What's Up With John Derbyshire?

I agree with most of the substance in this piece, but at at the end...

The other day I was on the checkout line at a convenience store. The people in front of me were having a conversation. One of them, a middle-aged man, was talking about his daughter, whose car had just been stolen. The girl was, apparently, inconsolable. Said her Dad: "She just mopes around the house saying, 'They stole my Camry.' The poor kid, she loved that car. It had a CD player with a six-disk changer. Really, she just can't get over it." The man speaking looked to be no more than 45. I can't imagine his daughter was much over 20. And this was the great disaster of her life: "They stole my Camry."

Look at us! Look at the gross vulgar overflowing fat wealth we live amongst! Look at the great cars that 20-year-old kids drive 400 yards to the mall, to buy things they don't need, gadgets to pack into houses already overflowing with gadgets, clothes to cram into closets stuffed with clothes. Look at the work we do, sitting in humming cubicles scrolling through screens full of numbers, numbers that measure our wealth. Look at the bright, airy schools our kids attend, to be taught that their ancestors were moral criminals, their parents are liars, their culture is a sham. Look at our "reality TV" programs, where people with empty heads wallow in infantile hedonism. Look at our fool diplomats, poring over their treaties and resolutions and communiqués, while young men with burning eyes slip silently into our cities with boxes, canisters, cargoes, vials, and suitcases curiously heavy. Look at this proud tower! And feel its foundations tremble.

It's like he's simultaneously channeling Luddite-esque anti-materialistic lefties and cultural conservative "tsk tsk"-ers.

The gal, according to him, is barely out of her teenhood, an age when your car is a very important object. Not to mention expensive. She hasn't lived long enough to have any other "great crisis" worthy of mention in a checkout line by her father...at least none that he knows of. Derbyshire doesn't know the first thing about this woman or what she values. All he has to go on are the comments a father made while chatting in line. Yes, all I have to go on are Derbyshire's reported observations, and they are weak indeed to give birth to such a sermon.

This is a grasping of straws way of letting a rant without a point escape. It sounds vaguely nice, but has no substance.

Posted by Drizzten at February 06, 2003 04:46 PM