Warriors, Wusses, and Worse: Why The Los Angeles Times Should Be Placed Under Martial Law

I DON’T LIKE The Los Angeles Times. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have if you are the kind of person who is apt to write NO WAR on your face with lipstick. I am not that kind of person, so I am quite pleased with my opinion.

And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who believe in free speech and stuff like that — supporting the right of The Los Angeles Times to publish their goofy paper. If you think they have a right to do that, by all means object when we kick in their doors, defenestrate their office equipment, and water-board Joel Stein until he passes cerebrospinal fluid through his nose. Cerebrospinal fluid which — I am convinced — will prove to be composed of Orange Jell-O with banana slices and miniature marshmallows.

But I don’t like the God-forsaken worthless-ass Los Angeles Times. And being against The Los Angeles Times while claiming to believe in the nonviolent tolerance of free speech is — I now realize and freely admit — a position which is unbecoming to a serious-minded adult manperson. To put it into the Junior High School Locker Room prose to which readers of The LA Times are accustomed: It’s wussy. Since I do not want the low-carb version of Peking Man to snap me with his jockstrap, I forswear all such hypocrisy from this day forth.

To blindly allow The Los Angeles Times to exist unmolested, I fear, may give them an opportunity to annoy me further in the future. Plus, I would be giving soft acquiescence to the use of “impact” as a verb.

And skimpy little say-nothing paragraphs.

Having realized my mistake, I don’t want to blame the exploited homeless people who deliver the paper in exchange for methadone. Nor even the LA Times editorial staff, gravel-sucking plecostomi though they be. And I’m certainly not going to blame myself, an innocent victim misled by the “free speech” lies of Voltaire and John Stuart Mill.

And blaming LA Times publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson for disgracing all carbon-based life with his very existence is just too easy. Not easy enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger to do it, but almost that easy. The truth is, if it weren’t for so-called journalists there would be no so-called journalism, and therefore no Los Angeles Times. Journalists are the pathogens and journalism is the disease — The Los Angeles Times is merely the pus-bloated symptom.

I do sympathize with any person who passed out while playing with a Fisher-Price Spell Toy and woke up at the Columbia School of Journalism, if any such person exists. But when you decide to become a journalist, you pretty much know that you’re not going to be saving the country from Richard Nixon. 67% of Journalism majors know that Richard Nixon is dead. So you are willingly signing up to serve the pathetic cultural ambitions of white middle-class liberals. After 20 years of this you write a 250-page book (with no footnotes!) to entomb your ego. Future journalists inherit your skimpy little book like genetic damage.

I know all of this is easy for me to say. I’m a blogger, not a journalist. I wouldn’t walk across the street to talk to a United States Senator. (What for? Seriously, what the hell for?) I don’t chase Clinton’s girlfriends through high-speed traffic. Such truth as I may possess is not for sale, nor is it used to extort leaks from Beltway scum. I don’t get Pulitzer Prizes for running circles around fact-checkers and brain-damaged assistant editors. I don’t pretend to be objective while plagiarizing DNC press releases. In fact, I don’t pretend to be objective ever.

Journalists tell us that they perform a necessary informative role — even when dead wrong — that is vital to the functioning of a free society. Even if this is so, I see no reason why I should be grateful for it. Those at The Los Angeles Times who are requesting this consideration display no gratitude for all the stuff other people have done for them. Like their imperialist ancestors who helpfully colonized Oakland Hills and the beaches of Malibu, or the Armed Forces who prevented the same from becoming possessions of the Emperor of Japan, or the LAPD which keeps the crack-heads and gang-bangers out of their unisex restrooms.

Besides, if there is one thing my elders have taught me — those solons whose wisdom was distilled in the intemperate Sixties, then mellowed for decades in the oaken casks of capitalist affluence — it’s this: Screw Everything. Especially everything that doesn’t affect me. But also a lot of stuff that would affect me, if somebody wasn’t taking care of it for me while I stand around and bitch. Above, screw all the stuff that I can get paid to make fun of in print by people who are even more witless and depraved than I am.

Another thing I've learned from these hoary cultural icons (and The Los Angeles Times is only a small part of their intellectual legacy) is that if I find some person or thing to be politically disagreeable, it's probably because that person or thing is PURE EVIL. Not in some figurative sense, but evil like something right out of Paradise Lost or Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World. So Christian charity must step aside for righteous zeal.

Now, I'm not advocating that we herd the staff of The Los Angeles Times into a cage, to be raped by amphetamine-crazed circus animals while we film the grisly spectacle for Pay Per View. On the other hand, what do I care? I don't write for their stupid paper.