Salon.com > Elon James White http://www.salon.com Sat, 18 May 2013 23:45:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Mr. Insensitivity meets the academy http://www.salon.com/2011/10/06/mr_insensitivity_meets_the_academy/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/06/mr_insensitivity_meets_the_academy/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10103734 As an honors graduate of the prestigious Gov. Chris Christie School of Charm at Rutgers University, I’ve got a thick hide. Also a satirical bent. Both prove useful in my line of work. Nothing makes me happier than reading angry letters and online fulminations calling me bad names for lack of a coherent argument. Hey, knock yourselves out. Insensitive? It’s my middle name.

Occasionally, my instinct for comic exaggeration leads me astray. That happened when I recently lampooned a column by Melissa Harris-Perry charging President Obama’s liberal critics with covert racism.

“This unfortunate obsession,” I wrote, “increasingly resembles a photo negative of KKK racial thought ... Harris-Perry’s becoming a left-wing Michele Bachmann, an attractive woman seeking fame and fortune by saying silly things on cable TV.”

The KKK line was definitely over the top, a violation of the “Hitler Rule,” which holds that the first person to call somebody a Nazi loses by default. My goal was to make people think, not emit steam from their ears.

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