Category: Rants

Earlier this month, the Council of Catholic Bishops (CCB) and other Catholic organizations flipped out at the potential for new health care laws to require them to offer contraception to employees and their insured dependents. This is not a bad point. A law requiring that was bound to cause controversy. Fortunately there was a simple workaround. The administration altered the rule to allow religious organizations to refrain from paying for or providing employees with any information about birth control, but insurers are required to offer it at no additional cost to any insured person who requests it directly or through a doctor. Since every insurer on the planet covers some kind of contraception, this would seem to be a fair compromise.

Shockingly, neither Bill Donohue or the U.S. CCB were satisfied. They retain "grave reservations" and remain convinced that Catholic organizations will end up having to pay for contraception indirectly. Their concern is somewhat odd, though.
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I mean, what contraception would they be paying for? Catholic doctrine proscribes it, so we can deduce that the (overwhelmingly Catholic) workforce covered by Catholic churches and non-profits wouldn't use it anyway.

Take a minute to finish laughing. Let me know when you're ready to continue.
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With so much attention focused on the Vatican, the Bishops, and other people in visible positions of leadership in the Church, the media end up overlooking the reality that few Catholics beyond a devout minority adhere very closely to its doctrine. As I assume is the case with all religions, most people who identify as Catholics, even if practicing actively or semi-actively, treat the rules of their faith as a buffet. They choose the parts they want to follow, disregard the rest, and overlook the resulting inconsistencies between their creed and their actions.

To wit, a recent survey concluded that 98% of Catholic women use or have used modern (i.e., not Natural Family Planning) methods of birth control. Even if we assume that this is an overstatement, it underscores a real gap between church doctrine and the beliefs of the faithful.

This raises the question of why exactly Obama is supposed to care what the CCB or other "Catholic leaders" have to say. Those people, by definition, are the strictest, most hard-line adherents to Catholic doctrine – which is to say that they are not representative of the U.S. Catholic population. Let's be frank: anyone devout enough to care about this decision isn't voting for Obama anyway. For the casual Christmas-and-Easter Catholic it's a non-factor.
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And of course there's nothing on Earth that Obama could do to please Catholic bishops, the Catholic League, and other religious right groups.

So why exactly is he supposed to care what they think or respond to their criticisms? These people are so used to being treated as important that they expect an elected official whom they will refuse to support anyway to dance for little more than their amusement. If he completely caved and gave them exactly what they wanted, they would declare victory and give him some kind of backhanded compliment before going right back to telling people not to vote for him. But the media need a narrative and something to fill airtime, so contrived drama about "losing the Catholic vote" and the bilious discharge from Bill Donohue's facehole will continue independent of facts, data, or logic.

One of the first times I clearly remember thinking that the entire world is run by crazy people was during the early 1980s moral panic about "satanic backmasking" in heavy metal music. Various religious groups and self-appointed moral guardians accused groups that were popular at the time such as Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin of hiding secret satanic messages in their songs, messages that would be revealed if the tracks were played backwards. Even at the age of six I understood that this was beyond ridiculous, and I began reconsidering my previous assumptions about the intellectual competence of grown-ups.

To be fair, backmasking is a technique that appears on a number of popular recordings since it was popularized in the Sixties by the Beatles. The problem is that the human brain is good at pattern recognition (it can find things that sound like words from a bunch of random noises) and it's even better at hearing what it wants to hear.
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If you're convinced that a backward Def Leppard song contains satanic messages, then lo and behold you're going to find some. So we destroy the line between actual backmasking done intentionally by artists and the figments of Jerry Falwell's imagination.

Many of you might not remember this wave of hysteria (complete with high-profile trials against bands accused of inspiring listeners to do horrible things with hidden satanic messages) but you see something very similar today in politics: the insistence that everything is secretly brainwashing people with the hidden liberal/gay/feminist/etc agenda. Remember when Tinky-Winky the Teletubby was secretly pushing the gay agenda?
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Or when the Muppets were secretly pushing a radical anti-oil agenda? Just two of many examples of creeping liberal brainwashing in action.

As soon as I heard about the Chrysler Super Bowl ad ("Halftime" starring Clint Eastwood) in the weeks leading up to the game, I was pretty sure that it would ignite a shitstorm of ridiculous accusations from conservatves about…something. It wasn't clear what or how, but somehow this commercial was going to be secret liberal propaganda. Sure, it stars lifelong Republican Clint Eastwood pitching cars for a quintessential Old Money megacorporation. That doesn't matter though. It's, you know, a secret Obama ad or something.

