Posted 6:47 AM by Gene

I promise this is the last I mention the news hacks' favorite assassination. Today ArtsJournal.com is pleased that the Guardian devotes so many resources to "the arts." So what does all this coverage get us? Predictable, unchallenging, contented thumbsuckers like this one, about all the wonderful changes in art our favorite assassination allegedly provoked. I would argue most of the changes ascribed here owe to Vietnam and the news-hack culture of award-winning doom and gloom and ennui that grew up around it, and engineered our defeat, and survived it. If doom and gloom and ennui could win news hacks awards, why not with their brethren on the other side of the media business? Hence decades of gloom and doom and ennui, and we can't shake it because both the evil media twins reinfoorce each others' prejudices with prefab bromides and rave reviews. One reason our successful military endeavors of the last twenty years have elicited such screams of pain from the unintelligentsia is that they were successful, and they knocked that whole Potemkin house of doom and gloom and ennui flat to the ground. But news hacks will always rebuild the house -- especially when the victories emanate from RED COUNTRY.

If this is what more arts coverage means I'm all for dumbing it down, as most American news hacks (led by the Times) are doing.