NewsBusters readers know The New York Times doesn’t just inject anti-capitalist and anti-conservative positions into its “news” coverage, but uses every section to make its arguments, concealed under the rubrics of Arts or Style.
The Times is gleeful over the inevitable demise of capitalism, as demonstrated by an enraptured take by culture reporter Jennifer Schuessler on the front of Thursday’s Arts section of a hard-left satirical exhibit, “Museum of Capitalism,” in Greenwich Village.
It appeared under a headline suggesting free markets were destined for obsolescence just like Communism: “Consigned to the Museum Heap of History” (click "expand"):
Thirty years ago last week, the Berlin Wall came down, a surprise event that soon brought the rest of Soviet-style communism down with it.
But a few days before the anniversary of that epochal moment, a crowd gathered in a Greenwich Village gallery to celebrate the opening of the latest iteration of the Museum of Capitalism, a roving exhibition dedicated to looking back on the system that triumphed in 1989 from some imagined future when it, too, has disappeared.
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There were “edible artifacts” of capitalism like cheeseburgers and energy bars, passed on trays bearing museum-like labels. Lines formed around the more interactive pieces, including a hand-cranked “minimum-wage machine” and a disassembly line where visitors, armed with hammers and pliers, were subjecting discarded shoes and cellphone chargers to enthusiastic creative destruction.
“We want to encourage people to talk about it, to figure out what this thing is that is too close for us to see,” Timothy Furstnau, who, with Andrea Steves, works as the curatorial collective Fictilis, said, elaborating on the project’s goal of “making capitalism strange.”
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Barbed wire may be visual shorthand for a totalitarian gulag. It’s also, a wall label inside notes, a capitalist product par excellence: It played a pivotal role in the westward expansion of the United States, as well as in an 1892 Supreme Court patent case that helped create ideas about intellectual property that still undergird capitalism today.
Take that, free-marketers! Schuessler swallowed all the socialist assumptions when examining the individual pieces of the exhibition.
The exhibition presents the end of capitalism not just as a premise, but as an aspiration. “Until capitalism is over,” Ms. Steves said, “the Museum of Capitalism will still have work to do.”
Nearby, in that day’s Styles section, the paper was still attacking those gauche Brexiteers from all angles, personal, political, and cultural, in contributor Sophie Haigney’s “Leaving the E.U.Is hard. Having A Party Is Easy.” A text box read: “An actor wearing a Boris Johnson wig is popular to hate.” How marvelous.
Just after work on Halloween, people congregated in a cavernous steampunk-themed bar in the financial district here, drinking No Deal Daiquiris, Bo-jitos and Tequila Mays: cocktails dreamed up for an “End of the World Brexit” party, planned for a night when Brexit was supposed to happen but didn’t.
What fun!
Damien Rivoire, 41, was wearing a mask and carrying a sign that said, “Ditch Boris!!” -- a reference to the prime minister’s declaration that he would rather be “dead in a ditch” than ask the European Union for another delay on Brexit.
“It’s a scary time,” said Mr. Rivoire, a photographer who is French but has lived in London for 14 years. “I knew Boris would be here tonight and I thought this was a good message, since Brexit didn’t happen.”
Haigney seemed to feel safe assuming all her Times readers despised Brexit (click "expand"):
The meaningless and ominous coincidence of the Brexit deadline falling on Halloween had been hanging over British life since the spring, making possible a range of metaphors for the fear that Brexit inspired, especially for those who voted Remain.
The specter of a hard Brexit was genuinely terrifying; the prospect of a deal and an actual departure was frightening to Remainers too.
How the majority of pro-Brexit voters feel has never been a concern for the Times. Haigney took the opportunity to work in anti-conservative, anti-Boris, anti-Brexit fulminations under the guise of reporting, like this weird concluding anecdote:
....there was also a Jacob Rees-Mogg, a “B.D.S.M. David Cameron,” and a pig -- a stand-in for the one David Cameron allegedly, you know. [Editorial Note: She’s talking about this alleged anecdote. Click at your own risk.] The pig, who refused to give even a first name, said, “The only saving grace of this whole thing, though there really is no saving grace, is that it can be hilarious.”
