Sometimes, you see someone contort themselves in knots of hypocrisy that even the most diligent scrutiny can only ever hope to partially unravel it. Today, I witnessed this first hand. It began with some snark:
To which one might respond, well, yes. It is. But that would be to ignore the mystifying sarcasm. Don’t worry though, Pazienza was adamant that nobody would fail to apprehend his point.
So, well, we seem here to have settled on the premise that GTMO is an injustice. That’s common ground. The problem is that it simply doesn’t make the grade. So far short of attention-worthy, we find, does it fall, that the thought that Pazienza might have written about it is occasion for yet more sarcasm.
The question here, then, is not how the unlawfully detained inmates of Guantanomo Bay ought to comport themselves, or despairingly to end their lives, so as to merit a sought-after allotment of Chez Pazienza’s rare and valuable attentional resources. It isn’t a question of which moral universe one would have to be in that Guantanamo’s horrors don’t even make it onto your radar.
That’s not the question.
The question appears rather to be about which moral universe you would have to be in that other people paying attention to Guantanamo ought to earn them this exquisite brand of castigatory snark. From a “journalist.”
That, we are to understand, is an accurate construal of the priorities of Chez Pazienza, veteran journalist. GTMO is passé, but goodness! Isn’t Glenn Greenwald annoying that he goes on about it?
We might wonder why Pazienza wasn’t glad someone else was compensating for his own attention deficit, given the apparent overall famine of available concern for the litany of wrongs that surround us. But although he does apparently accept that it is an injustice when people who are imprisoned for the best part of a decade without due process start to kill themselves in protest, he cares so little about it that everyone else should ignore it too.
We find, though, that he does care about something. The fault is not in the endorsement by successive U.S. administrations of the circumvention of the human rights of hundreds of human beings. The fault is in Glenn Greenwald. 
The problem is that Glenn Greenwald, in choosing to pay attention to gross injustices, is culpable in the exercise of “highly selective outrage.” We are therefore treated to the spectacle where Pazienza criticizes Greenwald for exercising “highly selective outrage,” while defending his prerogative, on account of limited cognitive resources, to do just that.
One might therefore speculate, under consideration of how little he had to say before he wandered into inconsistency, on the doubtlessly grave poverty of Chez Pazienza’s cognitive resources.
And that is where we leave Chez Pazienza, veteran journalist, on the 19th of May. Who knows what he could possible say next?
Posted on May 19, 2011
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