My prediction, in this space last week, of a Red Wave that would drown this year's bumper crop of uppity liberals has, to say the very least, come up short. While my Republican friends regroup and prepare for 2010—hopefully under the ideological aegis of Newt Gingrich's prodigious head—The Stranger, typically, is resorting to childish, craven taunts.
Yes, it's time for the Boasting Issue, wherein a collection of disreputable authors praise their untested and underqualified president-elect. Who was scraped from the bottom of the barrel and given the opportunity to "write" a few hundred gloating words? A bunch of people only my frantically Googling intern has heard of: JOHN HODGMAN (allegedly a television personality), SARAH VOWELL (sounds pretentious), EDMUND WHITE (a known homosexual deviant), ADAM HASLETT (ibid.), and GARY SHTEYNGART (the surname alone suggests a need for immediate INS investigation). This troupe is joined in its revelry by the usual cast of reefer-smoking, herpes-having socialists: DAN SAVAGE, CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE, LINDY WEST, CHARLES MUDEDE, and BRENDAN KILEY. Not to mention the nauseatingly smug return by former Stranger film editor ANNIE WAGNER, who is apparently pursuing a legal degree in Chicago out of some sort of blatant emulation of her personal hero, Barack Hussein Obama, even though she is a white woman from Wedgwood. What I want to know is this: How could a weekly newspaper, beset by a shrinking national advertising market due in no small part to the election of the aforementioned black celebrity to the highest office in the land, afford to pay the freelance wages that the aforementioned "writers" of purported notoriety command? I suspect there is some sort of "trade" involved, some sort of other economy at work, but I have eaten lunch too recently to dare inquire.
Moving on. The other sections of the paper seem, at first glance, to be uncharacteristically restrained, even taciturn. But I have been informed by sources inside the organization (unrelated personal note to JONAH SPANGENTHAL-LEE: Your Cheetos and video-game quarters will be delivered at the usual time and place) that due to unsurprisingly low ad sales this week—because, again, of Barack Hussein Obama—this particular issue is even lighter than recent ones have been. According to the billboard-sized flow chart in my office, this week's page count represents something of a low for the paper, and I am positively drooling to see how small future issues will get. Soon, there won't even be enough of The Stranger left to line the cage of my pet cockatiel, which was the only function the surprisingly absorbent material performed admirably. Dignified advertisers are advised to skip this publication entirely and do business solely with Seattle Weekly—which, for reasons that are not yet clear to me, has been markedly smaller than The Stranger of late. One assumes this is because upper management at Seattle Weekly has wisely marshaled all of its financial resources toward paying a suitable salary to its recently hired conservative reporter Don Ward, a fine young man and the only writer in Seattle brave enough to announce that Emperor Obama is positively nude.
