Pulitzer Prizes belong to journalists who make groundbreaking discoveries and write the most original prose. So it would be false modesty for me to say anything except that I deserve the Pulitzer for what I’ve just written. All of them, really.
Did you know there was an entire country of actual people outside of New York City, Washington, Los Angeles and the connecting terminals at various airports in between? Of course not! And by New York City let’s not get crazy and talk about anywhere besides Manhattan. I mean, I’ve met a few people who live in Brooklyn, but hippies, right?
Not long after embarking in my auto-mobile, I discovered a vast land called “Montana” where people actually walked the earth eating things called “ham-burgers.” Fortunately my offspring were easily diverted with songs from Hamilton, and before long we shall be close again to his statue near the Upper East Side.
Oh right, I also lived briefly in Boston when I went to a school in Boston (wink wink, we all know what that is). Unfortunately, there was no way to leave the ivy-bedecked halls there. From time to time I witnessed security guards and the people who worked in our eating halls emerging from holes in the ground. I assume they were some type of subterranean mole people? I have observed such people in Manhattan. Perhaps a subject for another Pulitzer award winning column next year. But back to my latest discovery.
Nobody Knew About This Before Me!
One of my jealous colleagues angrily claimed to known of the existence of such people for decades, and claimed that elitist abstractions that completely ignored reality would have terrifying real life effects. Impossible! I’ve never seen such a thing. If there were any adverse effects of the policy I have advocated for years, would I go exploring in my auto-mobile instead of exploring my culpability? I think not!
I was also informed that my discovery was such an old cliche that it was mocked by the publication of T. Herman Zweibel 26 years ago. It was suggested to me that this was a humorous sort of thing, but that is not possible. This publication The Onion was not founded by anyone who attended a school in Boston and did not hire their alumni. The hilarious tele-vision spectacle Saturday Night Live is run by alumni of this school in Boston, and by the abstract principles that guide my life, if those alumni are absent, by definition this article about the Midwest which I discovered must be some kind of Dada-style absurdity, not humor in any form whatsoever.
Further critics have claimed that for years highly paid news-paper columnists have been hiding from important issues and padding their production by filing from some place outside of bastions of East Coast wealth, claiming that it proves they are not some kind of elitist.
They have cited some clearly made up person named “David Broder” who supposedly was writing this drivel forty years ago for a publication allegedly named “The Washington Post“:
I take a lot of abuse from colleagues back in Washington who spend their summer vacations at fashionable places on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard or the coast of Maine. They insist that because they have cocktails with an undersecretary and cookouts with an ambassador, they are more “with it” than we are on this never-heard-of-it island at the top of Lake Michigan. They are wrong, of course. I have known for more than 30 years that Beaver Island is the center of the real world
This is clearly impossible. I invented the idea of breaking out of isolated bubbles and this person Broder could not. Fortunately I work at a publication which shuns these bubbles in the first place and would never overreact to unfounded gossip at a place like Martha’s Vinyard. And this Broder person speaks of a place called “Michigan” and if that existed, surely I would know of it. Also, when my colleagues are extremely close to sources, only good things come of it.
Could I simply be a hack producing the exact same false modesty-driven drivel that someone delivered by tele-phone dictation four decades ago? Pure reason is all anyone needs to know the answer is a resounding NO! Pat yourself on the back, readers of this august news-paper, for being next in line after me for this discovery that all of those online critics can’t begin to imagine.
Pulitzers. All of them. Deliver them to me now.
Russ Doubthat is definitely not a brilliant intellect who writes for a non-self absorbed paper which never deserves any criticism by some people who probably buy the last heirloom tomatoes at the Union Square Greenmarket instead of leaving a few for the next person in line. Fine, it sounds weird to first obsess over beets and now tomatoes, but I’m an editor and people should know who I am. Just more breakdown of the social fabric that led to the tutor of the editor’s son say they can’t rewrite his essay for Dartmouth because that would be dishonest and it needs to be the son’s words, not anyone else’s words. Seriously? Everyone does it. Anyway, Doubthat can best be described as a parody of a serious thinker.
I am very qualified to have opinions on all of these fancy things! Because my undergrad school referred to itself as the “Harvard of the Midwest”!!!
Incidentally I thought that was a gross exaggeration as my college was difficult and had* an excellent reputation, but not like super hard. Then I went to grad school in Alabama and was like oh huh my undergrad was fucking hard compared to this place.
*I say had an excellent reputation because in the last 15 years the board and president have basically decided that Missouri’s state liberal arts university needs to become more like a technical school. Which is fine, but fundamentally different pedagogy philosophy than a liberal arts university.
A Putzlitzer for Douchehat.
Well, I never. Doubthat is clearly a drunkard and a wastrel. Imagine thinking there are some sort of indigenous creatures living on the other side of the Hudson. Utter nonsense.
Completely unrelated I thought anytime someone mentioned this Russ clown that it was an imaginary name referencing the idea of an idiot opinion writer for the NYTimes.
I just realized it is a real dude.