Slog
News & ArtsWednesday, May 2, 2012
Housekeeping A Critical Overview of The Stranger
Posted by Gerard "Guy Fawkes" Fichtner on Wed, May 2, 2012 at 9:00 AM
A NOTE TO OUR READERS: As you have undoubtedly heard, The Stranger's public editor, A. Birch Steen, passed away two weeks ago. Along with a tremendous outpouring of cards, flowers, and supportive notes, the offices have been deluged with applicants for the public editor position. Here's this week's candidate.
The Stranger? Who cares? I guess when I was a kid, I thought it was kind of funny or something, but now they're the biggest corporate sellouts, like, ever. Look, I'm blowing down to Portland right now (the pigs are on to me after an action I was part of at the General Strike), but I guess I have a minute to speak truth to power.
It's kind of sad to think that The Stranger was on the fringe of society at one point, because they're such running dog lackeys now. I guess sometimes CHARLES MUDEDE is kind of cool—at least he writes about Marxism—but he spends way too much time talking about things that don't matter, like science books by white guys. He's like the token black dude and the token socialist all rolled into one, which is, like, big whoop for you.
Instead of reviewing real films—I haven't seen one mention of Occupy: The Movie in The Stranger, ever—they waste time on Disneyfied shit like The Avengers and other opiates for the sheeple. All the arts coverage is super-boring crap about the kind of airport-friendly pabulum you'd find in, like, Kansas or something. Where's the coverage of Seattle's spoken-word scene? That's where the truth is coming from now. Why isn't the visual art section all about street art by now? That is the real art of the people, but JEN GRAVES is still dicking around in museums—or worse, galleries that show street art, as if that makes any fucking sense. She's like some washed-up old peacock, driving up the value on the academic-industrial-complex-funded "fine arts" bourgeois galleries that are gentrifying the good neighborhoods around town, social justice be damned.
The news section does actually mention the May Day General Strike, but of course The Stranger just shoehorned in a bunch of photos at the last minute while continuing to act as a mouthpiece for the mayor, the SPD, and the capitalist corporate system. "News"? More like "Status Quo." And while we're talking about status quos, Dan Savage keeps up his propaganda campaign for cisgender privilege in the back of the paper. There's only a place for you in The Stranger if you propagate preexisting hierarchies and don't ask any questions.
Don't even get me started on the sham The Stranger is going to perpetuate on the masses this November. It's going to be Tweedledee versus Tweedledum, and we're supposed to care that one of the rich dudes is, like, half black or whatever? They're all neocons, except for Ron Paul and maybe Gary Johnson. Piece-of-shit corporatist sellout rags like The Stranger aren't part of the solution. Read Tides of Flame for that.
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Thanks, Pulitzer Prize winning "The Stranger"!
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BRING BACK STEEN
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If not, A. Birch must have a brother, sister, cousin or some other close relative (a B. or C. Birch?) who can step into the breech here and try and make things whole.
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