Here's the column for this week; let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown Brooklyn, NY 512-560-2302
Notes from Bushwick
It would probably be best if Hunter S. Thompson had never lived, or,
rather, if he were to be kept secret
from certain people, such as those who want to write like Hunter S. Thompson.
I myself have encountered here in Bushwick
some half a dozen young males who had gotten it into their heads that,
by virtue of having done a few drugs and perhaps gone on a wacky road
trip one time with their kooky friends including one totally craaaaazy guy they met in college who was always doing craaaaaazy
stuff and was totally a huge druggie and once smoked a joint, like,
just walking down the street in broad daylight, man, that they would
thus write a successful book. Perhaps they would weave in some politics
by way of dialogue, such as when they arrive at a friend's house the
next state over and split two grams of shrooms between the five of them and talk about how Cheney is the antithesis of the American dream.
One fellow actually handed me a manuscript of this sort and asked me to
read it. From what I could tell of the single scene I read
after having promised to read all of it, the characters were doing the whole talking-like-real-people-talk thing with regards to sex and relationships, and then they discussed selling a hit of ecstasy to somebody. Later, there was some driving.
I occasionally
wrote crap of this sort when I was 18, stupidly exuberant, and starting
out as a freelancer. It's a fine thing that these articles are no
longer accessible via the web, because if they were I'd have to kill
myself, and that'd be even more cliché than the other stuff. Notes from the Outside World
A lot of people other than me should be killing themselves over Google.
Among the nation's many institutional
failures that have risen to obviousness over the past decade, there is
one that may be pointed to as having been partly responsible for all
the others, but which will nonetheless never be addressed by the
American punditry as a whole. This failure is that of the American
punditry as a whole.
I'm not referring here to the most
egregious and well-known examples of the manner in which failure is
rewarded in the realm of professional political opinion; anyone who's been paying attention is aware that William Kristol
spent much of the past decade filling his columns and television
appearances with predictions that turned out to be dead wrong, but that
he was nonetheless provided with additional columns in both Time and The New York Times even after his failures had become undeniable. The incompetence of the hard right in dealing with facts and the indifference
of the moderate media in dealing with the hard right is no secret to
anyone except those among the hard right, who remain convinced that the
liberal media is out to get them and will tell you as much in their
columns, themselves duly published by outlets of the liberal media.
What has gone less noticed even among the well-informed, though, is the widespread incompetence of many of our nation's most respected left-of-center columnists. New York Times staple
Thomas Friedman, for instance, won the Pulitzer for commentary back in
2002, and his several books are fairly ubiquitous features among the
nation's more expensive, wood-paneled bookshelves. He has meanwhile
developed into something of a hero among upper-middle class moderates,
leftists, and even some conservatives,
together finding themselves in rare agreement concerning Thomas
Friedman's alleged talents as a chronicler of the world and related
subjects.
Friedman does deserve some credit for having
managed to cloak his mediocrity for years and in full view of millions
of newspaper readers. But as I recently demonstrated at greater length,
it takes only a few minutes with Google to reveal that Friedman couldn't predict a menopausal chick's period. In 2001,
for instance, he called on the American citizenry to "keep rootin' for Putin," whom he described in glowing terms as a positive force in Russia's struggle to adapt free market policies, transparency, and the rule of law. This is not just a ridiculous prediction of the sort that takes years to disprove; it was demonstrably
ridiculous at the very moment when it was written, by which point
Putin's fascist tendencies had already been on display for years (as
other, more competent analysts had already pointed out, Putin was
almost certainly involved in orchestrating the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, a probable false flag attack intended to provide Russia with a casusbelli against Chechnya, which it subsequently
re-subjugated with typical viciousness). He stated several months into
the ongoing U.S.-Afghanistan conflict that he had "no doubt, for now,
that the Bush team has a military strategy for winning a long war,"
objected to the idea that Afghanis
were concerned about civilian casualties, and proclaimed early in 2002
that "the Taliban are gone." And, of course, he called on the Democrats
to start thinking "seriously" (Friedman-speak for "hawkishly")
about Iraq lest the party "become unimportant." This was in 2005. And
there are dozens of similarly assertions to be found among the
poorly-written annals of Thomas Friedman. This will not deter The New York Times from providing him with a platform from which to infect the American reading public with his nonsense because the editors of The New York Times simply don't give a shit.
Also, just look at the guy. Look at him. He's all like, "Hey, let's have a dialogue!"