And of course that is exactly what has happened. The right's leading intellectual lights are lining up to accuse the ad – which was a parade of Chrysler vehicles under generic "America is awesome and will rise again!" sentimentality and stirring pictures/music/narration – of everything from being an Obama campaign ad to some sort of corrupt bargain with Chrysler executives who need to get Obama re-elected in exchange for the bailout money they received (from George W. Bush). I know that doesn't make sense to you or me, but that is because we are not paranoid wingnuts.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a song just a song, and a commercial for cars just a commercial for cars. Conservatives' wild imaginations ensure that nothing is really what it seems anymore.
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You can't see the subtle messages, but their trained eyes can detect the liberal agenda everywhere and they're eager to explain to the rest of us that essentially everything except Fox News, John Wayne movies, and old video clips of Ronald Reagan is thinly disguised left wing propaganda.

I have been of two minds about how to approach this. One option is to be thorough, do some research, and make a careful, reasoned argument about why the Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm is a marketing consultancy masquerading as a charity, a fact only reinforced by their recent actions regarding Planned Parenthood. The other is to put my gall bladder on the keyboard, crank the Dillinger Escape Plan, and let the bile-laced invective fly. Press A for the first option or B for the second.

That's what I thought. No one ever picks A.

As a preface, please consult Lea Goldman's outstanding, well-researched article "The Big Business of Breast Cancer", which represents what may be the one and only outgoing link to Marie Claire magazine I will ever offer. It details the proliferation of scams in the charity industry (a fitting, if oxymoronic, term) that has sprouted up around breast cancer. There are many organizations that use the funds they raise primarily to raise more funds and pay handsome salaries to the administrators and their talentless family members. It is a long read but well worth it. Note well the point that breast cancer research is hardly suffering for lack of funds. The author conservatively estimates six billion dollars funneled toward research annually with almost no progress made since the 1970s.

Second, just in case you missed what all of the fuss is about, the Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm For the Cure^tm announced on Wednesday that it will no longer be making grants/contributions to Planned Parenthood for early breast cancer screenings for the poor and/or uninsured. Nothing says "We're committed to stamping out breast cancer by encouraging regular, early mammograms" like eliminating funding for mammograms.

OK.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm has been on my personal shitlist for many years (this post is from 2008). If this is what it takes to get you on the heretofore lonely Screw Komen bandwagon, so be it. But you should not have a low opinion of Komen^tm because of their announcement on Wednesday. You should have a low opinion of them because they're a fake charity run like any other company with a product to sell. In this case the product is a combination of guilt, pity, and hope dissolved in a weak acid and dyed a nauseating pink.

Wednesday's decision has been described as motivated by pressure from pro-life groups, but in reality Komen^tm is (and always has been) run by right wingers and closely aligned with conservative politics. The organization's current president, Karen Handel, ran for governor of Georgia in 2010 and lost in the Republican primary. Sarah Palin endorsed her. During her campaign she promised repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood. She took over Komen^tm a few months ago. You do the math. On a personal note, Karen, I hope you get cancer. I hope the doctors find it too late to do anything but treat your pain, and I hope they do a poor job of that. Cut and paste that at your leisure to prove how mean-spirited and Uncivil liberals are.

Komen's founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, is a big money Republican with ties to the past three Republican administration who received a political appointment from George W. Bush as a reward for her fundraising largesse. She draws a salary of $459,000 annually, money well spent compared to the 39% of its budget the foundation spends on "public health education" (i.e., marketing itself). Not to mention that they also spend a million bucks per year in legal fees to threaten other non-profit groups who use the phrase For the Cure^tm, to which Komen^tm claims to have intellectual property rights.

That last part is important to the organization, of course, because every successful marketing campaign needs a good logo and a slogan.

And that's all Komen is – a consulting firm that helps large corporate clients sell more of their products through pinkwashing campaigns. By slathering everything from pasta to baseball bats to perfume to fast food with the Pink Imprimatur, consumers are led to believe that their purchases are making meaningful contributions to breast cancer research. Somewhere down the line a few cents per purchase may trickle into those bloated coffers, but the immediate and motivating effect of that pink packaging is to get you to buy things. In short, Komen^tm is a group of salespeople selling image. Whatever money benefits the sick, researchers, or recovering patients is ancillary. Getting those big, fat tax-exempt checks from their Partners for the Cure^tm is what drives their business model.

