So Maureen Dowd's "Guest Columnist" Timothy Egan, posts this column bellyaching about Joe the Plumber writing a book....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/opinion/07egan.html?_r=2&th&emc=th
Why does Egan care? Ostensibly, it's insulting to struggling writers who don't have a snowball's chance of getting published while the economy is plummeting and publishing houses are in turmoil, laying off, not acquiring.... And ostensibly it's insulting because Joe is clueless about writing and ... and ... whatever.
But that's not Egan's real problem. Egan's real problem is that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, challenged his candidate, Barack Obama. If Joe had challenged John McCain, do you know what you'd be hearing from Egan and the New York Times about this book deal?
Right.
Dead, ringing silence.
It's not about writing or publishing. Egan doesn't like Joe having opinions, expressing them, and God forbid, expressing them by a method that others can hear -- or read. In other words, it's all politics. The amount of filth that gets published is staggering -- and was before anyone ever heard of Joe the Plumber -- and the NYT doesn't blink an eye about that.
I admit I followed the campaign and election only superficially. I didn't even vote because, while most people saw a huge difference between the two candidates, I didn't. Besides, I got my fill of national politics when I was a Congressional staffer back in the 1990s. But I paid enough attention to the recent election cycle to understand what's happening now, in the aftermath, with such incidents as Egan's whining non-issue.
Egan and the NYT are elitists, and I can't stand elitism. (I can't help it; according to Myers-Briggs, that's just a natural facet of my personality.) Elitists do not want people with opposing, or differing, opinions to be heard, plain and simple.
But even if it was about publishing -- who is Joe putting out of work? His publisher is Pearlgate Publishing, LLC, for cryin' out loud, which appears to have all of two books under its belt.
We're not talking Random House, here, folks.
We see through you, Egan, because you're as transparent as a poly-carbonate champagne glass, and just as fake. Bellyaching about Wurzelbacher's book, which threatens no one's publishability, isn't just sickeningly elitist. It reeks of censorship and that makes it downright unAmerican.
