Snark Attack

Mizwrite has a post on Heroes that I liked and got me to thinking. I said that I am pretty sick and tired of cynicism being thought of as sophisticated and difficult. I mean how hard is to be negative and mean? And if you write well you are probably a best seller.

But...I love a good snark. I love irony. To me that takes so much more brain cells firing than cynicism. I was reading the Washington Post blog, Achenblog, which I just discovered. What snarky fun it is. He is writing about something as mind numbingly boring as what is REALLY in the budget that the President submits? He said all the fun stuff is in the appendix. He talks about how NASA got an "extra $900 million more dollars than the Bush administration's last budget request, which by my calculation will allow it to fire three more satellites into the ocean every year." He has a story in the Washington Post about the satellite "orbiting earth at the bottom of the Indian Ocean."

Kathleen Parker is another snarky columnist as is Maureen Dowd and Michelle Malkin. Christopher Hitchens is probably snarky, too, but his writing is so, so....well, let us say I can read a sentence he has written and not be sure I am speaking the same language. I have seen him on TV though and he is hysterical, even if you don't agree with him. Anybody who can flip off the Bill Maher audience has got to be snarky.

Maybe that is the hallmark of good snark, humor and a quick wit. Jon Stewart leaps to mind here. I like when they pick on all politicians and all issues, not just cherry pick the ones they are against. Hollywood is liberal, so they make fun of conservatives and do a mighty fine job of it, but there is plenty of humor to be had at the expense of the liberal world. We have a fine new Democratic Attorney General, Eric Holder, who says Americans are cowards when it comes to discussing race, and yet they have a fine Democratic member of the senate, Robert Byrd, who was a member of the KKK. Grand Wizard I understand. Now tell me there isn't a good snark in there somewhere.

A good snark takes what you think you know and pushes it outside the box. Kind of the same thing a good reporter should do, but without the sarcasm.