Am I too cynical? Consider their lack of discretion in choosing Partners^tm. Nothing says "We're serious about stomping out cancer!" like a pink bucket of fried chicken or pink bags of deep fried snacks. It's ridiculous on that "Earth Day brought to you by Ford" level.

There is a special circle of hell devoted to people who conceal their own selfish behavior with the appearance of charity and good deeds. I suppose that people who make so much money on the suffering of others need some way to look their spa-treated faces in the mirror every morning, but the rest of us need not be deceived. I have never purchased a Komen^tm-labeled product and I hope you will make a similar arrangement with your conscience today. Playing politics with people's lives is low, even by the withered standards of morality in the corporate world. The 60% of women whose breast cancer is detected before it metastasizes survive almost without exception. The 40% of women whose cancer is detected after metastasis almost inevitably die within five years.

Regardless of whether they cave to public pressure and reverse this decision, I would love to see the Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm and its self-aggrandizing, silly publicity stunts reduced to ground zero. I want corporate sponsors to feel like they'd rather put a swastika on their packaging than another Komen^tm logo for fear of a public backlash. And I want to prove that charitable giving is not wedded to the act of shopping. And since I'm so much better at pointing out what's wrong with everything than at offering solutions, here's what you should do if you want to help the fight against breast cancer:

1. Donate directly. Call or visit the Sloan-Kettering or Johns Hopkins/Avon cancer research institutes and ask how to make a donation that will go 100% toward research. Or donate to the American Cancer Society, which contributes less to research but does a lot of quality-of-life things like buying wigs or prosthesis for cancer victims. Donate locally to a hospital or hospice in your area that will use your money directly on patient services rather than commercials and administrative salaries.

2. Donate your time. One afternoon helping Chemo patients by cleaning their home or running their errands is worth more than all the yogurt lids in existence.

3. Say no to fake activism and Cause Marketing.

4. Remember that people die from things other than breast cancer.
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Cervical and ovarian cancer are overlooked. Men needlessly die from the reluctance to get regular prostate exams. AIDS is still a thing. Heart disease is the #1 killer of men and women.

Depression is a leading cause of death among young people.

5. Share this with as many uninformed people as possible. On Facebook, via email, or whatever.
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Show them Lea Goldman's article. Explain patiently why Planned Parenthood is used as a pinata by every floundering right wing political figure to score cheap points and get the rubes whipped into a frenzy. If you encounter said rubes directly, insult them. Suggest that his or her parents were related prior to marriage.

I spend my days at work looking through vast quantities of public opinion data.

Nothing I see is surprising anymore, and most of it is, if not predictable, easily explainable. A throwaway poll from the South Carolina primary, however, left me scratching my head. Among voters who stated that religion matters "a great deal", 46% voted for thrice-married serial adulterer and pretend Catholic Newt Gingrich compared to only 10% for Mitt the Mormon.
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Not being a practitioner of any organized religion, I understand the factionalism and various interdenominational rivalries adequately but not completely. I get it that evangelical Christians (let's safely assume they made up the vast majority of religiously inclined South Carolina GOP primary voters) have extremely negative views of Mormonism. It was clear that this would be an issue with his candidacy from the outset, but I never really processed it or attempted to understand it.

All religion is based on faith, and specifically the belief in miraculous events. Don't flip out here. What I mean is, Christians believe that Jesus performed miracles and rose from the dead. As people cannot rise from the dead (or, in the case of lucky Lazarus, be risen) one can only base a belief that such things occurred on considerable faith in a higher power. I'm not making fun of anyone. This is simply the reality of believing in something that can't be empirically validated. As such every religion, logically speaking, is equally plausible. The only reason Mormonism gets more crap is because the miraculous events upon which it is based occurred more recently and thus are treated with a greater degree of skepticism. Mohammed and the Buddha and Jesus and the gang were lucky to exist before photography, the telegram, and newspapers. Not so for ol' Joseph Smith.

