And the Wank Goes On…
By Read this, but make the following adjustments:
Replace every “Kanye West” with “Jonah Goldberg”.
Replace every other rap artist with a random conservative writer.
Replace “listening to rap” and similar phrases with “reading the National Review”
Replace “Grammy” with “election”.
Adjust as appropriate.
For example:
Jonah Goldberg is one in a long line of the canned rebels the National Review has been peddling to kids for years.
I’M IN NO position to judge the merits of Jonah Goldberg’s writing. I stopped reading the National Review when you could still find Gary Wills in its pages. These days I think it’s mostly just noise.
When people tell me, “Oh, but it’s technically very complicated,” or “You don’t understand how much work goes into it,” I’m reminded of a scene from “Don Quixote”: A man walks to the center of town and gathers a crowd for the show he’s about to put on. The man picks up a dog and inserts a tube into its rump. He begins to inflate the canine. The crowd watches, fascinated. The dog grows larger and rounder. Eventually, the man pulls the tube out and the air escapes loudly from the poor pooch’s rear as it runs away. The man turns to the crowd and asks: “You think it’s easy to inflate a dog with a tube?” Moral: Just because someone works hard at something doesn’t mean it’s great art.
That’s my disclosure for those who’d charge me with not “getting” the National Review: guilty as charged.
But I do think I understand marketing and public relations, and I am astounded by the naivete of young people — black and white — who actually buy the canned rebelliousness not just of the National Review but of most conservative literature.
And a bit further on…
IT’S ALL SUCH an obvious con game. We hear so much about how kids today are cynical, skeptical, media-savvy and so forth. But if they’re buying this hooey, they’re idiots.
When asked by the National Review if he’s worried that his outspokenness might cost him an election, Jonah replied, speaking in the third person: “Jonah is always opinionated and outspoken, and now that it’s election time he turns into a house nigga? Come on. That’s not even realistic.” Right, but the suggestion that a political movement that dominates every branch of government is a pariah, never mind suffering from Christlike persecution, is entirely plausible?
And…
As far as the American political scene goes, Jonah Goldberg is the man, but he won’t admit it. Instead, he sells himself as a victim of a society that can’t handle his truth. Millions of magazines sold and saturation adulation in the media suggest that it can handle his truth just fine.
The problem is, it ain’t the truth. It’s just a scam for kids too stupid to recognize they’re being played — again.
Want to be a real rebel? Read a book.
Hat tip to BBB.