11/7/07: Closed Due to Blue Funk*…and also looming deadlines, but mainly looming depression, due to laboring over my first retraction in over 21 years of dead-tree hackery. That’s an impressive record if you consider the volume (and type) of writing. Still, it’s a drag to have laughed off legal threats from lawyers representing the likes of Jack Nicholson and Leonardo DiCaprio and practically the entire cast of
Baywatch, and then have to worry about some…Oh, never mind. Let’s just say it’s a grim journalistic milestone I was hoping to put off for another two decades.
In further depressing news: another reminder that Steve H. Graham was right. First, though, I have to go into detail about what Steve H. Graham said. I’d like to link to the fine entry that Graham wrote some weeks ago at
Hog On Ice, in which he noted how mainstream conservatives ignore young right-wing talent. A lot of people goofed on him at the time, with some claiming that Graham’s point was that right-wing bloggers were to blame for him not being sufficiently famous.
Unfortunately, I can’t link to that post because Graham often deletes his political content. It’s not worth risking his career. I’m too old and self-destructive to have a promising career, but I’ve certainly seen younger talents disinvited from a prudish and provincial conservative media. Maybe I’ve invoked
this story too often, but it’s really more about them than it is about me. I’m specifically thinking of two brilliant young writers who were roundly ignored by right-wing publications. They’ve gone on to successful careers, but—like Graham—they no longer write about their conservative politics. For good reason, obviously.
I did, however, save one of the comments from that original Hog On Ice post, since it sums up a hard truth about why young writers should never work for an established conservative: “If Jon Stewart were conservative, Stephen Colbert would still be on his staff, and he'd be working for minimum wage. Or for ‘the valuable exposure.’”
Anyway, I recently served as the middleman in brokering a story between an established conservative and the kind of writers who really risk their careers by having conservative beliefs. That established conservative ran with the story without bothering to give any credit to the brave upstarts. That established conservative safely kept things within the confines of the small world that makes right-wing media so reliably tired. There’s still a lot to respect about that established conservative, I guess, but where’s the next generation supposed to come from? Probably from some place that’s too dull for me to be reading.
*…just like Rush Limbaugh’s, and I only know he’s in a blue funk because the topic came up on Kathy Shaidle’s site. She also says that Reason should now change its name to Ayn Rand’s High Times, which is a thought that’s insightful, funny, and non-libelous. Why isn’t she famous?
