Can you tell I'm feeling cranky today?
My mood wasn't helped by the arrival in today's mail of the current issue of The New Yorker.
There is much about The New Yorker that I enjoy and admire. Their cartoons are the best around. They publish some splendid fiction. They capture much of the excitement and vitality of New York City.
But they've become such rabid Bush-haters that I believe it's time for us to part company when my subscription runs out at the end of the year.
I found this week's cover art particularly egregious - the American flag over the faint shadow of the hooded Iraqi prisoner from Abu Ghraib, arms outstretched and trailing electric wires. As if harassment milder than what I bore as a fraternity pledge could somehow overshadow what happened to those twits' own hometown on 9/11. How soon the memory of the fireballs and the rain of doomed WTC victims fades from the memory of people who reflexively loath their own country.
Truth be told, The New Yorker's parochial self-absorbtion was wearing a bit thin with me. For the most part, they're pseudo-intellectual jerk-offs who are desperately out of touch with what the rest of the country thinks. While NYC is a city of immigrants - people with the courage to strike out and leave home for something better - I think the editors and writers of The New Yorker are descended from people who were too comfortable or too timid to expand the frontier as most of our ancestors did.
They can teach us nothing, but have much to learn from us. So why pay $40 a year to be annoyed every week or so by their pointless jabbering?
I'm confident that they would receive a cancellation notice from me with supreme indifference, so I'll be content to let it go with this.
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