in a like manner, Paul T. Mero, alpha brain at Salt Lake City's conservative Suth...

posted 8/20/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Everybody loves an underdog. Exhibit A: Now, even if you are not a sports fan, you might have seen and probably enjoyed the movie 'Rudy.' This enjoyment can be taken too far, of course - once upon a time I had a corporate gig where our incoming employee orientation included a screening of the above scene to get us "jazzed up" about locum tenens healthcare staffing. A very obnoxious trope that is found in a vast majority of American cinema is the "triumph of the underdog" - you know, every movie has to have the third act, where the hero loses everything and we suffer in agony with him as the odds stack up against him. Then, in Act Four - hey, presto! our hero triumphs over the vastly overwhelming forces of evil to win the day! This love of the underdog has a dark side that has metastasized most odiously in America. You see, not only does everybody love to see the underdog take down the uberdog - at this po...