Juxtaposer
I used to read the New York Times op-ed pages regularly before they put most of their columnists behind a paid subscription firewall. But aside from Nick Kristof’s passionate writing about Darfur, I haven’t felt that I’m missing much.
For example, Bob Herbert apparently argues in his latest column that:
There is something terribly wrong with the juxtaposition of Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians.
I’m not really sure who’s making said juxtaposition other than Herbert or whoever writes his clichés, but it strikes me as a fairly bizarre foundation on which to build a column.
It doesn’t really matter what he compares it to, there’s something terribly wrong about the slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. Period. So if Herbert’s trying to make a point about Iraqi tragedy, why bring holiday shopping into it?
The more I’ve tried to parse the statement, the more I hope that’s what he’s trying to do, because the alternative — that he’s using the slaughter of innocent Iraqis as a rhetorical device in a larger indictment of Christmas consumerism — is just shameful.
I guess that all this is to say that there’s something terribly wrong with the juxtaposition of the Times asking me to pay for Herbert’s columns and, well…
No, that’s pretty much wrong on its own.