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.