My point here is that while the core beliefs of Mormonism may appear silly to the non-religious or merely the non-Mormon, they're no sillier (or less plausible) than the stories of the Old Testament or the Bhagavad Gita. It all requires the willing suspension of the laws of physical reality and a belief in a supernatural power. Fine. So why do born-again Christians have such fanatical hostility toward Mormonism? While Catholics, Jews, mainline Protestants, and other major religious groups in the U.S. may not be Bestest Buddies with the LDS church, they seem to be tolerant and not openly hostile.

Recently it hit me that the issue is not based in religious dogma (Mormons do not, as Evangelicals often claim, reject the divinity of Jesus) or in codes of conduct (Mormons reject most of the same behaviors rejected by Christians, including polygamy, gay marriage, and other hot-button political issues). It's about competition. The megachurch dwellers hate Mormons because Mormonsism is a proselytizing religion, one that has been phenomenally successful in the past few decades. When George Romney ran for president or governor in the 1950s and 1960s nobody cared that he was a Mormon because Mormons were as common as Zoroastrians. Now there are over 14 million Mormons and LDS missionaries (Sound familiar?) in 167 countries according to the church.

In competing for the same customer, if you will, Mormons have the distinct advantage of being almost absurdly friendly and outwardly tolerant of other belief systems, whereas the average ultraconservative Christian Bible-banger has a mouth like a puckered asshole and uses Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards as a blueprint for spreading the word. Mormonism has slick ad campaigns (they have billboards all over Atlanta, commercials on every TV network, and a sponsored YouTube channel that pops up at least once daily for yours truly) and they distance themselves from the anti-intellectualism of the Christian right. It's the kind of thing that middle class people – particularly Hispanics – appear to find appealing, based on the number of new recruits. And like other parts of the Republican base, the Christian right is terrified at the prospect of losing the Hispanics as a potential recruiting pool.

This isn't Ed's Ringing Endorsement of Mormonism. To me it is no better or worse than any other religion. The point is that the Pat Robertson crowd is scared shitless of the success and polished appeal of the LDS church, not any particular aspect of its dogma.

Since so many religions differ wildly from evangelical Protestantism, I can't think of a more plausible explanation for why Mormonism is singled out for such intense hatred.
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Why not Gingrich's Catholicism, with its blasphemous Roman popery? Why not Judaism? Why not Islam? Oh wait, I guess they do hate that last one. Different reason, though.

I am not the world's most open minded person. I detest Scientologists, Juggalos, and the Irish. OK, just the first two. But my reasons are rooted in their beliefs and practices. I'm becoming convinced that the anti-Mormon sentiment on the right is based on something entirely different. Megachurches are in constant competition with each other and with other religions to put more butts in seats. And they're getting very worried that this new kid on the block, Mormonism, is to Evangelical Christianity what digital photography was to Kodak film.

This has been a minor news item at best, but I've derived a good deal of enjoyment from the not-quite-infamous Rand Paul TSA incident. For the unaware, Paul Jr. refused a patdown search at Nashville International Airport (as subsequently released security video footage shows). Eventually he was turned away at the security checkpoint. While he was calm during the incident, he turned into a great big ol' drama queen afterward and blew the incident beyond any reasonable proportions. The speed with which the Paul Sr. campaign turned this into a talking/debating point – Trampling the 4th Amendment! Tyranny! Loud Noises! – suggests that the entire incident was premeditated and staged for political effect. The campaign hysterically described the event as Paul Jr. being "detained indefinitely."

“The police state in this country is growing out of control,” Ron Paul’s campaign said. “One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe.”

Wow, what a compelling controversy.

The TSA is of course a signature issue for the paranoid Liberty-loving Pauls, and the bedraggled agency has become a lighting rod for criticism from conservatives of all stripes in the past few years – surely you recall the enthralling "Don't touch my junk!" brouhaha from 2010. It's the kind of don't-you-dare-inconvenience-me hissy fit that stands in for a serious discussion of political issues in this country. The rich irony, of course, is that the TSA is direct creation of the right-wing histrionics that followed 9/11. On the one hand they demand the illusion of security provided by wars, technology, and lots of people in badges performing searches (badges being the Authoritarian-Follower personality type's version of a favorite blankie). On the other…you know, privacy and The Constitution and I'm a Very Important Person who doesn't have time for long lines at the airport.

