Cheek and Bluster

Talk is cheap, and snark is the cheapest kind — which is why the internet is swamped with it. Fortunately there are exceptions to the rule, those relatively few writers on the web whose skills raise them well above the garden variety haters.

One such iconoclastic wit goes by the online alias of Mobutu Sese Seko. His Twitter profile says, “Former Notorious African Dictator. Politics blogger at @Gawker and @GQMagazine.com. Guest at @Deadspin, The @Classical and @Vice. Registered sexhaver.” His blog Et tu, Mr. Destructo? is a longtime resident of my sidebar, and can be found at http://www.mrdestructo.com.

Mobutu isn’t the first to take aim at the New York Times’s Weddings section. These weekly matrimonial hagiographies are like a carefully preserved relic from the gilded age: fawning reports of joyous unions between necessarily well-bred, well-educated, well-off young paragons of virtue. Perhaps, like me, Mobutu hadn’t bothered to look at any of these tulle-wrapped flauntings in a while. In any case, yesterday he did, and was moved to embark upon a most entertaining flurry of tweeted hathos.

The New York Times, “Sage Mehta and Michael Robinson”:

Alexandra Sage Mehta and Michael Robinson do not seem to belong to the Facebook generation that expresses itself in sentence fragments. In conversation, their sentences are grammatical and lovely and often sound as if previously written, if not rewritten.

Hurl these people into a slow-moving river. nytimes.com/2012/06/03/fas…

— Mobutu Sese Seko (@Mobute) June 3, 2012

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