08.04.11
Lickspittles Talent Agency
UPDATED
The slide show video.
Lickspittles Talent Agency represents pundits and journalists, the good boys and girls. They’re those sufficiently camera and photogenic, chosen to “analyze” the issues of the day.
They can be counted on to laugh and tut-tut their way through the terrible news on any given day, safe in the knowledge that their position means they’ll never suffer any of the drawbacks of life out in the ruins.
Everyone in the video is a liberal but you’d be hard-pressed to find even one capable of naked rage or a wrinkled brow.
Snark and laughter at the ignoramuses in Washington, or the Tea Party — they’re all very good at that, though.
Some of the good boys hold multiple positions. They star on TV, they write for the biggest two newspapers in the country, or the two big supermarket glossy news mags, they are fellows at think tanks and professors at university.
They’re a great demonstration of another type of rampant inequality in the US, that of the rigged system, the winner-take-all society, that place were everything accrues to those who simply appear on television or some prime print real estate.
In a country as large and complicated as ours you’re asked to believe all the alleged wisdom on everything worth comment is to be found in a group of somewhat less than fifty people, all of whom earn never less than six figures every year.
Since the video is less than two minutes long, I couldn’t get to them all.
In order of of appearance: Jonathan Alter, Nicholas Kristof, Joan Walsh, James Fallows, Fareed Zakaria, Gene Robinson, Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Matthews.
Add your own to the list in comments if you want.
If you want to know why people often vote for the worst among us, Lickspittles Talent Agency is one answer. You see them on tv, laughing and smirking at the empire crumbling down, and you’ll vote for anyone who appears to be a polar opposite, no matter the cost.
Spite is like that.
Kevin Coyne, the Englishman who wrote “Good Boy,” knew it way back in 1973.