Tanenhaus! You Peckerwood! Cover 'Em Up If You Got 'Em, 'Cause Us Ivy League Bitches Is Packin' Now!

[purejuice]

I love New York City better than life itself, actually, but the newspapers -- my life's work -- can be so head up ass sometimes, and on the very same problems, for decades, I do despair of human nature.

Sam Tanenhaus' remarkably cretinous essay on how Hollywood and Karen Finley didn't predict the Amy Bishop massacres. He's the editor of the NYT book review and his cultural references are schlock movies????

My response:

this is a curiously anaerobic piece of logic which conforms to what i call the charlotte fedders syndrome: it's not news until it happens to a white girl.

the essential question here is the same one that got bishop off the hook when she shot her brother 20 years ago and refused to drop the shotgun when ordered to do so by the second of two policemen. a woman of color or a man in those shoes? would have been dead by now. or in jail for fratricide.

what has captured mr. tanenbaum's attention is the whiteness of the criminal. which is all too typically provincial of male supremacist newspapers.

two words: khieu ponnary.

and consider the cases of the child soldiers of the khmer rouge and everywhere else in the world, including your local gangsters: give a child a gun and he becomes a killer. imagine that.

I called him Tanenbaum.

So shoot me. You know where to find me.

Comments

[the-sikh-geek.livejournal.com]

Before the end of the second paragraph I hit this speedbump:

"And the alienated teenager, that fixture of modern American life, didn’t fully exist until J. D. Salinger, with his faultless ear and attentive eye, coaxed him into being."

No need to read further.

Except I went to this line:

"or Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biodefense expert who, the F.B.I. concluded last week, committed anthrax terror in the aftermath of 9/11"

Yep, the FBI certainly had a slam dunk of a case with that one, conveniently convicting a dead man with scant proof well after the fact.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

So very awesome and I totally hadn't thought of this.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

I will note, apropos of everything, that Albert "Tick Tock" Tanenbaum was a hit man for Murder, Inc., in the 1930s.

What the hell was in the NYT's coffee?

[fengi.livejournal.com]

In the very same edition we get this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/t-magazine/28talk-women.html) reassuring us that the Whitney Biennial has no angry feminist artists like Barbara Krueger.

[villagecharm.livejournal.com]

If I read it right, he's somehow holding it against artists that they didn't see this coming. That seems like an odd complaint. Surely Amy Bishop's husband might have seen it coming, but Karen Finley?

[orso-amoroso.livejournal.com]

NYT had some schlock thing on Jeff Bridges, someone facebooked the line about "Lebowski was his Raging Bull".

I was all "wtf?!". It was shit. I couldn't read it.