a grammar

you and your fancy ideas

This sorta uncharming McSweeney’s-online* submission (“A Robbery of Three Liberal Arts Graduates: The Police Report”) has been floating around Tumblr lately — even Newsweek’s. And I hate to be a downer, especially concerning something as small as this piece, but can I suggest that this item is … kinda fundamentally cruddy? I mean, the joke is basically this sort of thing:

“A second unidentified black male then appeared brandishing a gun, and ordered the two men to get on the ground. Mr. Goldstein inquired whether Perp One and Perp Two were aware … that gun violence is the number one cause of death among young black men. …Perp Two then informed Mr. Wilson-Stern, Mr. Goldstein, and Mr. Miller that their “white asses” should listen up … Mr. Wilson-Stern informed Perp Two that he is, in fact, 1/64th Cherokee and asked whether Perp Two had read Kyama Sozuki’s article on race as a social construct.”

It’s not that I don’t get jokes about students being pointy-headed and namby-pamby and whatnot. (Yes yes clever.) But ultimately, there’s a rhetorical thrust to this piece that’s just as often associated with, say, racist uncles at Thanksgiving, and that thrust is this: all your liberal impulses, multiculturalism, interest in social justice, and sensitivities are basically meaningless and silly for the reason that Big Scary Black Guys Are Going to Rob, Kill, or Rape You, and where will your namby-pamby liberal values be then, huh?

I’m sure the author of this piece believes he’s coming at it from a different direction, but in the end, the whole thing winds up pretty much indistinguishable from an email forward you might get from that tea-partying uncle — the only difference being that the uncle might believe the whole thing was true, and add a few lines at the bottom about how this is why he carries a concealed weapon, can’t believe you live in the city, and can’t stand “political correctness.”

Not that I’m totally humorless, or anything — the joke about the signed copy of Sontag is pretty solid.

* I was really surprised, a few years ago, to learn how many people on the internet thought of those website submissions as what McSweeney’s actually was — and yet for some reason it makes you look hairsplitting or pedantic to point out that there’s this whole literary journal involved.