Thomas Hobbes described life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Unfortunately, Mitch Albom, horrible columnist, is only three of these, and they are not the first two.
It’s not worth dissecting an entire Mitch Albom column. I’ve done it plenty of times already, and it inevitably boils down to Mitch Albom’s bold opposition to death, gravity, people falling off of tall things, Satan, the plague, and a thousand of other obvious things that are demonstrably evil, bad, embarrassing, or otherwise undesirable.
This week he wrote about Antonio Cromartie having eight children by six different women, and did so based on the infamous Hard Knocks clip featuring Cromartie reciting the kids’ names. He also noted that this was bad.
Mitch Albom does not have a Pulitzer Prize, and it is for a good reason: the Pulitzer committee does not give out awards for Obvious Studies, and does not feel that pointing out that fire is bad is worth an award.
No sane or intelligent person can watch someone talk about having eight kids with six women and think that is a good thing. You’d have to be an idiot to assume that was good, tolerable, or responsible. This is why people laughed at it, because the only alternative is breaking into tears at the horrific condition of the world at any given state in human history.
So the only people you write for when you point out that kids should have a father figure, or that you probably shouldn’t be drunk, eighteen, and leaning off a building, are morons who need the obvious pointed out to them. As long as we’re clear on the audience, I’m totally alright with this, but let’s just be clear on who the target audience is here, and that is people so stupid they are at any point in the day seconds away from setting themselves on fire.
(Next week: Albom points out that fire is bad, and that someone should do something about it.)