Journalism Sarcastic Quotes

My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions. They split down the middle between very sincere opinions and feelings that I have and sarcastic and hopefully humorous rebuttals towards cliché' bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years. I mean it seems like there are only two options for songwriters - either they are sad, tragic visionaries like Morrisey or Michael Stipe or Robert Smith or there's the goofy, nutty white boy - hey let's party and forget about everything people like Van Halen or all that other heavy metal crap. I mean I like to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork.

Commenting acidly on a writer whom I perhaps too naively admired, my old classics teacher put on his best sneer to ask: 'Wouldn't you say, Hitchens, that his writing was somewhat journalistic?' This lofty schoolmaster employed my name sarcastically, and stressed the last term as if he meant it to sting, and it rankled even more than he had intended. Later on in life, I found that I still used to mutter and improve my long-meditated reply. Émile Zola—a journalist. Charles Dickens—a journalist. Thomas Paine—another journalist. Mark Twain. Rudyard Kipling. George Orwell—a journalist par excellence. Somewhere in my cortex was the idea to which Orwell himself once gave explicit shape: the idea that 'mere' writing of this sort could aspire to become an art, and that the word 'journalist'—like the ironic modern English usage of the word 'hack'—could lose its association with the trivial and the evanescent.

In your journal, note which of the following statements describe one or both of your parents (Gibson 2015). My parent often overreacted to relatively minor things. My parent didn’t express much empathy or awareness of my feelings. When it came to deeper feelings and emotional closeness, my parent seemed uncomfortable and didn’t go there. My parent was often irritated by individual differences or different points of view. When I was growing up, my parent used me as a confidant but wasn’t a confidant for me. My parent often said and did things without thinking about people’s feelings. I didn’t get much attention or sympathy from my parent, except maybe when I was really sick. My parent was inconsistent—sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable. Conversations mostly centered on my parent’s interests. If I became upset, my parent either said something superficial and unhelpful or got angry and sarcastic. Even polite disagreement could make my parent very defensive. It was deflating to tell my parent about my successes because it didn’t seem to matter. I frequently felt guilty for not doing enough or not caring enough for them. Facts and logic were no match for my parent’s opinions. My parent wasn’t self-reflective and rarely looked at their part in a problem. My parent tended to be a black-and-white thinker, unreceptive to new ideas.

But that is all in the future. These days, the local newspaper publishes an endless stream of stories about drug arrests, shootings, drunk-driving crashes, the stupidity of local politicians, and the lamentable surplus of “affordable housing.” Like similar places, the town is up to its eyeballs in wrathful bitterness against public workers. As in, Why do they deserve a decent life when the rest of us have no chance at all? It’s every man for himself here in a “competition for crumbs,” as a Fall River friend puts it. For all that, it is an exemplary place in one respect: as a vantage point from which to contemplate the diminishing opportunities of modern American life. This is the project of Fall River Herald News columnist Marc Munroe Dion, one of the last remaining practitioners of the working-class style that used to be such a staple of journalism in this country. Here in Fall River, the sarcastic, hard-boiled sensibility makes a last stand against the indifference of the affluent world. Dion pours his acid derision on the bike paths that Fall River has (of course) built for the yet-to-arrive creative class. He cheers for the bravery of Wal-Mart workers who, it appears, are finally starting to stand up to their bosses. He watches a 2012 Obama-Romney debate and thinks of all the people he knows who would be considered part of Romney’s lazy 47 percent—including his own mother, a factory worker during World War II who was now “draining our country dry through the twin Ponzi schemes of Social Security and Medicare.”16 “To us, it looks as though the city is dissolving,” Dion wrote in late 2015. As the working-class apocalypse takes hold, he invites readers to remember exactly what it was they once liked about their town. “Fall River used to be a good place to be poor,” he concludes. “You didn’t need much education to work, you didn’t need much money to live and you knew everybody.” As that life has disappeared, so have the politics that actually made some kind of sense; they were an early casualty of what has happened here. Those who still care about the war of Rs and Ds, Dion writes, are practicing “political rituals that haven’t made sense since the 1980s, feathered tribesmen dancing around a god carved out of a tree trunk.”17

He made a little gesture at his chest that she thought was supposed to mean he was curtsying or bowing or something sarcastically gentleman-like. Calla would’ve flipped him off, but Blue just stuffed her hands in her apron pockets. As President Cell Phone headed back to his table and picked up a fat leather journal that seemed incongruous with the rest of him, the soldier boy let out a derisive laugh and she heard him mimic, “… ‘not a prostitute.