Short ‘n’ Stubby: Monday Meow Mix

Happy Monday, everyone! Ms. Manx hopes your New Year isn’t off to too rocky a start. Here’s some nuggets from the Stumpy Cat’s bowl for all of you today:

Ms Manx is shocked, SHOCKED!–well, not really–to learn that Chris Hedges is a socialist. And that global crapitalism has made him so. She is sure that he’s not the only one. Dave Winer, too, has come out of the commie-pinko closet to assert that the whole world is socialist–like it or not.

Meanwhile, the LAT is awfully squirmy about Dilma Rousseff’s Marxist guerrilla past. What they neglect to mention is why SHE was a socialist (and still is)–Brazil was under a right-wing dictatorship at the time, in which the markets were free and the people were not. Ms. Manx is shocked (but not terribly surprised) that such a significant fact would not be deemed worth mentioning. Indeed, the very fact that Brazil was a dictatorship and that Dilma, their new president, was tortured during it, was buried midway down the piece. It’s a well-known journalistic trick, that, and the Stumpy Cat thinks you should be aware of it–most people read the beginning and end, but only skim the middle.

Ms. Manx is amused, however, to find confirmation that conservatives are cowards. Little wonder, then, that a disproportionate amount of courage exists on the left, which is precisely where all the positive changes in the world are coming from. Dilma was a Marxist guerrilla in Brazil; Pepe Mujica, a former Tupamaro, is now president of Uruguay; and of course, the Stumpy Cat’s favorite guerrilla of all time is Che Guevara, whom no one could accuse of cowardice and still expect to be taken seriously.

And speaking of people whom no one could accuse of cowardice, how about Ted Rall? He’s taken a lot of flak for his cartoons (several of which have appeared here) and his articles, which question the status quo so hard, they’re just shy of waterboarding it. Ms. Manx says “Welcome to the barricades, comrade!”

Finally, Ms. Manx is puzzled by the paucity of female authors in leading literary magazines. And she’s not the only one.