The Federalist By: Elle Purnell
“Journalism” failed to win this year’s Kentucky Derby, and the corporate media are taking it personally. MSNBC, however, was lashing out at the beloved cultural institution even before the race began.
“The Kentucky Derby perfectly encapsulates Trump’s vision for America,” wrote MSNBC producer Hannah Holland, and she did not mean it as a compliment. Her complaints against the Derby include its glorification of “the Good Ole Boys of the American South, a bastion of American conservatism,” its relationship to gambling and drinking, and above all, what she deems its Trumpiness.
Most of the piece’s substance comes in the form of a regurgitation of Hunter Thompson’s 1970 essay titled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” a memoir of Thompson’s own drunken experience at Churchill Downs. In it, Thompson returns to his childhood home of Louisville to criticize his childhood friends and caricature what he derided as “the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.”
Holland, who interprets Thompson’s essay as a “salient metaphor for Nixon’s America,” extends the critique to the Trump era.
“In Trump’s second term, culture is already being reworked by those who long for an America that is long past, or maybe never really was. The Kentucky Derby already mythologized this,” she writes…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (thefederalist.com)
Home | Caravan to Midnight (zutalk.com)
