Movable Snipe: Get Fired More Often, Spencer

Well, as they say, if you’re gonna go down, may as well do it in flames. The blogosphere is nothing if not a unique source for cathartic self-expression, connection with one’s fellow human beings, and limitless platforms for nonstop bitching about your place of employment (though it’s better if you’ve already left the job – trust me on this one). You’re certainly in good company –Charles Lane, Michael Kelly, and of course Andrew Sullivan have all been reportedly masticated and expectorated by the TNR machine.

While I’m usually impressed with TNR’s quality of journalism, I’ll confess to being a newcomer to The Spine. So many eds-in-chief now have cyber-soapboxes under their publication’s web masthead, there’s simply no time to read them all and still reserve the necessary five hours for consuming apocryphal tales of earth’s imminent destruction, masterfully-spun punditry and brain cell-demolishing celebrity gossip. But The Spine proved to be a time-saver, in that the author’s ornery malignance shines through in one quick scan. After wading through the gooey grandiloquence of Peretz’s fustian pedantry (though granted, I’m a card-carrying member of the unwashed masses whose Harvard rejection letter arrived less than eight days after mailing in the application, so maybe his perspicacity was simply lost on me), I discovered that his gift lies in his ability to offend virtually everyone on the planet. Equal opportunity loathing for every class, race, creed, group, viewpoint, analysis and education level but your own – I suppose it’s a form of egalitarianism, albeit in a twisted way. Affirmative action, a doctrine that apparently promotes and is rooted in anti-semitism, is "regretfully” resurfacing as a “trap for Democrats.” Palestinians are “lemmings” whose cause is “without ethical meaning.” Andy Warhol’s iconic Mao portraits are nothing but “extensions of China's mass production of the chairman's image.” And everyone with an IQ lower than 115 should be rounded up, stashed in a deserted Nebraska slaughterhouse and forced to donate their eyeballs and livers to their intellectual superiors.

As for Peretz himself, well, perhaps he programs his Google alerts to omit descriptions containing words such as “one of the magazine industry's cruelest autocrats” or “self-promoter, braggart, Arab-hater, name-dropper, and bad writer,” or even “grand, cape-swirling, mustache-twirling crank who periodically emerges from a volcanic fissure in the ground in order to curse the light of the sun, blaspheme the name of God, and drink the blood of particularly slow and vulnerable golden retrievers.” Then again, maybe he’s just taking a lesson from the stone tablets of megalomaniacal PR: No press is bad press, as long as – well, I’m sure we all know the rest.