Washington Post correspondent David Weigel – with whom I had a few minor interactions, back in the 1990s when he was working at the late, unlamented “City Pages “– got suspended from the WaPo last week for retweeting an un-PC joke that was around most likely before man landed on the moon.
Now, I’m not exactly leaping to Weigel’s defense, here. When covering a Minnesota legislative race, he once got into a bit of trouble (I’m told) for getting the candidates District wrong. Also the candidates name. You know – the kind of stuff that journalists used to get into trouble for getting wrong.
Nonetheless, he was hounded into a suspension without pay by a group that has become, in fact, the equivalent of the layer of commissars that used to accompany the Soviet army into battle: the parallel political advisors that could veto the decision of any military commander.
One of them – a male and graduate of the Stanford journalism program – wrote a student op-ed castigating the University‘s food service for not prepackaging his meals, since he had too much anxiety to go to the buffet.
Excerpt:
I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds himself rooting for this twerp and Weigel to have a cage match.
Beyond that?
Sometimes I wonder if the problem with millennials is that they had no great existential struggles in life, as a group.
Humans have evolved over humanities history to be keenly adapted to responding to existential crises. And life certainly threw them crises. Up until our great great grandparents times, life itself – surviving past age three, not succumbing to famine or injury or childhood diseases or childbirth or a war, was a great and noble struggle in its own right.
Our parents/grandparents generations had the depression and a couple of world wars to deal with. The generation after that, a number of decidedly first world crusades; ending communism or ending poverty, and/or getting to the moon, depending on one’s point of view.
After that?
We’ve got a generation now, maybe two, whose greatest struggles have been a recession and society — and, it would seem, at the end of the day, the least worthy and yet most intractable opponent of all, themselves.
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