Mingle Until Departure

If the cultural-values conservatives ever succeed in cleaning up culture, they won't know what to do with themselves since it was never culture they were interested in anyway. The cultural conservatives of decades past actually read T. S. Eliot, Irving Babbitt, F. R. Leavis, and other custodians of tradition. Today's cult-cons scrutinize cartoons for butt-cracks and tabulate penis references in sitcoms, and then wonder why no one wants to sit next to them in the sauna.

Good God! How to describe the irresponsibility (and the sheer dumbness) displayed by the Washington Post’s Steven Luxenberg? Luxenberg edits the paper’s Sunday “Outlook” section. How to describe the irresponsibility he displayed when he published yesterday’s “opinion piece” by know-nothing twenty-something Laura Thomas? ... Let’s say it—almost surely, Thomas doesn’t have the slightest idea about the way that money has been handled. But she has proven herself the perfect mark for a generation of disinformation. So as she ends her hapless piece, she falls back on Santa again:

THOMAS: Politics notwithstanding, my logic goes like this: It's time to "prepare and plan" for the future as the president put it Tuesday. That's why last week, as soon as I hit the one-year mark at my job and became eligible for a 401 (k) plan, I signed up—much to the relief of my family, I'm sure. And I don't think other people my age are just sitting in the dark waiting for a glimpse of Santa Claus, or tossing their money up the chimney while counting on Social Security.

There’s a term for that: clueless know-nothing. But conservative propagandists have labored for decades to get those ideas into young people’s heads—and to produce a generation of editors who are willing to print such disinformed thoughts in our most important newspapers.