Intellectual Love

This is something I meant to blog about earlier in the week, but being as I am in previews for Red Herring, I wasn't able to get aroud to it until now. Of course, today is Valentine's Day so I feel as though I should blog about that. But I don't want to.

I guess a compromise would be to blog about the first thing as though it were my Valentine. Here goes.

Dear Los Angeles Times Opinion/Book Review Section,

I love you. You are probably my favorite section of the paper. So cleverly designed to stir my thoughts and inform me of the opinions of others. When I feel all turned upside down, all it means is I've reached the end of one section and the beginning of another.

Last Sunday, you were particularly good. In your Book Review section, you reviewed The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, which discusses how today's American culture appears anti-intellectual. In it, she mentioned how the post-war era of self-betterment, secularization, and devotion to the high arts has gone the way of the dodo. We are now in the midst of an age of religious zealotry, low-brow entertainment, and utter complacency.

Then, lovely as you are, in your Opinion section you had an article about Nancy Pelosi turning the House cafeteria "green" - that is with free-range, healthy food instead of the calorie-infested processed crap we Americans really want. In this idyllic eaterie there are even numerous recycling stations on the perimeter, which are promptly ignored. Charlotte Allen, the opinionator here, laments this turn for the Democrats becoming the "party of the elite and the trendy." Trendy? Saving the environment? Bettering one's self? Hmm...sounds like the work of the intellectuals. And Ms. Allen might do herself some good by turning the Opinion section upside down and reading the book review.

Love,
bt