Be warned: this is, for the second consecutive day, a commentary-within-the-commentary post.
I would like to draw your attention to this little gem from noted right-wing intellectual heavyweight Jonah Goldberg. As with my last post, I'm not terribly bothered by the content of this piece. It's pretty standard boilerplate wouldn't-everything-be-better-if-we-privatized-it dreck.
The Cato Institute craps out a dozen of these little rants every week, at which point they're swiftly consigned to the Irrelevant bin in public discourse. No biggie. No, there is something else about this article that bugged me. Upon my first read I could not quite figure out what was odd about it. After a re-reading, it hit me.
This reads like it was written by a college sophomore.
I spend a good majority of my time evaluating the intellectual output of 18-20 year old undergraduates.
I've read hundreds – probably thousands by this point – of papers from college kids.
So I feel that I have some relevant authority upon which to base this admittedly subjective judgment. I can honestly say that Goldberg's commentary is virtually indistinguishable from most of what I read. All of the stock dialogue of the average College Republican's argument are present.
Check.
This really got me thinking. Why is Jonah Goldberg's writing smell so powerfully of a 19 year-old pre-business major who just read five pages of Hayek for the first time? Why did this column make me do a double-take to make sure I wasn't reading the Daily Illini? Then it hit me. There is no Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg is not real. His picture is merely a computer-generated amalgam of male profile pictures off of RepublicanPeopleMeet.com. His commentaries are pieced together from the daily Letters to the Editor of the College Republicans at several large universities. Jonah Goldberg is indistinguishable from a 19 year-old because Jonah Goldberg is a bunch of 19 year-olds. It all makes sense now.
So ends the mystery of why this "person" sounds like a college sophomore. The bigger mystery – why this drivel continues to get column-inches in major periodicals – will have to wait for another moment of inspiration on my part.
J. Dryden says:
Not to bring up the second-only-to-Hitler-in-causing-the-loss-of-an-argument name of Orwell, but I've always assumed that the writings of Goldberg, like the 'clever' analogies of Dennis Miller, the speeches of Dick Cheney and the rantings of the poor-trannie's-version of Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, are simply cranked out of a slightly modified version of the machine that produced prole-targeted novels, porn and pop music in the Ministry of Truth.
Probably located somewhere in the bowels of the Cato Institute, this one–just programmed with a bunch of 'hot button' words/phrases and a basic knowledge of grammar–note the efficiency with which the immigration bill was killed just by having everyone on the other side repeat the phrase "rewards criminal activity" and by making "amnesty" a dirty word…