Pierce on Obama

I don't think the piece was self indulgent at all.
Pierce compared the rhetoric to reality and found both lacking.
We get the country we deserve and right now, we don't deserve a good one.
And all the sweet rhetoric in the world isn't going to make it better.
I also still appreciate a Learned Hand reference.

 

Charlie Pierce is a tremendous wordsmith. My brain, however, sometimes has trouble reconciling the rumpled sportswriter who appears occasionally on TV with the raconteur who writes so well with such obscure references (Heisenbergian physics and Aeschylus for just two examples). It's almost like he's Jack Klugman's Oscar Madison on TV and Tony Randall's Felix Unger in print. Often I like to read a piece hearing the writer's voice in my head but if I try that with a Charlie Pierce piece - I end up picturing Pierce red-faced and out of breath (like Belushi doing the March comes in like a lamb bit from the old SNL).

Mizzou is right when he says that Pierce is unbelievably biased in his political views. I've come to the happy medium of reading Pierce's pieces in the soothing voice of Kelsey Grammer as Frazier Crane. However, just a page into this piece - I started hearing the raging of Pastor Wright bellowing about chickens coming home to roost. Maybe I'm the cynic but when I read the words of Pierce complaining about fat men and fat women and the wreckage he envisions both the country and the Constitution to be in - I can't help but hear a man saying God damn America in polysyllabic words.

When I was done with the fourth page I also couldn't help but think of the George Bernard Shaw quote "Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" Except in my mind it was, "Charlie Pierce thinks he sees things as they are but instead of saying 'why?' or 'why not?' he says 'Fucking Republicans.'"

 

Awesome.

 

Yes, the last seven years have shown us just how truly awesome it is.

 

Well struck.

But you can only make that case by choosing to ignore his indictment of the 2006 Congress led by Madame Pelosi. Or by glossing the two terms of the Clinton Administration he damns by implication in his assessment of our spiraling national predicament since 1980.

 

Hey, I thought it was a funny line.

Let's all ratchet down the political sensitivity, please. Sometimes a line can be funny in a vacuum without having to think, "Damn that fucking BUSH!!!!!!"

 

Depends what he's criticizing them for.

 

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to bring up Pierce's reference to fat men and women.

I think the point is that these Republican men and women were wearing "Purple Heart Band-Aids to mock John Kerry's war wounds". That is despicable, not the fat reference.

But of course some people still believe that there were WMD's.

 

You'll have to convince me, convince me, convince me that this wasn't incredibly well-written self-indulgence.

 

I'm sorry, but what's self indulgent about it?

It's an extension of the New Journalism which Esquire showcased and nurtured going back to the 60's with Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer & George Plimpton.

 

5,000 (well-written) words in which a journalist repeatedly casts himself as "The Cynic" and says a presidential candidate must convince him he is worth voting for? You can cast it as "New Journalism," but yeah, that's damn self-indulgent.

Which is why I give him the benefit of the doubt and think The Cynic is just a character, not Pierce himself.

 

Guess you'll have to read it to find out.