It is widely known that George F. Will is one of America's premiere douchecanoes. Every week brings a fresh atrocity from the fetid pen of the bowtied one; whether it's climate denialism, contemptuous dismissal of basic Enlightenment ideals, or this week's turd sandwich, a blithe assertion that sexual assault victims are somehow a new privileged class:
Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.
Charlie Pierce is of course on top of it, letting himself go in a nicely calibrated and fully righteous rant,
The Bowtied Monster:
To paraphrase what the late Molly Ivins once said to Camille Paglia on a similar topic -- I've got some Texas football frat boys I'd like George to meet. I don't even want to get into why Will chose that breaking-academia-to-the-saddle metaphor, although he does look like the middle-school librarian whose tastes run to the sting of the whip. However, I would like to compliment him on his use of the word "progressivism" as a catch-all for anyone he doesn't like. He has set up a lovely little corner of Glennbeckistan for himself. This guy was once reckoned to be an American intellect. Now, he's writing like a sociopath, except about baseball, on which he writes like a foof. Not much soulcraft to trolling rape victims, George. Not much at all.
But I'd like to try a different approach. Follow me below the short and curlies...
Will is a shockingly poor writer; the sort whose pretensions are embedded in his prose at multiple levels. His language is obfuscatory, his metaphors overwrought, his allusions studded with all the faux erudition, his literary references hideously self-aggrandizing (remember T. Hamilton Tripler, Will's "quote boy"?).
I thought it would be fun for the biter to be bit. Hence, a little literary exercise to while away the afternoon:
Write a paragraph mocking George Will — in the style of George Will.
Here's my submission:
The evidence is indisputable: George Will is a pustulent bleeding stringwart on the face of journalism; his faux-intellectual blathering is a mere swish of polysyllabic mouthwash which cannot disguise the hideous halitosis of a profound moral putrescence. If the inbred and self-congratulatory world of the DC punditocracy may be likened to the back of a pioneer farmer's long-johns after an endless winter, Will is the dingleberry supreme, flourishing and burgeoning in the fetid crevice between the cheeks of our national discourse.
Submit yours in the comments! Winners will receive nothing save the gratitude of the unwashed masses for whom Mr. Will's contempt is palpable.
OK...here we go!