IOW : Ever since the 2003 Jayson Blair scandal, it seems increasingly like the positively diseased minds at Amerika's newspaper of record have chopped off their proverbial right ear, making them tone deaf in essence to any voice whatsoever that does not tow the pro-progress, anti-tradition line.
The New York Times is like the rich doctor's daughter date who gets good and boozed up with you at the sports bar, but then refuses to make out after she discovers that you didn't march against Apartheid while in college.
Anything that goes even a little against the grain of their progressivist, anti-racist, pro-feminist worldview causes the discussion with them to slam shut like the giant 500-ton cast iron door of an underground bank vault.
It is official : the NYT is the most humourless publication on Planet Earth.
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A case in point would be a hilariously sycophantic propaganda puff piece published in the national print edition of today's Sunday Times Magazine entitled "An Actor's Gold Mine" by Times communist Daniel Bergner.
I started reading this article today not sure (I thought) of who this "famous actor" that the Times was writing about - a one Jeffrey Wright" - was at all. I had never heard of him (I thought).
So I read on, amused as always by the predictable and incredibly transparent brown-nosing that always accompanies anything whatsoever the vermin at the Times write about when the dateline says: "Africa." In the case of "Gold Mine," that dateline: "Africa" story brought us to Sierra Leone, where a Hollywood bigwig I thought I'd never heard of (Wright himself) was working to improve the lives of his people blah blah by building a sustainable blah blah gold mining model blah blah in minerals-rich S.L., blah blah etc ad infinitum.
And then it hit me like a ton of bricks :
"When he finished filming “Ali,” instead of returning home to New York, Wright flew with Marafono to Freetown. That trip had no clear purpose. Wright saw acting as his calling; he’d given luminous performances as a gay nurse who tends to the homophobic Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” and in the title role in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film “Basquiat.” But his experience working on “Ali” left him feeling tainted. As the two men toured Freetown, Marafono was greeted as a peacemaker and called “Father of the Nation” on the streets, where many of the buildings were burned-out shells. At a bedraggled camp for the war’s amputees, Wright encountered a girl, no more than a toddler, whose forearm had been chopped off by soldiers. “How do you process that?” he asked me one night last spring as we drove past a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, where a spate of maimings had occurred. “I couldn’t. It was very difficult to see that and not say, Is there something I can do here that can be helpful to her, to this place?”
"Oh snap!", I thought, they're talking about the guy who played Basquiat in the 1996 movie of the same name! Which Btw was one of the most poorly-acted movies I have ever seen. David Bowie plays Andy Warhol, even Courtney Love makes an appearance. (Think I'm being unfair? Consider this scene :
...No matter your views on the "genius" of Basquiat, all can agree that this is one very, very poor, pretentious little film).
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So this mountain of Hollywood mediocrity Jeffrey Wright - who like the half-Haitian Basquiat himself btw is more genetically European than African (but not by a lot) - catches the Bono bug and decides to go help his co-ethnics in the motherland, settling on Sierra Leone (it of "Blood Diamonds" fame), where he attempts to establish a gold mining operation.
The only problem is that today, nothing works in Africa - especially those parts of the motherland historically farthest removed from European influence. And though neither Jeffrey Wright nor the spineless Times' journo sent to cover Wright's gold-digging - a one Daniel Bergner (wink) - have not the balls to admit it, the fact is that post-Colonial Africa is a shambles of a place that is utterly dependent on Western Food Aid, on the one hand, and, on the other, a place that suffers not so much from the "legacy of colonialism," but rather from the absence of colonialism.
Western colonialism, that is. Because even though the criminally hypocritical One Worlders at the New York Times never mention it, everybody knows that the biggest colonial power in Africa today is the Han Chinese, who are about one thousand times more racist towards blacks than white Euros, and about one million times less inclined than white Euros to use their time on the Dark Continent to uplift the negro be it through religious missionary work or the construction of clinics, schools, hospitals, roads etc you get the picture.
But the weasels who green-lighted the publication of Bergner's piece on Wright did not mention Chinese influence in Africa one single time.
Of these crimes we expect the Times, to commit them. The one thing that I will never be able to countenance, is the way the horrible little haters at the NYT seem to be possessed by a hatred for white men that is so powerful, so irresistible, that they cannot help slipping into an Afro-centric puff-piece such as "Gold Mine" a little racist jibe or two, in this case towards the end of the article :
Two days later, the three-person delegation swooped in, circling in a bright yellow helicopter above the parcel. The chopper landed, and soon a meeting was held at an open-sided hall in a town where the sole proud piece of machinery was a hand-powered water pump. Wright presented Jibila with a bundle of kola nuts, signifying life. “We’re a small company, but we have big ideas,” he told the convocation of chiefs and of Bundu women led by a witch in a carved wooden helmet with a mane of orange, blue and white yarn. One of the three visitors, pink-faced, tall and bulky in a dress shirt and bluejeans, said solemnly, “Our trip would not be complete without paying homage to you, Mr. Paramount Chief.”
Jibila turned to the three visitors. “Use your helicopters and bring your machines!” he commanded. “I am an important chief, and I want development fast-tracked! Go as hard as possible! We are impatient! Don’t even sleep!"
Later the pink-faced man told me that he was satisfied. It appeared that Wright would have his partnership. But weeks went by, then months. In late October, while Wright watched a screening of “The Hunger Games” in Manhattan, his phone vibrated constantly, calls coming in from the Taia staff, huddled in a spot with cell service and anxious to know if at last he had a commitment. He didn’t. The price of gold had taken another dip. With values so unsteady, his would-be partner was hesitant. Wright has begun wooing another set of investors.The New York Times reporter Daniel Bergner's calling a white male mining executive "pink-faced" not once but twice in this article, is akin to me referring to Bergner as "hook-nosed and beedy-eyed".
The only difference is that I would never do that, except by way of comparison.
The New York Times: They Seem To Have A Big Problem With The Pink-Faces, Since 1896.
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