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NY Times Op-Ed contributor Gail Collins has a sense of humor. She thinks we’re mad, changeably so, like the Mad Hatter. She pokes gentle fun at the March “hate” she says has replaced January’s “hope”.
[We're] Angry. So very, very angry. Unable to speak due to mega-anger washing over every pore and fiber of my being. Anger is in. (Hope’s so … January.)
Mr. Obama campaigned for two years on a message of audacious hope. But Mr. Bush left him with a mountain of trash, took the keys to the garbage trucks and fired all the union street cleaners. He even left a White House communications system so antique it was more likely to keep the RNC, dressed as Mata Hari, informed than Mr. Obama.
To manage an impossible workload, Mr. Obama has resorted to playing the same hand as Mr. Bush. He’s temporarily kept his cards for torture, domestic spying and secrecy, when we wanted him to draw three new ones. He’s kept at the table card sharks from among Mr. Bush’s US Attorneys, like the pair in Alabama, Alice Martin and Leura Canary. Never mind. For Ms. Collins, it’s more fun to normalize, like a soccer mom managing unruly teens who’ve lost their last game.
I hate everybody in the world of finance. Also accountants, since it’s tax time.
And I’m totally angry at everybody in Congress for trying to pretend that they’re angrier than I am. Like Senator Chuck Grassley saying the A.I.G. execs should follow the Japanese model and “resign or go commit suicide.” Took him about three seconds to backtrack. “Inteligent journalist can’t recgnize rhetoric,” Grassley twittered.
Yes, Ms. Collins, Main Street Americans are peeved. We sometimes feel like prisoners behind barbed wire, while the Allied soldiers from inside the Beltway dither over whether to release us because they fear it will stop their onward march. The AIG debacle and Obama’s adoption of Bush’s secrecy and spying powers make it seem like we survived eight years in the Bush desert only to find that our first responders are giving all their attention to the sunburned guys at the pool in Palm Springs.
Public dissatisfaction is how Main Street makes its will known to those hermetically sealed inside the Beltway. It’s the public equivalent of K Street’s champagne, caviar and a lap dance. Don’t begrudge us our bowl of gruel and then give us snark when we ask for more.
Rather than say, “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” pitch in and help, Gail. Stop playing journalistic soccer mom. Be a journalist and tell your readers what the public might legitimately be unhappy about. Then use the Times’ power to help fix it. And, yes, making it funny would be welcome.
12 Comments
Just who the Fu*k is Gail Collins? AFAIK, no one is so pissed off they can’t speak.
Ms. Collins, like David Brooks and Paul Krugman, has a regular gig on the New York Times Op-Ed page. According to her Times bio, she joined the paper in 1995, has sat on its editorial board and edited its Op-Ed page, as David Brooks did for the Wall Street Journal before joining the Times. She has over thirty years experience in the newspaper business, has written several books, and is now a regular columnist for the Times.
My critique was about her tone. The public, like DFH’s, is mercurial and the elite should not take it too seriously. From time to time, the villagers (as opposed to the Villagers, who can do it at will) feel the urge to grab their pitchforks and remind the gentry they won’t take everything lying down. This, too, shall pass, she seems to say.
Eight years of the excesses of George Bush, whose anti-regulatory zeal helped give us the current debacle on Wall Street, an already huge deficit, two foreign wars and an economy in long-term free-fall, seem like more than “nothing to get hung about”, as a John Lennon said in Strawberry Fields.
The anger is legitimate and past due. Ms. Collins wants to tamp it down, to keep things humorously in “perspective”. The question is who’s perspective, Main Street’s, Wall Street’s or K Street’s?
earl, I think you might not quite understand whose anger it is that Collins lampoons. It’s not the publics’.
This is snark, not criticism:
This, too, which ignores Liddy’s de facto compensation, including front-loaded money, perks and marketing power he gains from taking a job at a nominal $1 a year. Ditto the “turnaround artist” whose kept Delphi in bankruptcy for three years, with no obvious signs of being able to get it out.
Ms. Collins is gently mocking the idea of “hate”, its inconsistent application, the hypocrisy of those who claim to feel it. She is mocking Congress, in part, but more so the public. Just as the Times derided as “shrill” those who sharply criticized Bush for conduct meriting censure or jail time. It’s a technique to de-legitimize well-earned criticism, while pretending to be balanced. A NYT specialty.
I would be very leery in suggesting that Collins’ follows any NYT specialty. I would also go slow in suggesting that she doesn’t share in the indignation that you and I share about AIG and the greater mess.
I think, as you say, that the column is mocking Congress, but in great part. Where she mocks the public it’s not because of the public’s anger, but, I would venture, because of the way the public is allowing it’s anger to be channeled.
I’ve got to confess that I’m inclined to a fond interpretation of her writings ( duh!) based on have read her stuff for most all of her thirty years of writing,
I don’t think so.
Tristero over at Digby’s place:
having read
sorry, trouble with edit
I’m more inclined to agree with Tristero, cited above. Ms. Collins is often mildly liberal and I’ve appreciated her other work. That’s why I find today’s column mystifying and wholly unpersuasive.
She seems to mock the display of anger as much from the public as from hypocritical members of Congress who now claim, like Sgt. Schultz, to “know nussink” or to have opposed what they earlier pushed, or vice versa (whatever fits today’s PR need). As Tristero says, her humor fails to get across any particular message except a timid, George Bailey-like lament of a pox on both your houses. The Times Op-Ed page is too valuable a forum for such wasted effort.
The NYT op-ed page is a very strange place. I once wrote that any neocon in New York on a drunk who could hold it together long enough to scratch something out on a napkin could get it published on the NYT op-ed page.
It’s current editor is David Shipley but I blame Andrew Rosenthal the editorial page editor for its embrace of neoconservatism. And of course on the news side there is Bill Keller and above them all the not quite there Pinch Sulzberger.
This from Keith Olbermann is a fine example of articulating and channeling the public’s rage in a constructive way. Ms. Collins might prefer humor as a better tool to make her point, but her example today seems phoned in by comparison and is not up to her usual high standard of work.
Best theory is that the column does not make a lick of sense, and that she does not know what she is trying to say.
When you hear hoofbeats in Nevada, think horse, not zebra.
Occam’s Razor? Perhaps. I give Ms. Collins and Sulzberger’s editors more credit. She knows what she wants to do, and sometimes that’s to defuse and befuddle.