[Prestidigitweeze]

Interestingly, we've moved from people expressing hatred toward an entire paper based on a single article to Texans telling us how much they hate New Yorkers. Meanwhile, no New Yorker in this thread has ever expressed hatred toward Texans or their newspapers.

I myself am not only a New Yorker but a person who was yards away from the second WTC tower when it fell, and who went to the site directly to try to give assistance to people who couldn't breathe. The only time I ever mention it is when people talk about how self-involved New Yorkers are. Apparently, I’m not too self-involved to risk my life for a heavy-set old woman in a K-Mart jacket gasping for air.

The moronic thing about hating New Yorkers as a group is that most of us aren't really from New York at all. A lot of the people who died at WTC weren't even from the States.

Never once have I or anyone else on MR suggested that New York is the center of the U.S. All I've done is point out to certain so-called nationalists that the U.S. itself isn't the center of the world.

Never once have I seen any New Yorker on MR express anything quite so arrogant about their own state as the congenital humility with which our two Texans invest everyone else in the country. But I've seen plenty of arrogant anti-intellectual snobbery from some of the offenders on this thread.

It’s also interesting that many who hate New Yorkers the most self-identify as patriots. Where were those people hours and days after my fellow Americans in NYC were hit?

Even when I was growing up in Vancouver, BC and Portland, Oregon, I was observant enough to notice -- without bitterness or resentment -- that a disproportionate number of cultural events took place in NYC. If you can’t admit that without being resentful or nasty, then it’s you, not New Yorkers, who have a problem. I loved living in Portland even as I noticed the greater number of concerts taking place in New York.

What makes New York a great city has always been the immigrants and artists, most of whom die in obscurity and never claimed to be superior to anyone. The energy of New York is in the exact opposite place than some of you are suggesting. It's in the ideas of newcomers and visionaries who are often close to poverty. By looking down on them collectively, you prove yourselves to be the elitists and snobs.

If you want to complain about the arrogance of individuals on Wall Street, or of six-figure lawyers you've had to deal with personally, I can commiserate with you more than you know. But that isn’t about New York. It’s about those stupefyingly self-involved individuals, wherever they happen to live. Individuals from Portland can be pretty arrogant about their city, too, as can some I’ve met in Austin and San Antonio. Sociopaths know no city.

I could mention my dealings with a few memorably awful people in Texas -- people with names like Mr. Hunter Horn the Fourth, who wasn't happy in my presence unless he was voicing his massive hatred of Yankees in general and Jews in particular. But that would be misleading, because a lot of witty, modest, creative, whip-smart and kind people also live in Texas.

And finally, I could dwell on the fact that I hate -- and I mean, truly, utterly hate -- reading The Hunger Games, the Twilight Series or the Harry Potter books. It isn't that I look down on people who enjoy them; it isn't even that I've avoided trying to read them. I actually bought The Hunger Games recently just to give it a chance, and I don't believe in the idea that labels should determine a book's ultimate audience. I tried to understand what was good about those books and ended up disliking the content and style even more.

But that doesn't make me an elitist any more than your enjoying those books makes you childish or stunted.

Alice in Wonderland, The Cockatoucan and Speaking Likenesses were read by children, too, and I happen to love those books, so let's not make the NYT writer's asinine mistake in the name of defending what that writer trashed. You don't have to descend to the level of a jerk just to tell us you disapprove of what another jerk is saying. The minute you do so, the jerk who wrote the article has won because your generalizations are as uninformed and intolerant as theirs.

Yes, I do read specific columns by individual writers who are published by The New York Times, just as I avoid other pieces by individual writers who are published by The New York Times. Suggesting that those writers are all part of the same elitist swill-churning cabal is monumentally ignorant. Even now, there are prize-winning journalists and novelists who publish articles in that paper, and some of them actually deserve the prizes they've won. The name of any paper is only relevant as a placemark for columns by individual writers.

People around here have said they’re tired of Apple and Kindle-bashing and I can appreciate that. Well, I don’t think the people who run this site appreciate New Yorker-bashing, either. I used to like two of the participants in this thread, but I’ve lost a lot of respect in the past half-hour.

And just to make the idea of trashing the NYT over one article even more ridiculous, the person who wrote it isn't even a columnist or staff writer. The author, Joel Stein, is a regular columnist for Time Magazine.