Do the Writers at the Times Really Believe the Stuff They Make Up? Poverty Chic

A million Monkeys with eight million typewriters. m/r

Obvious lessens always unlearned:

From Preston Sturges' SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS

(Sullivan, his valet and his butler in the bedroom, as Sullivan contemplates himself in a mirror, dressed as a hobo.)
THE BUTLER
If you'll permit me to say so sir: the subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.

SULLIVAN (exasperated)
But I'm doing it for the poor.

THE BUTLER
I doubt that they would appreciate it, sir. They rather resent the invasion of their privacy. I believe quite properly, sir. You see, sir, rich people and theorists, who are usually rich people, think of poverty in the negative…as the lack of riches…as disease might be called the lack of health…but it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study…It is to be shunned.

SULLIVAN
Well, you seem to have made quite a study of it.

THE BUTLER (dryly)
Quite unwillingly, sir. Will that be all, sir?

(Sullivan watches him exit, then turns to the valet.)

SULLIVAN
He gets a little gruesome every once in a while.


THE VALET
Always reading books, sir.

Poverty Chic | National Review Online

JANUARY 11, 2014 

De Blasio's Tailor

Bill de Blasio is on the cutting edge of political fashion.

By Matthew Continetti

‘Poverty,” the New York Times announced yesterday, “is suddenly the subject of bipartisan embrace.”
I have spent a lot of time parsing that sentence. There is, for example, the adverb: “Suddenly” does a lot of work; it carries the weight of the entire piece on its eight letters. The condition of the working poor, after all, has been a subject of political dispute since, oh, the Industrial Revolution. The author of theTimes article, Jeremy W. Peters, seems to recognize the Groundhog Day aspect of his argument when he writes, in a fine example of mixed metaphor, “To read the flurry of fundraising solicitations that flood email inboxes can, in fact, seem a lot like a rerun of the last presidential election.” Jeremy has a short memory.
There is also the matter of subject-verb agreement. Isn’t the subject of an embrace the one doing the embracing? That would make poverty the object, not the subject, of the sentence. Or does “subject” in this case mean a topic of discussion? And wouldn’t a “bipartisan” embrace be between a Republican and a Democrat, leaving poverty in the cold? How does one embrace a concept or state of being? Is poverty really a condition anyone would like to embrace — to welcome, to envelop, to receive cheerfully — in the first place? You don’t “embrace” poverty. You escape it.
The unintelligibility of the Times pronouncement does not diminish its significance, however. Mike Allen of Politico had good reason to call it the “sentence du jour”: The eight words capture, however badly, the mood in Washington, the character of recent debate. A less hurried or less pretentious writer might have said, “Poverty has of late become a subject of concern in both political parties.” The inequality business is booming. Obscene wealth isunfashionable. Poverty is “in.”
-go to link-