Thursday, April 03, 2008

Louis Black Syntax Atrocity of the Week

The set-up: Black wrote his column this week about how so-called solutions to the illegal immigration "problem" (his quotation marks, though I agree with his use of them) would cause a lot of damage. In his introduction, he writes that most people, regardless of political ideology, feel that the U.S. government is broken. He disagrees with these people, with one caveat. This caveat gives us our Louis Black prose nugget of the week:

"(As always, I exempt the current administration from this discussion because there is nothing you can say about it that is so bad that I won't agree with you -- but rather than interpreting it as symptomatic of whatever one's beliefs are about federal failures, I still view it as an extreme, diseased aberration that, as with cancer, has its origins in many different political trends but is solely owned by none of them.)"

So, cancer is caused by a combination of political trends? What? Did you hear the news? Tony's uncle died today from cancer of the testicles. They think it was caused by a combination of stagflation, Orange Alerts, and speculation about Anderson Cooper's sexuality.

2 comments:

chewtastic said...

goddamn it. you almost made me spit-take coffee through the nose on my laptop with that last sentence.

steigrrr said...

wow, i just read that quotation several times and i cannot figure out what any of it means. rather than interpreting it as a failure of syntax, i view it as an aberration that, as with obscurity, has its origins in many journalistic atrocities but is solely owned by none of them.