Fri Feb 25/05
Death Cab for Cutter

Until yesterday, I was no more than peripherally aware of the author and columnist Michelle Malkin, one of the right-wing team players over at Town Hall. (Malkin's book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror, tries to do for the Japanese internment camps what Ann Coulter is trying to do for Joe McCarthy.) Her Wednesday column, though, is a hall-of-famer. Truly, this is one of the most breathtakingly stupid things I have ever read.

According to Malkin, "the new youth craze" is… cutting. Yes, that cutting — in Malkin's words, "using knives, razor blades or even safety pins [oh Lord, please not safety pins! –ed.] to deliberately harm one's own body." And, which is worse, "it's spreading to a school near you." Malkin then outs some celebrities, Angelina Jolie and Christina Ricci among them, who have discussed their cutting in interviews, and disapprovingly notes that "the destructive practice has been depicted in films targeting young girls and teens (such as "Thirteen")."

"Wait, what the hell?" I thought to myself. "Is this lady somehow unaware that cutting is a psychological disorder?" Indeed, based on this astonishing sentence, it would appear so: "This madness would not be as popular as it is among young people if not for the glamorizing endorsement of nitwit celebrities such as twentysomething actress Christina Ricci." But the quotes Malkin attributes to Ricci are not glamourizing at all. Rather, they echo what one might expect to hear from a bulimic describing the reasons for her disorder.

Malkin remains unflappably clueless (or else she very effectively feigns cluelessness), offering this even more astonishing sentence: "It may all be fun and games for a Hollywood starlet like Ricci, but her mindless stunts have inspired countless young girls to carve themselves into a bloody stupor."

I only hope Ricci had as much fun hacking her arms to pieces as I had reading this, which is thus far my Funniest Sentence of 2005:

There is even a new genre of music — "emo" — associated with promoting the cutting culture.

Fook me, that's wonderful. It's moments like that when I can understand the appeal of slavishly aligning oneself to The Left or The Right, and to its line-toeing columnists, always scanning the newswires for the One Big Embarrassment from the other side.