The unbearable lightness of being pundits

I don't like writing about pundits. They take up oxygen which would be better spent on a paramecium. And yet, they plague us, like an uncurable case of the clap.

I chose Elie Mystal for my case study, but really, any will do.

"He's a lawyer, and you're just some dude!"

No, I offer a correction. We're both just some dudes. My education is no less than his. My width of reading I'd put up against his any day, and twice on Sundays. Simply because he has a JD doesn't make him any more insightful than me.

"Well... he works in social justice! What do you do?"

I'm a librarian in an underserved community. I work to uplift my fellow Latins every day. I provide them a service funded through their taxes. As a librarian, I'm on the front lines of every single damned social issue facing us. Forgive me if I can put up my social justice bona fides up against Mr. Mystal's any day and come out smelling of roses.

"Well... he's holding our Democrats accountable!"

No, he's not. What he's doing is selling his books and making sure he gets booked on cable news shows. It's how he makes his money. Yes, we take donations on here. But if you think I'm going to retire on the lucre you lot give me and Trevor, well boy, you're wrong.

Mr. Mystal and his confreres are good at one thing: Being outraged on TV and social media. That's it. That's their stock in trade. They don't shine light, but stoke smoke. They don't offer rational analysis, but spew out whatever will push your buttons. Where we need sobriety and probity, he and his like will just churn whatever anger is out there. It's how they make their money. I would love for them to do my job for just one day. They'd run home crying to their partners. I have to deal in the real world. They have to deal in not having the right water in the green room.

Now, yes. I'm unabashedly a yellow-dog Democrat. I would vote for a yellow dog if it had a (D) after its name. And it would do a better job than most Republicans. This isn't because I'm in a cult. This isn't because I've given up my reason. This is because every single thing which has made my life better, and the lives of my loved ones better, since the 1930s has been promoted and enacted by the Democratic Party. My grandmother said I should be a Republican because I was getting Pell Grants to go to UCLA. I, lovingly, informed her that any money I received was due to the work of Democrats to keep it flowing. I very much well know what side of my bread I'm buttered on.

Pundits on both sides of the aisle offer nothing but Veruca Salting. "I want it NOW!" That is no way to run a modern state. Immediate gratification is something we should have left behind once we learned to use the toilet. But too many of our fellow citizens never progressed past that mental state, and, well, here we are.

Personally, I have no desire to be part of anyone's grift. And that's all that these people are: grifters. The sooner we consign them to obscurity, the better off we'll all be.

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