Dwight Garner @ the New York Times

September 16, 2011

Dwight Garner @ the New York Times

RE: Michael Moore and your inclusion of him in the hagiography of modern American Liberal wafflers, wimps, weasels, and wussies as recorded by you in the New York Times.

Mr. Garner,

Mother Jones? Woody Guthrie? Phil Ochs? Rachel Carson? [Why not Margaret Sanger? How did Margaret Mead miss the cut?] Harvey Pekar?
Mighty fine company for Michael Moore, America’s favorite fat man, now that Fatty Arbuckle and Oliver Hardy have gone to that great big Ben & Jerry’s in the sky, the one where Chunky Monkey and Death by Chocolate can be mainlined. Jowl liposuction on his moon pie puss could give Haiti a good, sit down Sunday dinner. But enough of that ad hominen stuff.
Your first five templates used to nominate Michael Moore, AKA “Pant Load Lard Ass”, to the Hall of Fame of Loutish Ohmadahns are either narcissistic phony bastards, Homerically dimensioned frauds, or world class “moonbat” wingnuts. Rachel Carson earns special mention for being a scientific faker worthy of Guinness Book accolades. Her book, Silent Spring, is helping to restore the unfairly tarnished reputations of Lysenko and the Piltdown Man.
It is your mention of Woody Guthrie that stirs the embers of an almost forgotten fire. It is one that has gone down the memory hole that modern American Liberals quickly dig when yet another of their gravity defying “balloon juice” pipe dreams runs into reality.
I’m glad that his guitar “fought Fascists”. It was a bit late in joining the fray but so was “Papa Doc” Joe Kennedy, the Hitler loving anti-Semite.
Some things are owed to the record.
From August 22, 1939 to June 21, 1941 Woody Guthrie’s guitar was not fighting Fascists. His weekly tract, aptly named Woody the Red, said that Hitler was an OK guy. In case you are not familiar with the above mentioned dates you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that they cover the period when Hitler and Stalin were pals. “BFF” as the new social networks would say.
Would I be too far out of line to say that Woody was OK with the flattening of Poland, the defeat and occupation of France, the bombing of London, and the construction of the abattoirs and charnel houses that were used to kill and cook the Jews? Qui tacet consentit still means Silence gives consent, doesn’t it?
No off handed reference to Christopher Hitchens can be allowed to pass without mentioning George Orwell. Orwell, one of Hitchens’s favorites, will not be in your Progressive Hall of Fame. “Homage to Catalonia”, “Animal Farm”, and “1984”, books that pilloried the brutal tactics of Stalin, would never pass the muster of the modern American Liberal word police who are in charge of such things.
I like to ask hacks of the New York Times if there have been any sightings of Walter Duranty. He was the bought and paid for KGB agent who won a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Reporting when he was the Moscow correspondent of – you guessed it – the New York Times.
Duranty began the “low, dishonest decade” that ended with Guthrie, who ignored the massacre of the Kulaks and the Moscow show trials because of his slavish devotion to Stalin, giving Hitler the green light to give a new meaning to murder.
Would it earn me permanent curmudgeon status if I were to say that Woody had a lot of really smart friends – Mr. & Mrs. Rosenberg, Lillian Hellman, and Alger Hiss leap to mind – who, believing in nothing, believed that Stalin’s shit didn’t stink? I hope so.
Why doesn’t Saint Fatso do a documentary movie on the “unpleasantness” at the Katyn Forest or the Gulag?
Just one more sign of my never ending naiveté’
Sorry about that.



Kevin Smith