Media Self-Absorption Watch

Check out this unintentionally hilarious paragraph from a completely fatuous editorial in today’s Washington Post.

Chelsea has been winning kudos in this campaign as an effective surrogate for Hillary Rodham Clinton, but I keep wondering whether she’s an effective representative for us. Like me, Chelsea’s a twentysomething (28 to my 29), a member of the generation that, as it happens, I spend a lot of time learning and writing about. We’re ironic, sarcastic and self-deprecating, a reflection of the pop culture and politics that played out while we grew up in the 1980s, 1990s and onward. We were weaned on Chevy Chase movies (“Spies Like Us,” of course, being the best), grunge and MTV’s “The Real World” (seasons 1 and 2 only, please) and trained by the Onion, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to detect spin in the most banal comments. People my age shed privacy at the nearest high-speed Internet connection and, more often than not, display the very grown-up qualities of self-awareness and self-reflection.

Allow me to translate: “Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!”
I have a feeling that self-awareness somehow escaped this writer. His description of his generation probably accurately describes about, say, 0.3% of the population.
I’m having a hard time deciding what’s the worst sentence. Maybe this?

Maybe Chelsea reached this workplace ideal of neatly combining altruism with affluence at her first job at McKinsey, an elite consulting firm, where she specialized in health care, or possibly now, at her hedge fund.

I won’t even go into the part where he talks about his near-stalking of Ms. Clinton. After that, it gets kinda creepy.

Posted by on May 4th, 2008 at 9:22 pm


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