Person Of The Year
My verdict on Nostradamus's person of the year contest (x-posted on Death/Media):
On the Colbert Report last night, Katrina vanden Heuvel said that she was hurt by Rush Limbaugh referring to "Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel." I laughed, because the first time I heard the phrase "Hurricane Katrina," it was from somebody on the Fox News Channel and I thought he was just making fun of Katrian vanden Heuvel.
Terri Schiavo, by the way, is not a person. She is the timeless concept of the absolute universal feminine, actualized on a mythic time scale in an eternal return.
Harriet Miers is also not a person. She is George Bush's horse.
That leaves Natalee Holloway and Cindy Sheehan. Close call; Cindy Sheehan is ahead in things reflexive liberals idealize for no reason points. Natalee Holloway is ahead in hot blond who disappeared who wouldn't be on the news if she weren't a hot blond points. In self-righteousness points, Sheehan herself is doing well, but Holloway is dead and her parents are turning into minor celebrity scolds because of it, so Holloway ekes out a win.
posted by Finnegan @ 1:02 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
"Cindy Sheehan is ahead in things reflexive liberals idealize for no reason points..."
(Or perhaps "things-reflexive-liberals-idealize-for-no-reason points"?)
Now I realize there is a sign at the front of the Contrarian Treehouse that says "4 the deesent Left only", but these are the types of kidney punches that accomplish nothing except to falsely reassure the assailant that he has the toughness to be more Kipling than Pinter from time to time. We will name this tendency, as we should name most disorders of the left even at the risk of confusing them with one another, in honor of The New Republic. TNR syndrome, like Tourette`s, manifests itself most distinctly through exclamations of abuse apropos of nothing.
Cindy Sheehan need not be Gandhi or Thoreau; I don`t know of anyone who "idealizes" her. But since this war lacks individual stories of loss and is depicted mostly in numbers ("100,000 dead Iraqis" from the Lancet study, "2,000 dead American soldiers" on the front of The New York Times, etc.), a human face to the loss is useful and poignant to the extent that it stirs the passions in us that statistics cannot.
I think Terri is so far the official winner, but I'll have an anouncement once all of the votes have been tabulated. I went to the Sheehan rally. I made eye contact with Cindy (I was say 30 feet away, snapping photos right in the front)... She really didn't trust me, if her look told me anything. Somehow, and I don't know how and am certainly not superstitious or religious in any way, but somehow Cindy Sheehan knew I was only there for the spectacle, and that I am in fact so detatched from reality I could never understand something as real as personal loss... It was an amazing moment for me, one that made me feel all to comfortably at home in my personal, idealized world of lies.
On another note, I saw this really poignant video on HBO called "I Have Tourette's but Tourette's Doesn't Have Me"... It would really suck to have that particular malady, I must say...
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