These apparently contradictory urges actually make sense as long as we recognize that right wing suburban America does want more airport security, just not for themselves. Why is the TSA inconveniencing all of us with searches? Why don't they just pull the brown people out of the line and search them since we all know who the real terrorists are anyway? People like Rand Paul want a TSA that accomplishes the primary task of government as people like him see it: making white people and people with money (to the extent that the two groups do not overlap in his mind) feel safer. It's the best of all worlds, an America in which the the people with badges keep their eyes on the colored folks while good God-fearing patriots like Us are left to enjoy our freedom.

I can't read Rand Paul's mind, but let's say there is smoke suggesting fire on this issue. You may recall his statements against the Civil Rights Act during the 2010 campaign, or perhaps Ron Paul's various statements suggesting some problems with race issues (note that his "plausible deniability" argument regarding his newsletter evaporated last week thanks to some good investigative journalism). Maybe the Pauls are true Libertarians, or maybe they have some racist tendencies, or maybe they're just garden variety modern conservatives who demand total freedom and total security simultaneously – for themselves, of course. Everyone else is fair game.

Automakers talk more about fuel economy and new technologies now than ever before, which is less impressive than it sounds given that they didn't give a flying crap about efficiency or evolving their technology until about 2005. The public is now regularly exposed to messages about how this-or-that new technology has heralded the arrival of the efficient, non-polluting car, which is largely ridiculous. Some cars are more efficient and less polluting than others, but regardless of whether you drive around in a Nissan Leaf or one of those "I have a small dick" Ford Super Duty trucks you're still consuming energy that originates from fossil fuels. We haven't seen a true technological breakthrough in this area until there is a vehicle that consumes no fossil fuels and can be refueled without being plugged into a charging station for several hours. Hybrid cars, for example, use less gas than a normal car (excluding diesels, which are popular in Europe but still pariahs here) but the basics of how they get from point A to point B are the same. You put in gas, you go until you run out, and you put in more gas.

All that said, if you're gonna drive it's obviously better to have a vehicle that uses less rather than more. Hybrids and plug-in hybrids, even though they are technological stopgaps at best, make sense.
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Last year Chevy (part of "Government Motors", as our rapier-witted colleagues on the right call it, especially those ignorant of the fact that the first bailout payments came from George W. Bush in an effort to push the automakers' bankruptcy into the Obama administration) released the first plug-in, range-extended vehicle, the Volt. It's expensive because the technology is new, but for those willing to take the plunge it offers the ability to travel about fifty miles on electricity and then engage a small gasoline engine to recharge the batteries. The end result, accounting for the power that it draws from your home, is a vehicle that gets the equivalent of 93 mpg. That's pretty impressive.

So we have an American-designed vehicle, built in Detroit and its suburbs, that represents a substantial leap forward in technology.

And it's probably going to be a flop because Republicans are desperate to see anything related to GM fail. Because they love America so much, they want to kneecap the company and its products in an effort to score cheap political points against Obama to the presumed delight of their legion of mouthbreaters.

Last year a Volt's battery pack caught fire after a crash test. And by "after a crash test" I mean three full weeks after the vehicle was totaled in a side-impact crash. Just so we're all clear: the thing didn't burst into flames on impact (as cars full of flammable liquid sometimes do, of course). It was crashed, left outside in a parking lot for three weeks, and then developed a fire in its smashed battery pack.

Non-story.

But the House GOP, led by Darrell Issa – yes, the only convicted felon currently serving in your Congress – have decided that they can accuse the administration of conspiring to conceal this incident, supposedly to protect their cronies at GM (who, for the sake of their argument, let's pretend actually exist). Their theory is apparently that the NHTSA failed to disclose the fire "quickly enough"…what exactly that means is neither clear nor, for Republicans, relevant. In the process they have publicized the hell out of this crash test incident, culminating with televised hearings before a House committee today. There a GM higher-up patiently explained to Inmate Issa that the battery fire could only be reproduced in testing by impaling the battery pack with a steel rod and waiting several weeks for the fire to start, leading to this revealing exchange:

GM's Akerson stood up for the Volt, saying that the fire that's caused so much commotion only happened "after putting the battery through lab conditions that no driver would experience in the real world," according to his prepared remarks. Strickland said NHTSA "pulled no punches" in the Volt fire investigation – which recently ended after finding the Volt to be a safe car – but Issa was having none of it. He told Strickland: "I hear you, I don't believe you."

In other words, "The facts don't align with my talking points, so you must be lying. Also, Obama bad."

