At the best of times while reviewing The Stranger, I somehow
manage to convince myself that the incomprehensible mixture of
pretentious bloviation and pornographic navel-gazing is intended as a
satire: It is all a joke, I mutter to myself as I scrape my
tired eyeballs across another tragic Mudedeism; nobody can take this
seriously. It must be some kind of demented compendium of
knock-knock jokes for the brain-damaged.
I share this sad bit of self-delusion with you, the reader, to
establish the newest theory I have devised about the abomination that
now serves as The Stranger‘s news section. While it is true that
in recent times, the news section was slapped together by a
card-carrying Weatherman extremist and a bra-burning female separatist,
it at least had a coherent editorial view. Now that both editors have
left—or were forced to leave—The Stranger in rapid
succession, I believe the current news section to be nothing but
parody.
Surely only a washed-up comedian, toward the wet-brained end of his
so-called career, would find any value in JONAH SPANGENTHAL-LEE’s
bloated mockery of a “think piece” about a recent rash of burglaries.
Whoever is in charge of the news section these days (I suspect a baby
gorilla or perhaps a propped-up corpse stolen from Edward R. Murrow’s
grave) must have intended the story to be a mockery of television news’
beloved scare pieces. Any rational citizen understands that all you
need to stop a burglar in his tracks is as follows: a fence, a team of
Doberman pinschers, and at least one loaded handgun on the premises. I
sleep like a rum-sopped infant with my pearl-handled Smith & Wesson
tucked under my pillow, and I’m positive this is the manner in which
every other sane Seattleite comports himself as well. That Mr.
Span(etc.)-Lee doesn’t endorse gun ownership at any point in his
dribble is the last laugh on the reader.
The cavalcade of comedy continues with ELI SANDERS’s blithering
tirade about health care. Only a fool would want the government
involved in the care and cleaning of his fleshiest bits; therefore
Sanders’s editorial whining must be some kind of monkeyshine. It fails
even at that.
Humorously, the arts section (and I use both terms loosely) of the
paper attempts to counterweight this lack of direction in the news
department by ratcheting up its two major exports: self-indulgence and
irrelevance. In a puff piece weighted with years of faux
intellectualism, foppish dandy BRENDAN KILEY sprays adoration all
across the work of Rebecca Brown, a well-known friend of, and
contributor to, The Stranger. There is apparently no such
conflict of interest in JEN GRAVES’s dithering about Lake Burien, but
she frames her story as some sort of journalistic activism. Instead,
she gives the news section a run for its comedic money.