Jack Burns Lives!

Ed Would Be Pleased

Marc Weingarten’s recent pontification concerning Postcards From Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast, screams for attention. He reminds me of a little child that throws toys across the room and stomps its feet until everyone turns around, looks and stops what they were doing.

Just a lot of unnecessary grandstanding.

The review is highly critical of Abbey, essentially saying Abbey was little more than an old curmudgeon that never had a nice thing to say about anything. A “nasty crank” lacking “generosity of spirit.”

Ed would probably be quite pleased that after all these years, he’s still getting hammered by book reviewers. Been dead nearly twenty years and still pissin’ people off!

About all I can say is Weingarten doesn’t understand Abbey very well. He states that Abbey “is not a warm and fuzzy figure, someone to embrace like a benevolent uncle.” Well, Ed didn’t want to be warm and fuzzy! Ed wrote “to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate,” and generally didn’t give a damn about being popular, especially with reviewers. I suppose being snubbed by the east coast aristocracy gnawed at him a little. No one likes rejection. But Abbey believed that telling the truth, no matter how ugly it may be, is the most important item of business. That’s exactly what he did and exactly why he’s long been a target of people like Weingarten.

Some people just can’t handle the truth. They don’t like hearing the truth about their cultural darlings, that their writing was crap, their music was crap and that our preoccupation with cultural crap, instead of vital, critical issues, is a big part of the problem. Note: Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton and who’s screwing Brad Pitt this week.

Abbey called it like he saw it, and he wasn’t afraid to do it, reviewers be damned!

Ed is anything but an anachronism, and his writings have perhaps more relevance today than they did in the ’60′s and in the ’70′s. Who’s better qualified to awaken the insouciant masses from their stupor than Edward Abbey?

Here’s to you, Ed.