The end result of all of this, if today's flurry of news items about the hearings is any indication, is that the buying public will probably associate this model with fires. Every headline contains some combination of the words "Chevy Volt" and "fire", and products that develop reputations for being unsafe, whether or not it is warranted, tend to have a hard time shaking it. Like everyone over the age of thirty automatically associates "Ford Pinto" with "exploding gas tank", our Country First^tm GOP wants to make sure that Americans think of Chevy Volts as giant bombs that will, like, electrocute your kids and then set their corpses ablaze.

It's pointless, it's counterproductive, it's selfish, and it's a great example of how scorched Earth tactics are the sum total of what the modern GOP is capable of doing. The party that exists solely to suck up to corporate interests is proving that it will even throw those under the bus if they happen to be between it and more power.

The recent death of Christopher Hitchens, like all deaths of semi-famous people these days, prompted a wave of tweets, posts, and social networking eulogies ensuring that for one day we all paid more attention to Hitch in death than we ever did in life. While that dynamic is strange on its own, what puzzles me more is the way that so many people spoke fondly of him for his willingness to say unpopular things and his general reluctance to give any shits about offending people.

That's worth a closer look.

There is little doubt that Hitchens was a talented writer. At his best he was a skillful, provocative raconteur who found great joy in taking shots at the powerful.

His takedown of Mother Theresa was classic Good Hitchens; I mean, who takes shots at Mother Theresa?? Well as it turned out, he made quite the argument that perhaps she was not the living saint she was made out to be. This is good writing. He was also the rare media loudmouth who was willing to stand behind his opinions. When the editor of Vanity Fair challenged Hitchens, who had spoken dismissively of claims that waterboarding amounted to torture, to receive a waterboarding, he did it (and concluded, obviously, that it's hard to imagine what is torture if waterboarding isn't). The bottom line is, anyone who reacts to the death of Jesse Helms by penning a column entitled "Farewell to a Provincial Redneck" is doing something right.

At his worst, Hitchens was little more than an unusually eloquent drunk, a misogynist, xenophobe, and warmonger who seemed to take leave of his critical thinking skills when the question of scary brown foreigners reared its head. He described his pro-Western worldview as a matter of "defending civilization", but in practice it looked a lot more like garden variety Islamophobia (arguing that the Iraq War death toll was "not high enough") and neocon foreign policy frames.

He argued that women are not funny in a manner that he considered unbiased, rational, and unemotional, but the end result was a rant worthy of any drunk in a bar ranting about his ex-wife. He painted Michelle Obama as a race-baiting militant out for Whitey on the basis of a paper she wrote in college suggesting that black students feel alienated on campuses that are almost entirely white. These are not the attitudes of a critical thinker – they are the knee jerk reactions of an old man quite comfortable with the social hierarchy that places white Anglo-Saxon men firmly at the top. We'd expect to hear such arguments from Glenn Beck, and we often do.

Hitch fans have always been eager to excuse away these outbursts as ideas with which we don't agree, but for which we still tip out hat to the author for continuing to champion unpopular viewpoints. He is one of the most frequent recipients of the "Well I didn't agree with everything he said, but blah blah blah" type of praise one reserves for people we antiseptically call "controversial." The problem is that there is no inherent value in saying unpopular things.
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Some of these unpopular viewpoints Hitchens put forth are unpopular because they are stupid, without intellectual merit, or simply offensive. The Westboro Baptist Church has unpopular views. So does Michele Bachmann. So does Thomas Frank. Do all three deserve our praise?

Hitchens is probably compared to HL Mencken more than any writer in the past half century, and for good reason. They were the leading dyspeptic commentators of their day, using pens filled with bile to write scathing obituaries of the powerful and aggressive criticisms of the popular.
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But Mencken was also a racist, a reactionary in his own right (though he detested that quality in others) whose ideal world saw women in the kitchen, the colored folk in Their Place, the world subservient to American interests, and people like himself exalted. There is nothing courageous or laudable about that. Does it mean that nothing Mencken, Hitchens, or any other flawed personality may have written is without value? No. But the tendency to praise them for their willingness to say controversial things is a strange one. The popularity of a viewpoint plays no role in determining its merit. To applaud him for bravely writing sexist, racist, or culturally hegemonic ideas suggests that we are glad that someone said such things. I for one am not.