The last review in the same issue of the New York Times Book Review discussed in the immediately preceding post is rife with another increasingly frequent form of cultural bias, Bush-bashing.
The author of the review, Douglas McGrath, is identified as a film writer and director and co-author with Woody Allen of “Bullets Over Broadway.” Perhaps the appearance of the word “bullets” in that title is why the editors of the book review found him qualified to review a book about U.S. Grant and his epochal struggle to write his memoirs before succumbing to cancer.
Whatever the reasons for his selection, McGrath’s review, in true Woody Allen fashion, tells much more about McGrath than it does about Grant, even down to the Allen-like snide cuteness. Here’s how it begins:
When people speak of the “weight of history,” I am not moved. The McGrath head has never been bowed with worry as President Kennedy’s must have been during the Cuban missile crisis or as President George W. Bush’s surely was when gas prices briefly dipped below $2 a gallon, weakening key stocks in his trust fund.
Perhaps most NYT readers are interested in what moves the McGrath head, or what it thinks of President Bush. But interested or not, McGrath can’t resist telling us. Here’s how it ends:
What stays in the mind is Grant — a man who, when faced with the twin assaults of death and poverty, raced against one to outwit the other. If Perry’s lovely book inspires us today it is not only because of Grant’s heroism, but because of the shaming contrast his life offers with the people who guard and guide us now. They use the words he lived by — patriotism, honor and responsibility — as masks for their dark mischief, and they twist the language in a way that is a cancer all its own.
About the best thing that can be said about this ostensible book review in the NYT is that it’s not quite as bad as this opening for a recent theater review in the Village Voice [via Instapundit via Jason van Steenwyk]:
Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.
But hey, what’s the harm in a throwing a little humorous red meat to the loyal (and politically predictable) Voice and Times readers? All New York editors know that all Republicans are uneducated dim bulb neanderthals who neither subscribe to nor even read their publication and who wouldn’t really understand this high brow humor even if they stumbled across one of these reviews one day while wrapping a fish with it.
Excuse me – we Republicans are too dumb to wrap fish. We just carry them around in our pockets.
Care to exterminate this Republican? We are the ones with the guns. Grant, a great republican precided over one of the rare times when the South had good government.
When the Democrats ended that, we had another 80 years of cruelly and crudely enforced racism. Huzza for the father of Condi Rice, who defended justice with arms.