Annals of Derp: Jonah's MacGuffin Theory

Via Amy Sterling, who's a little worried about Jonah's diet: "heart attack waiting to happen". Seriously, you need to ease up on the brandy and beef suet—and Froot Loops too— and pay some attention to the vegetables.

The derpetology practice here at Rectification Central too often focuses on rebarbative matters like statistics or money or earth science with which your correspondent himself is, to tell the truth, not all that in love or even very familiar. If it's just David Brooks misreading a chart, that's one thing, but frequently we are obliged to deal with the work of real scientists—or economists, which is even worse, imaginary scientists or scientists of the imaginary—and I really have to wonder why I'm working so hard. Can't some qualified person take over?

So it's pretty refreshing when we get Jonah Goldberg turning to film theory, riffing off a 2013 piece by the so-called Ace of Spades, "The MacGuffinization of American Politics".

The Ace's original complaint was the not very original thought that American politics has been turned into entertainment, which he believed had suddenly happened with the election of Barack Obama as president:

Hyperrisible

I don't normally have a reason to mention television here, or even to watch it, but there is a lunatic soap opera that I sort of watch with my as yet somewhat teenaged daughter called Pretty Little Liars, featuring four high school girls dressed like society matrons (the skinny kind) who have been persecuted for some time by cell phone messages and other communications signed A, the pseudonym masking the identity of a cruel and demented supervillain who seems [jump]