Friday, October 17, 2008

Joe (Menchu) The Plumber

For those on the left who think that this whole story is about Joe's personal
background, let me put in in terms they should understand. Think of Joe as a
symbolic construct whose situation is "fake but accurate." The left always seems
to like that sort of approach to what they regard as underlying truths. Think of
him as the left thought of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menchu">Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan
writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature with her autobiography of how, as
an indigenous Mayan, she and her family had suffered at the hands of the
Guatemalan army. Except it turns out that many of the details in her
autobiography were fabrications. That didn't matter to the left or the Nobel
Prize Committee because they regarded her story, true or not, as an essential
expression of suffering that could have been true.
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