Pierce: Today's Reverse-Pulitzer Goes to This Trash Avalanche from Politico

[babylonsister]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19642643/politico-clinton-voter-piece-is-trash/

Today's Reverse-Pulitzer Goes to This Trash Avalanche from Politico
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
By Charles P. Pierce
Mar 30, 2018


Then again, we have the occasional reminder of why we called it Tiger Beat On The Potomac in the first place. It sent one of its young tyros out into the country to do an anthropological study of Clinton voters, and the result was a kind of garbage avalanche rarely seen in American journalism.

The Park Slope Food Coop—a 17,000-member-owned and operated food store with a vaguely communist-sounding name—is a Sam’s Club Republican’s fever dream of where card-carrying members of the East Coast elite shop for groceries. For starters, I could locate no industrial-sized containers of ranch dressing. All the food comes from no farther than 500 miles away, most of it from small farms. And the politics of the co-op’s members are decidedly progressive, in case you missed the front-page story of the Linewaiters‘ Gazette, which is sort of like the co-op’s Pravda: “Immigrant Rights and Local Farms,” a piece that traces just how pivotal immigrants are to the PSFC’s food supply chain. One member I met estimated that, during the 2016 primary, 60 percent of the co-op’s members threw their support to Clinton and the other 40 percent supported Bernie Sanders. Not to mention that the co-op is situated in one of the toniest parts of Brooklyn, the site of Clinton’s campaign headquarters, and a borough that she won by 61 percent.

Shut up now. Damn, too late.

My editors had given me this assignment as something of a lark…An innocent abroad, I would leave Hamilton County, Indiana, a deep-red suburb north of Indianapolis that Trump won by nearly 20 points, the kind of place where the Koch brothers are presently carpet-bombing Democrat Senator Joe Donnelly with $2 million in television and digital ads for his vote against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Once on the decadent East Coast, I would luxuriate in its undiluted upscale liberal consensus at bookstores, wine bars, cafes and other Blue State institutions peopled by NPR tote-bagging sophisticates. Perhaps I’d drop in on something activist-y, a meeting of Resistance types. It was a trip that would take me across three states, from a food co-op in Brooklyn to an unabashedly liberal bookstore in Bethesda, all in counties Clinton won by at least 60 percent or more of the vote.

Run your editors out of the building. Do it immediately. They are trying to destroy you.

But I also found there was something more to the Trump hatred—a kind of closed-off complacency that also translated into how they treated me. The more I persisted, and closer I got to the beating heart of D.C., the more reluctant people were to talk to me on the record. The whole trip would leave a sour taste in my mouth over how difficult it is to perforate the Blue Bubble. It wasn’t just the clichéd dispatches from Trump Country that Clinton Country voters had come to loathe—it was Trump Country itself.

See? Missed opportunity. You’re lost forever. You’re in rube-worship hell and there’s no way out.

This story represents all that was wrong about the work of Stephen Glass—except for the fabulism, of course. The phony Innocent Abroad voice. The continual head-fakes toward I’m Just A Regular Guy Out In The World. The twee fake-Britishisms. The complete idolization and sanctification of the utterly trivial. (He even gets snotty about the people who work at Comet Pizza in D.C., playing the episode where a guy actually showed up with a gun for laughs.) And, if ever in the future I describe myself as “Your Correspondent,” you have my permission to have me sent to the Nervous Hospital.

But the apotheosis of awful in the story comes when Our Correspondent meets a woman of color.

That was when I caught up with Early, the 33-year-old Brooklynite who grew up in Manhattan. Asked how she felt about Trump’s first year in office, the real estate agent rolled her eyes. “First of all, I’m brown,” she said. Early said she knew Trump’s reputation from friends who worked on “The Apprentice.” “He’s horrible,” she told me. Did she have empathy for Trump voters? Or was she angry at them? She wasn’t angry, she said, but “maybe they should come to Bed-Stuy and walk around the projects to see what my life was like.” I told her I was from Indiana, and had come here to do almost exactly that. She thanked me for listening. “I go off on tangents like this at parties. People are like, K, bye.” We said goodbye.

Did Our Correspondent actually jump on the G train and go to Bedford-Stuyvesant? After all, Brooklyn gave Hillary Rodham Clinton 92 percent of its vote, and all of those people couldn’t have been aruglula-sniffing gentrifiers from Park Slope. There likely were as many Clinton voters in Bed-Stuy as there were at the SoulCycle class or the organic market.

You’re kidding, right? He went to Union Square Park to be further amazed by liberals.

[Va Lefty]

1. I read this pile of crap. What the hell is happening to Politico?

[Achilleaze]

2. Everyone who eats depends on Immigrant Rights - including right-wing Politico Wankers

Our immigrant and migrant workers are pivotal for everyone, for the whole food-supply chain, leading right up to your dinner table.

Free clue for KGOP republican right-wingers: no immigrants, no food. You are standing on their backs, eating from their hands. Better respect that reality as Dirty Donny* & His Browshirts continue to drive farm workers and packing house workers out of the county.



* aka republican Draft-Dodger-in-Chief

[Girard442]

3. I read the original piece that Pierce wrote about.

Well, most of it anyway. So sorry that your article was rejected by The Onion, Mr. Wren. I see you were able to find someone else that would run it.

[Hekate]

4. This is appalling. If this phony snark is representative of Politico, I'm crossing them off my list

...of reliable and responsible news sources.