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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

MORE ON EASTERBROOK'S END OF YEAR LETTER


UD is puzzled by fellow blogger Fenster Moop’s response to Gregg Easterbrook’s end of the year letter (to read the letter, see below, UD post dated December 30, 2004):


I found Gregg Easterbrook's tongue-in-cheek holiday letter both fun to read and difficult to take. I am a somewhat reluctant blue-stater, but I am a blue-stater nonetheless (as well as a boomer and a bobo). I work hard to have Easterbrook's pen not point at me, and do a passable job of it, but my bone is not that far from the surface and it's not difficult to cut close to it.”


I’ll put aside questions of how specifically “blue state” and “bobo” the attributes of the woman writing the letter are (Drop her reference to Mandela, and couldn’t she as easily be writing from Arizona? Is her corporate greed and guiltless abuse of her maid bobo?) and simply ask how closely Moop - a thoughtful, morally serious contributor to the 2 Blowhards blog - can in fact identify with this woman.




Easterbrook’s satire is fun, but like most serious satire it conveys contempt for its object -- in this case, a boastful, arrogant, belittling, cheating, oblivious, money-grubbing American hog. Many variants of this woman exist in red as well as blue America, but rather than raging at them as they dose their kids with Ritalin and hand them the keys to the Hummer, Easterbrook has chosen satire.

UD would respectfully like to doubt Fenster’s assertion that he needs to “work hard” to escape Easterbrook's penpoint. Everything she has read of Moop’s suggests that it’s not hard for him to be a decent person. Which is all one needs to evade Easterbrook.