Why do I get the feeling that for all her accredidation, Ms. Solnit doesn’t really belive she has earned the status she keeps telling us she deserves? She’s like an Ivy League grad that keeps telling anyone who will listen how smart they are by pointing out where they went to school or the elite job they hold, but rarely by demonstrating any real insight or wit.
For some reason, when I run into such people at bars or parties, I have an almost irresistable urge to find their psychological blind spots and pound away. Call me an intellectual bully, but the experience of pouncing on a quota crybaby or a feminist wimp at a dinner party is just too delicious to pass up, mostly just to watch them scurry from the table, speed-dialing their therapist for a quick boost of self-worth. I cannot help but feel a sense of vindication: for years, their family and their professors shielded them, lied to them, coddled them, and told them how goddamned precious and thoughtful they were, and here they are are in the big, bad world, and someone is contemptuously dismissing everything they hold dear in public. You should have learned to put up your dukes in college, girlie, but you figured it was easier run over to your Women’s Studies advisor and have everyone you disagreed with censored.
