{"id":10116,"date":"2024-10-28T12:52:39","date_gmt":"2024-10-28T18:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/?p=10116"},"modified":"2024-10-28T12:52:39","modified_gmt":"2024-10-28T18:52:39","slug":"a-skin-suit-demanding-respect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/archives\/a-skin-suit-demanding-respect\/","title":{"rendered":"A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most\u00a0recent Trump hit<\/a>\u00a0is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush\/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time for Election Day 2004. Frankly, I never cared much for CBS 60 Minutes, after a certain point in my development as an adult with a passing interest in public matters. It was all a rather contrived and scripted business, all carefully edited in the furtherance of the \u201cgotcha\u201d narrative o\u2019 the moment. After Rathergate and the faked ANG memo, though, one did rather wonder exactly how many other previous 60 Minutes expos\u00e9s had been based on fraudulent and\/or sketchy documents, which no outside CBS ever got a chance to examine with a gimlet eye.
\nBut the degradation of the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0from a once-respected venerable literary and cultural publication with 160+ years of solid worth \u2026 into a purveyor of partisan sleaze is something that hits me rather personally. It demonstrates Iowahawk\u2019s oft-quoted tweet about identifying a notable and influential institution, slaughtering it \u2026 and then wearing the pelt as a skin suit, while demanding respect.<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>, along with\u00a0Harpers\u2019<\/em>,\u00a0Horizon<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0American Heritage<\/em>\u00a0were publications that my mother had subscriptions to, from the earliest days of my own childhood \u2013 even when she and Dad were raising two children\u00a0(later three, and subsequently four)<\/em>\u00a0on a graduate student\u2019s GI Bill stipend. Although\u00a0Harpers\u2019<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0were similar in content and quality, and Mom could have saved a bit more of that tiny income by giving up one or the other \u2013 she never could decide which, and so kept both. They arrived regularly at the family home, and when I departed that home, I kept up subscriptions of my own, all during the long two decades of military service, most of it overseas. They provided between them a bit of a connection to an intellectual and literary world which \u2013 to be frank \u2013 didn\u2019t come my way very often. I had many regular magazine subscriptions then; about twenty or so, if memory service. Between them and the catalogs that I was on a mailing list for, the post office clerks swore up and down that on some days they had to use a crowbar in order to wedge all of my mail into my military post office box. I recall most particularly reading a Bernard Lewis article, sometime during the build-up to the first Gulf War \u2013 an article on the\u00a0reasons for Moslem rage<\/a>\u00a0against the modern western world, generally. I remember going around to other people in the unit with that issue in my hand saying,\u00a0\u201cSee?! This is why they\u2019re so pissed at us! It\u2019s not anything that we did \u2013 we just succeeded at modern stuff, and they didn\u2019t!\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Yes, it all made sense to me then. Still does.<\/p>\n

Anyway \u2013 I regularly devoured issues of the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>, even after I retired from the military and set up a home in Texas \u2026 and then over the years since 9-11, and finding other connections and sources through the internet, all those subscriptions fell off. A good few of them, like\u00a0Brill\u2019s Content<\/em>\u00a0ceased publication. Others, like\u00a0Entertainment Weekly<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Premiere<\/em>\u00a0\u2026 I just lost interest.\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 a weekly digest of news just got dated and increasingly pointless, as the internet sped up. I dumped\u00a0Harpers<\/em>\u00a0after getting annoyed at the pretentions of prosy old prune, Lewis Lapham, in the wake of 9-11. I think that I gave upon the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0about the same time that I gave up listening to\u00a0Prairie Home Companion<\/em>, and for much the same reason \u2013 a combination of poisonous hatred for GW Bush and the slobbering worship of Obama which just got too much to endure.<\/p>\n

I suppose that I shouldn\u2019t really care so much what degradation Atlantic has sunk to, of late \u2013 but for so many decades it provided a very real intellectual pleasure to my life, and to that of my family, but this latest turn of fortune for it is just sad and infuriating \u2013 sort of like seeing your once respectable and beloved third-grade teacher becoming a homeless crack whore turning tricks at the nearest truck plaza. Comment as you wish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most\u00a0recent Trump hit\u00a0is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the\u00a0Atlantic. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush\/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,1,75,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aint-that-america","category-domestic","category-general","category-literary-good-stuff","category-media-matters-not"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10117,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10116\/revisions\/10117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}