If only racism were the only problem

Romenesko links to this post detailing subtle racism in a couple popular blogs. I don’t think John Lee, the writer, makes much of a case — a couple citations don’t exactly prove a trend — but he had a few blogworthy passages.

Gawker is run by a New York Observer contributor named Choire Sicha, whose vibe is that of a young Rex Reed ? a man riffing on the superficialities of life with the highly self-referential banter one expects of a Lower East Side scenester who turns to writing when his dream of being discovered as an underwear model at a gallery opening in SoHo has evaporated. Sicha’s writing style is composed of a bitchy stream of consciousness peppered with metaphoric comparisons to viscous fluids, queer malapropisms, and three-part neologisms such as “man-f*cking-hattan.”

and this…

Ana Marie Cox, a.k.a. Wonkette, is Sicha’s DC counterpart. Her mission: to plumb the DC gossip scene for any signs of life in a town where getting invited to a Beltway power party is harder than getting a reservation at Nobu during a Mad Cow Disease scare. For a city that arguably controls the fate of the known world, DC has a social scene that is only slightly more interesting than life on an Alaskan oil field ? this city’s idea of a velvet rope is ten secret service guys standing in a row.

Note to Mr. Lee: If casual (and, by my best guess, unintended) racism were the only thing wrong with these blogs, I’d say, well, nobody’s perfect — certainly not white people in a white-dominated society. Two things bug me even more about these blogs:

1. The celebration of snark — as if everything can be written off with a wisecrack.
2. The preoccupation with the Mundane Lives of Other People More Important Than We Are.

Not to be one of those Grating Social Commentators or anything, but both of these blogs seem to encapsulize our growing tendency to dwell on the petty, the insubstantial, the superficial, when clearly we’ve got more important things to worry about. Something makes me want to shout at ’em: for God’s sake, people, grow up.