lovely shop

Nora and I went into a very nice art and craft gallery in Inverary during our Scotland trip in May. I just got an email the other day tht they've launched their website. Check them out sometime (Natural Elements Crafts Gallery); they have some very lovely work.

hate speech, American-style

I picked up a number of subscriptions last year as a result of special-offer deals for salon.com subscribers. One of them was to US News and World Report.

Now, I recalled vaguely from high school (the last time I read it) that USNWR was slightly right of center, so I was surprised that salon.com was effectively endorsing them by doing a deal. But I thought perhaps they had mellowed over the years, gotten a new direction. In retrospect, I expect that Salon's sales and marketing staff probably make swaps that the editorial department doesn't know about, let alone approve of. I've found USN&WR to be a good deal more than right of center: they have a weekly section that apparently exists soley to praise whatever program the president and VP are engaged in and provide cute and folksy anecdotes about their daily life (devoid of detail about whose rights the adminsitration is quietly trampling on, how many grieving familes are wishign the president and his puppetmaster hadn't lied us into a bloody quagmire of a war to fatten their own pockets and stroke their egos). USN&WR hews closely to whatever line on Iraq and Afghanistan that DOD and the White House put out. They have lots of wholesome stories about America in which criticism of the rising tide of conservatism and religious fundamentalism is nowhere to be seen. And they delude not only their readers but seemingly themselves with their fulsome headline writing. A recent article was entitled "Fighting Fire On the Right: The feds are keeping an eye on homegrown extremists"; but actually reading the article revealed that "the feds" are keeping an eye only on a small portion of homegrown extremists--those on the left--while completely ignoring the demonstrably much more violent and dangerous right-wing extermist groups that the headline insisted were under scrutiny. The article also briefly mentions the cheerful fact that communication among national domestic security serivces is poor at best, and it ends with the comforting news that the feds are really only able to catch domestic extremists by luck.

But all that paled in comparison to the editorial penned by USN&WR senior writer Michael Barone that I happened to read this evening.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/050815/15barone.htm

A more vituperative, wrong-headed, evil-minded pile of cr*p I can't remember forcing myself to read all the way through in recent years. Read the whole thing if you have the stomach for it, but I think it is best summarized by its closing sentences. If it puts you in mind of a certain recent piece of wicked Republican hate speech, I shan't be surprised:

Multiculturalist intellectuals do not think our kind of society is worth defending. But millions here and increasing numbers in Britain and other countries know better.

In other words, it's all the pinko commie liberals' fault (again). Never mind that the premises of the piece, that multiculturalism promotes ethnic separatism, that multicultural society is without basic moral values, are total rubbish. Never mind that its arguments about modern historiography stand reality on its head: of course it's all lies, but lies so blandly and effortlessly told, lies presented with such a sense of mild grievance and defensive outrage that the writer almost dares the reader to point out their obvious falsity. But that's all by the by. Let's not quibble over details like truth or accuracy. Not when we can give the nasty liberals a soaking and blame them for hideous crimes. Why blame the actual *perpetrators* of the crimes, when with a little sleight of hand and a rhetorical flourish you can blame the real enemies--your own countrymen?

I've seen these sort of vicious lies and foul libel floating around the Internet, but to have the boldfaced effortery to actually print it in an editorial (not an op-ed, mind you, but a message approved by the periodical itself) is suggestive of a mindset that I want nothing to do with. I'll be writing to let the magazine know exactly what I think of it's Brownshirt cultural politics and where they can put the remainder of my subscription. But the fact that a national newsweekly thinks it can print such lying drivel and have it accepted by the reading public makes me unhappy about the tenor of discourse at the present time. What's next, internment camps for intellectual undesirables?