Re-Post-- Andrew Sullivan: "I'm Not Easily Offended"
Newcomers to this site might wonder what the hell I was doing before Dan Rather decided to give me the gift of traffic.
Well, pretty much I was doing the same crap, except to Andrew Sullivan.
Andrew "No Offense Taken" Sullivan had his nineteenth nervous breakdown after Zell Miller spoke at the Republican convention, declaring:
"I'm not easy to offend, but this speech was gob-smackingly vile."
Well, I decided to check the evidence as for his self-declared immunity to offense. The results of this investigation follow.
"I'm not easy to offend, but this speech was gob-smackingly vile."
So says my longtime pen-pal and former college badmitton partner Andrew Sullivan, evaluating his capacity to be offended, and finding himself to be quite a cool customer in this regard.
I think that's the way we all think of Andrew-- as not easily offended.
When I think of the man who (to tell a secret) actually writes half the posts on this site (tip: me, the real Ace, never played D&D in my life; that dorkwad elf crap is all Andrew), I think of a calm, stoic, almost impassive man; and not at all, let us say, a man prone to twitchy excitability, shrill hyperbole, embarassingly emotional language, or frequent hysterical outbursts.
Not. At. All.
The sort of man who never, ever finds something that outrages him, and tells us all in no uncertain terms about how "vile," "disgusting," "sickening," et al. it all is.
The sort of man who you could easily see playing the Steve McQueen role in a remake of Bullitt, so long as the director would be comfortable with a more understated and laconic performance.
At any rate, here's a quick run-down of Andrew's recent take-no-offense, just-hang-and-chill-with-it postings. The blase ennui practically drips from these posts, I think you'll agree.
"Purple Heart bandages are plain sickening."
"One thought sprang into my mind immediately: what an arrogant jerk."
"Both are repulsive in different ways."
"I'm sick of being told that worrying about this is a sign of faint-heartedness in the war."
"It's this blindness that rankles."
Wait one red hot minute: even with chickens? Even chickens? Wouldn't you guess that, in the heirarchy of food-animals, chickens would be the first to be abused? I don't know why I think that.
Oh yeah, yes I do: because they're fucking chickens.
But anyway, on to the piece de resistance:
That's my best bud-- Andrew "Not Easy to Offend" Sullivan. Just about the calmest, coolest, least emotional cat I know.
Steady as a rock. An emotionally unstable rock with a nervous disorder shrieking hysterically in the grips of a meth-fueled halluciation that its eyes are being devoured by "sinister lobsters."
And who's really, really passionate about gay marriage.
That's the sort of rock I'm talking about.
Unrelated Serendipitous Irony Update: From a different era in Andrew's life, back when the War on Terror was, like, you know, sorta important 'n stuff.
Nothing should be allowed to detract from the war against Bush. How... self-prescient, to coin a clumsy term.