I used to like Slate when it was owned by Microsoft before it was bought by the Washington Post and became a dumping ground for noted “gin soaked popinjay” Christopher Hitchens. Well here’s a note I found in a USA Today article about unofficial iPod tours:
“Slate.com posts art critic Lee Siegel’s downloadable tour of what he considers the most overrated and underrated paintings in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
Is Siegel any better at properly critiquing other people’s work than at characterizing his own? Let’s take a look at what Siegel wrote in the comment section of his own blog using a deceptive alias–via Daily Kos:
“Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.”
Blogger Scott Lemieux offers this about the laughable dismissal of Siegal from his blog at tnr.com (the New Republic online):
“Really, Siegel’s blog was a national treasure–that level of onanism doesn’t come along every day. Now, the question is who will replace him: Ben Domenech? John Lott? Ann Coulter?”
Good question. Well it looks like they are going to try to bore us sheep for a while with something called “Open University.” This is from the site:
“To the best of our knowledge, this blog is unlike any other out there. It’s dedicated to thinking about not just the news of the day but also the news from the academy: Controversies in campus politics that warrant thoughtful discussion.”
Well it looks like they want to launch an online center for stoking controversey over Middle Eastern studies at Columbia and screwing Juan Cole’s career. Or something like that. Those Slate readers walking around the MoMA might be Hitchens fans who might anyway enjoy a dishonest, arrogant mouthpiece for power guiding them–anyway back to the “popinjay” bit–the man who used that term was George Galloway, MP for Benthal Green and Bow in East London. Mr. Galloway recently wrote in the Guardian‘s blog about the war in Lebanon:
“Practically the only person in the world who claims Israel won the war is George Bush – and we all know his definition of the words ‘mission accomplished’. Reports that the Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, expressed regret this week at having underestimated Israel’s response to the capture of two of its soldiers were misleading. In fact, Nasrallah thanked God that the attack came when the resistance movement was prepared, as he was convinced Israel would have otherwise invaded later in the year at a time of its choosing.” How did this “time of our choosing” phrase become popular? I think George W. Bush used it to code “we’re going to Iraq” as a matter of when not if. Another language change, picked up by some media, is the recent repetition of “Democrat Party” instead of Democratic Party. This tactic is just a sad exhibition of typical Republican disrespect and arrogance (perhaps they have convinced themselves that this is a clever if Orwellian re-branding, but it just sounds unsophisticated to me). But an even more interesting media talking point is the strange overuse of the term “embolden.” It seems to me that the old horror story about “emboldening the terrorists if we leave Iraq” has been meta-projected by many media talkers and touts onto all sorts of non-Iraq-related matters. This passage appears near the start of a NY Sun article:
“Iran’s mullahs, emboldened by Turtle Bay’s waffling on the Lebanon crisis, are moving quickly to consolidate their gains and solidify their seat in the no longer exclusive nuclear club.” It can’t go over well when a club loses that clubby feel. But wait, there’s more. Here’s the title of the article:
“U.N. Actions Embolden Hezbollah”
So let’s just say that there appears to be a lot of embolde
ning happening on the Middle East scene. It seems that the idea that the enemy (or whoever) can be “emboldened” seems to imply an enormous amount of potential control, giving the ones who shouldn’t be doing the emboldening ability to affect the will and determination of the antagonists. Perhaps these antagonists need to be given more credit for being autonomous and not exclusively reactive in their motivations. What of other uses of this strange verb, not passive but actually active–but in a strange way. The Peublo Chieftain uses the term in an article about the arrest of fugitive Warren Jeffs: “Jeffs’ arrest should embolden law-enforcement officials in the southwest to further crack the iron-fist hold that Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints leaders have on their communities.”
So it seems to be all over the place, and I don’t really understand how such a strange concept as “embolden” is conducive to reason.
[photo: webshots.com]