A lot of folks were upset by Joseph Rago’s anti-blog rant in yesterday’s WSJ because of his crack about blogs being “written by fools to be read by imbeciles.” Ha. I wish. If I could get a few more imbeciles reading the Speculist, maybe I’d make some money off that Google ad bar up top. Or if we could even get a few somewhat credulous folks, not even imbeciles.
For people who aren’t that bright, Speculist readers strike me as being remarkably hard-nosed and skeptical. Or maybe you’re all just lazy. That would probably make more sense.
Anyhow, the passage that upset me was not the one about imbeciles, it was this:
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .
“A tone of careless informality?” Dang, that is truly upsetting.
Or not.
Whatev.
But that crack about irony, that really hurts. It reminds me of a similar concern I expressed in a recent comment (third item) on one of Stephen’s posts:
We were born into a world where there were a few people could say things like, “back in the blizzard of ’03,” and now WE say stuff like that. Or at least I do. See, here’s another reason why Leon Kass is right — if I opt for life extension, the world is going to be deprived a world-class old codger. In a world of eternal youth, whither codgerhood?
It’s a pretty grim future we face, ladies and gentlemen. Not only we will be completely bereft of irony, there will be no more Joseph Rago’s around to tell us what a bunch of imbeciles we all are. Sorry to land such a bummer on your holidays, but there it is.