No doubt Virginia Heffernan is getting the opportunity to see herself as others see her, although I doubt she would recognise what she sees.
Her neighbours did her a favour and removed the snow from her driveway. This appears to have been a random, selfless act of kindness done because they are decent people being neighbourly. It’s the sort of thing that decent folk worldwide tend to do.
What, then, is Heffernan’s response? Does she nip round, knock on the door and say “thankyou” or does she use her column in the LA Times to berate them becuse they are Trump supporters?
Well, what did you expect?
She compares them to Nazis (yawn, FFS! – Ed), and to Hezbollah and to Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Yup, because these people are Trump supporters, they are terrorists. Most reasonable, rational, decent people would merely have knocked on the door and proffered a thank you. But no, because they are Trumpites, something must be done, hence the defamatory article.
What do we do about the Trumpites around us?
As if, somehow, something needs to be done. Oh, like sending them to re-education camps, I suppose. After all, they are guilty of wrongthink and we can’t be having that. And that is the nub of the matter. Heffernan and her fellow travellers are so conceited that they assume that they have all the answers, that their opinion is the correct one and those that differ are wrong and something needs to be done about them – even if they do indulge in random acts of kindness.
She sanctimoniously decides that she cannot offer them absolution – how’s that for puffed up pompous conceit? As if voting for someone that she disapproves of, is needing absolution. The thing is, Heffernan, like her opposite numbers over at the Guardian on this side of the pond, thinks that she is a good person. She is not. She is a snob at best, but at worst, she is judgemental and downright nasty. An act of kindness on the part of her neighbours has seen them besmirched in a newspaper column, their reputations publicly defiled all because this vile woman wants to virtue signal about how good she is. It is just as well that this is the extent of her powers. God help them if she had a position of power, jackboots and a pistol. And that’s the thing here. These people never see themselves as they really are: Nasty totalitarians who think it is their place to boss the rest of us about – and it was people just like this who willingly carried out the atrocities of the 20th century on behalf of the despots in charge. No doubt they, too, thought they were good people.
The lack of self-awareness on display is staggering to say the least. She is the one behaving like the Nazi, She is the one who is abhorrent here, not them. She is the bully.
The article has managed to go viral and not for the reasons Heffernan and her publishers at the LA Times would have wanted. Every time I see it referenced, people are taking the same horrified reaction to it – I am far from alone in may assessment of Heffernan as not being a good person. What a nasty piece of work she is and didn’t an editor look at it and point out the obvious before pulling it? Obviously not.
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!
That Burns wrote this to a louse is, perhaps, apt.
So this journo doesn’t realise the Nazis were socialists like US Democrats so called? It is always troublin when anyone equates Hitler and his Nazi party with the extreme right instead of the extreme right. The German Nationalist socialist workers party probably is hard to distinguish from a Chilean Pinochet type set up.
One might hope the neighbours dump all their snow on HER drive next time…
Yellow snow.
This would be an appropriate modification to the neighbours snowblower:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Etpc9oQWYAIA5KO?format=jpg&name=900×900
If the neighbours have any sense one conversation will be enough to get her measure and to steer well clear of her, but she’ll never have the self-awareness to realise that the politesse which they exhibit is indicative of their reluctance to befriend her.
This person has this retreat so that she can escape from the shithole she and her ilk made of her city. Once a few of her pals buy out the deplorables she will be more at home.
Then a few refugees from further south, across a few non existent borders will clear her drive for a few cents.
Then like a cancer, they can move further into the strange country that is fly-over land.
Might she be a bit menopausal?
By seeing her neighbours as part of the ‘Deplorables’ she is herself one of the ‘Reprehensibles’.
The kickback is gratifying to see. This type of person has been getting away with being utterly obnoxious for far too long. At last people are noticing and shutting them down.
I haven’t seen any favourable comments. She’s being ripped to shreds over this.
What was the editor thinking? Why didn’t he ask her neighbour for his thoughts on the matter? “Are you such a nasty, uncaring bigot that you do these random acts of kindness just to mess with our writer’s head?”
My thoughts exactly. Regardless of political opinions, it’s a disgraceful piece and an editor should have stopped it in its tracks.
Just goes to show what the mindset is in the media. The editor saw nothing wrong with the piece, it fitted in to his way of thinking perfectly.
What a cunt.
“These people never see themselves as they really are: Nasty totalitarians who think it is their place to boss the rest of us about – and it was people just like this who willingly carried out the atrocities of the 20th century on behalf of the despots in charge. No doubt they, too, thought they were good people.”
As Basil Fawlty once said, “this is exactly how Nazi Germany started.” ?
Well, look on the bright side, think about how Nazi Germany ended, lots of individuals swinging from the gallows.
Unlikely this time though.