In general, I agree with the agenda of liberals and those left-of-center, including increased govt. action to reduce income inequality, rebuild decaying infrastructure, spending on public education, regulating and limiting the size and role of the financial sector in the economy, regulating possession of guns, and universalizing access to health care, and increasing the social stability of the broad middle class. I also agree with live-and-let-live with regard to sexuality and partnering, abortion, birth control, and the possession and use of illicit drugs- with appropriate regulation and taxation of the latter. Having said that, I need to add that, while I agree with this agenda for the most part, I dislike most liberals and leftists of my acquaintance and mostly like conservatives and those right-of-center, because I find the former to be self-righteous and smug, imbued with belief in their own moral and intellectual superiority, and narrow-minded in that they rarely read or tolerate exposure to viewpoints with which they don’t already agree, while I find the latter in general to be more open-minded, less sure of themselves, and more tolerant and open to listening to and reading opinions opposed to their own. In short, I agree with liberals while disliking them personally and disagree with conservatives while liking them personally.
Completely off-topic to this (except insofar as she lives in a world-view shroud of received and unquestioned left-liberal opinion, like so many tenured members of the mainstream media): what is the deal with Manohla Dargis? She has to be one of the worst and most banal movie critics out there. She is of the school that believes that, if one piles up (multisyllabic) adjectives and adverbs in her movie reviews, then she is displaying intelligence, erudition, and perspicacious views about the work of art in question. Witness her review in today’s NYT: “Mesmerizing, mysterious, willfully perverse, the Mexican movie ‘Post Tenebras Lux’ opens with two scenes, one realistic, the other fantastical…a cacophonous, stunning sequence…” The two excerpts of her review separated by the first ellipsis represent the beginnings of the first two paragraphs of her article. It is a measure of the degree to which she has nothing interesting or original to say about any movie she reviews that she relies on this type of ‘writing.’ It should be pointed that most of the rest of her review, and of her reviews in general, consist of a combination of labored exposition of the film in question (like a not-too-bright sixth grader reviewing a novel for English class), statements of the obvious, and cliches. It is a measure of the depths to which the NYT has sunk in recent years that she has held (along with the marginally more competent A.O. Scott) the title of co-chief film reviewer. I admit to personal animus in her case: I was a fan of the much more creative and entertaining Elvis Mitchell, who was bumped from the Times to make room for Ms. Dargis and her egregious struggles with the language and with cinematic and artistic. When she retires, it is almost certain that, like the pedestrian-prose-purveying retired NYT dance critic Anna Kisselgoff, Ms. Dargis’s prose and reviews will be forgotten and almost never quoted. At least Kisselgoff wasn’t pretentious and full of herself.
Wayne Buscombe