Citizen's arrest for public stupidity

     In the Sunday NYT, Timothy Egan crawls way out onto the elitist limb where I and many others have perched, squirming, lo these last eight years, averting our gaze as the seeds of anti-intellectualism sprouted into an insidious, full-on clusterfuck of stone idiocy in hardback and trade paperback. Hyperbole aside, it's nice to have some company out here; someone who is willing and able to get published his spot-on indignation over those meatheads, presumably in possession of opposable thumbs but nevertheless lacking the ability to rub a noun and a verb together, who insist on sucking up the oxygen in American bookstores. All two of them.

     It's not that I begrudge idjits their God-given right to large advances, publicists, and marketing. It's that these historically precious resources -- the advances, not the idjits -- have become practically extinct in the last, what?, week, since the publishing industry went off the rails and onto life support. Yes, it was largely self-inflicted (see "last eight years" above), and precipitated by the Not So Great Depression, certainly. Still. The choice to offer Whalin' Sarah Palin a seven-figure book deal while edging out, I don't know, me, is hardly a moral dilemma on the scale of Sophie's Choice. Who shall thrive in difficult times? The fittest! Who shall be published in a whack market? The writer! Who shall be left to do the necessary work of fixing toilets? Joe the Motherfucking Plumber!

     See? Not so hard.