NBC's Tom Brokaw Is Retiring From Journalism (And Not A Moment Too Soon)

 

 As you listen to this bit, you HAVE to imagine me at home, repeatedly screaming, "YOU FOOLS! HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW OPRAH PROMOTES FRAUDS?"

 

Crazytalk

Somebody at Slate thought this was a misleadingly eye-catching link for an economics story: 

 Austerity Is Ruining Everything That Makes Europe Better Than America 

It caught my eye because, unlike the folks at Slate, I can't think of much "that makes Europe better than America" and, having lived there, I'm still looking. 

I wonder why Slate would lie like that? Have they never seen Adult Swim? There's no Adult Swim in Europe. I know French music lovers who are just discovering The Wu-Tang Clan - in what way is being culturally 20 years behind somehow "better"? 

The lame parameters of Europe's established circle jerk, where any American who doesn't look like a relative of Tom Brokaw is deemed "authentic" - permitting everyone in agreement, internationally, to openly marginalize our country for almost anything - is bullshit. It's especially galling when Americans, like the folks at Slate, engage in it. "Better than America"? How?

 

If you ask me, Europeans generally don't know their heads from their asses and, if they did, they wouldn't have spent so much of history standing on each other's throats. (America's less than 300 years old and we're already over most of that shit, the slopes,...) To speak of "Everything That Makes Europe Better Than America" is to speak, mainly, of sloth. We don't have enough of it. If an American has what used to be referred to as "get up and go", Europe will declare them to have ADHD instead, prescribing a homeopathic preparation and lots of de-stressing "rest" (and wine) so such evil ideas will never invade their, oh, so rationally self-enforced, pursuit of eternal leisure ever again. Hell, by merely typing this blog I'm already engaged in a more active endeavor than the average Frenchman, so what the fuck? 

Why must I read this shit, much less, have to consider Americans writing it? Don't these people have editors? Has anyone at Slate actually been to Europe? Come on. 

 Oh - wait - I get it,...

Looking At The The 60's: "Immaturity And Lack Of Impulse Control"

"Boom! contains some scattered autobiographical interjections in which [Tom Brokaw]—objective to a fault—recalls how he felt as anti-war activists shut down campuses and rock stars started throwing around the f-word. In typically measured tones, he suggests they all went too far.

The problem with Boom! is that it doesn't go far enough,...Brokaw alludes to the failings in his subjects' personal lives, from drugs to infidelity, but he's too cautious to confront these men and women directly, or to bluntly assert that the boomers screwed up a golden opportunity through their own immaturity and lack of impulse control."

- From the A.V. Club's review of Tom Brokaw's new book, Boom!, in The Onion