Over at Slate, Jack Shafer and Mickey Kaus both have pretty good takes on the debacle of Easterbrook’s strange Kill Bill blog. Kaus also links to about 10 million other blogs that discuss (or mindlessly rant about) Easterbrook’s entry and subsequent apology.
Funnily enough, Shafer actually had the exact same reaction I did when he read the column last Monday. He writes:
The moral posturing and witless embrace of loathsome cultural stereotypes found in these 84 words seemed so un-Easterbrook that I hoped that someone would e-mail me the news that somebody had hacked Gregg’s blog and inserted this bogus copy.
I’m glad that people who are close to Easterbrook have defended him as a person, even as they’ve criticized his work in this instance. It’s much better than reading, “Y’know, he told me he was collecting that Nazi memorabilia for a special project, but I never thought…”
Anyway, it seems that this rant of his got out of hand, such was his indignation at Tarantino’s film (which I’m now dying to see, admittedly). It’s not like he’d be the first blogger to misstep; it’s more a sign of his gravitas that such comments were taken so seriously (though I still contend they’re more muddled than anti-semitic). Anyone who’s read this blog in the past 8 months knows that essay-like entries can really go off the rails sometimes.
One other disturbing thing: It completely slipped my mind when I was writing the first entry, but ESPN (where TMQ was published each week) is actually owned by Disney. See, I thought TMQ’s quick hook was a post-Limbaugh response by ESPN. But now, it raises a more sinister question: Did a high-up at Disney (Eisner or Weinstein, perhaps) call for Easterbrook’s firing? Media consolidation sucks.
I hope that Tuesday Morning Quarterback resurfaces somewhere like Slate (where the column originated).
Or at Virtual Memories! Why, I’m pretty unconsolidated, by Big Media terms (well, I do run a publishing company by night, edit a pharmaceutical magazine by day, and watch NFL Direct Ticket on Sundays)!
So let it be known that I am now offering Gregg Easterbrook a place to post his Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns. I can’t promise that my server won’t collapse under the weight of the new traffic, but I can offer an absoluete minimum of editorial interference (after all, I am used to running a trade magazine)!