A long time ago, in a decade called the 90’s, there was a brave and brilliant little website known as Suck.com, which featured daily essays —
presented in a charming
but sometimes hard to read
"snaking" format like this —
about politics, culture, technology and everything in between. Today it’d be written up in a New York Times trend piece about "snark" because that was that general tone of the site, although Suck wasn’t mean for the sake of mean; it was mordant and smart. David Denby may have even assailed it in his misfire of a book, but I wouldn’t know because I haven’t read it, being just the sort of emblem of aloof disdain — calling it a "misfire" without having read it — Denby doesn’t like very much. Anyway, among the contributors to Suck who have gone on to reach the dizzying middles of media celebrity is one Nick Gillespie, now editor and web TV wizard of the libertarian magazine Reason. (He and another former Suckster Tim Cavanaugh once participated in a Jewcy feature called Movable Snipe, wherein they read and made fun of preselected blogs.)
Nick’s slightly mocking tone doesn’t always come across in blog posts or learned essays about the Modern Language Association, but he’s found himself in ReasonTV. Check out the following episode of on-the-street interviews with Obama supporters on Jan. 19. They all somehow feel they’re the change they’ve been waiting for, yet can’t quite explain what they’d have done differently if John McCain had been elected president.