Snarking has been part of the air we breathe for a long time. It is said to have entered American pop culture in the 1950s, with Mad magazine, Stan Freberg, and so on. Not at all. They were practitioners of the honorable art of Satire. They exaggerated traits rather than punishing them. There was affection involved. Snarking has come into its own as a rhetorical style in this age of the internet. The web simultaneously allows anybody with a computer access to a worldwide audience, but the probability of complete invisibility. You can speak, but in a sea of so many words, no one will hear. You can win listeners by writing something worth reading, but you can win them more easily by snarking. When you snark the famous, you not only associate yourself with them, but propose yourself as their superior. This is so essential to the process that I have never observe the snarking of an unknown person.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?

ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

always remember you’re somebody’s child

What I noticed caught me a bit off-guard. There was a story on the threat of terrorism, which started off with a historical gloss of Al Qaeda activity from the 1990′s to the present. While there were the obligatory-and-expected digs at Clinton’s supposed passivity, these digs were evenly spread when it came to GW’s first nine months in office. And still more surprising to me was the prominence that Fox not only gave to Obama’s prescient speech in 2002 about not getting bogged down in a dumb war, but also the readiness to take on McCain/Palin’s attacks on Obama’s wanting to read Miranda rights to terror suspects–in a truly fair-and-balanced approach, Fox showed that Obama’s views were otherwise.

All the while, the scroll bars (there are literally 4 different scroll bars now) were scrolling things like, Hillary seeking to mobilize women voters, Karl Rove saying that McCain’s ads are going too far (when the pot calls you black, you must’ve really gone far), and Greenspan criticizing McCain’s purported middle-class tax relief. In short, Fox was showing info-bites that one might find on the Huffington Post.

Now it’s old news that Rupert has been trying to cozy up to Obama, but was I witnessing something larger trickling down here? Surely just a few minutes is not scientific, but more evidence is surfacing that my experience was not a mere aberration.

Maybe I’m clueless and don’t recognize that there was simply enough red meat thrown by showing the word “Hillary” or by showing that Obama opposed the Iraq invasion like all the other anti-Americans, but if I am right that Fox is leaning more in his direction, what does this mean? Do the powerful simply recognize that an Obama presidency is inevitable? Or perhaps are they truly frightened that McCain might die, leaving my wacky Aunt Sarah in charge?

Or maybe more cynically they realize that with two unwinnable wars and a shit-tanking economy that there are no easy answers to fixing the Bush legacy, that the next president is doomed to a one-term clusterfuck of catastrophes, and they’re taking the bearish approach that the clusterfuck could have long-term residual impact on that president’s political party?

Not to be trolly, but…. if you substitute the sentence

Apple should design a phone the remains intact when you drop it 3 feet.
to
Microsoft should write an operating system that blocks spyware when you download porn.

would the reactions change from calls for “personal responsibility” to “down with the man!”? I like apple products and all, but try holding them to any quality standard and it seems you’ll get shouted down faster than somebody saying “retard” in a movie.

previously

It’s a good one though, this CD. (MP3 here)

Do I need a Cleveland Steamer to make Icepresso?

And that reminds me … I’m not sure I grok how a book can be frothy, but whatever. What I really want to know is who GULPS cappuccino besides the staff at Essential magazine apparently?

Joe Posnanski taking a breather from espousing the merits of Pedro Feliz (a position I heartily second) he pisses on the Jason LaRue parade — not that there is one, really.

Tangent: This year, in 127 at-bats, LaRue is hitting .157. That would be a 1 followed by a 5 followed by a 7. Now, many people have wondered why LaRue keeps playing on a fairly regular basis, and I don’t have a particularly intelligent answer for this; I do have a theory. I think it may have something to do with the regret the Royals feel for not going into the National League a few years ago when they had a chance. Since they cannot have their pitchers hit, they are doing the next best thing.

Two other points about LaRue:

1. He hit .194 in 191 at-bats last year. So that means that in his last 318 at-bats, LaRue is hitting .179. The last guy to get 300 at-bats in ONE season and hit that badly … the great Rob Deer in 1991. He hit .179 in 448 at-bats. Deer did bang 25 homers (13 more than LaRue) and walk 89 times (50 more than Larue). Before that, you have to go back to 1974.

2. Tony La Russa made big news by hitting his pitcher eighth. So where was the national media when Buddy Bell hit LaRue seventh?