I’m used to being attacked by right-wingers obsessed with gay sex and fixated on anti-gay stereotypes. It’s a new and different sensation to be attacked so crudely by a man of the left—particularly when that man’s fat ass squats in a large glass house.
Garrison Keillor's mind-boggling column trashing same-sex parents on Salon.com, here. Dan Savage's most excellent takedown (and the source of the above quote), here.
UPDATED: while opinion is divided, comments on Salon.com, Slog, and other blogs are running about 4-1 in favor of "wtf" over "satire." Keillor's column was baffling, given his progressive track record, which in itself tends to support the possibility that it was intended to be satire. However, I'm disinclined to accept that, if for no other reason than that a writer as experienced and precise as Keillor (whether you like him or not, his ability as a wordsmith is pretty much beyond reproach) should be able to understand that satire only works when it's thinly veiled. Readers need to be able to see through the absurdities on the page; they must function as a lens through which society's shortcomings and leaders' failings are magnified and made clear. The kinds of cues needed to accomplish this are absent in this piece. When the end result is bafflement, not only is the piece not effective satire, but it becomes something that can be used against the very cause it's purportedly written to support.
1 comment:
What do you people not understand about Keillor's piece?
Why don't you try to understand a seriously written social commentary instead of taking the easy road and writing it off and calling it what you know it isn't - insensitive.
What bothers me about people who read a couple lines and get angry is that they aren't taking the piece seriously enough, thereby, to get seriously angry about its contents. If you read it seriously, you cannot be seriously angry about the presence of "stereotypes" because you know the piece isn't even about the stereotypes.
It's about putting your kids first, and your lives second. When you have kids, this is what you do. And this means you too, homosexuals.
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